Growing Skyward

Raising the Roof of the Dharmalaya Institute

When we left you with the season finale cliffhanger last June, we had just bundled up our baby building with prayers that she’d survive the monsoon rains without a roof. That was asking a lot from a big mud sandcastle, and we put her fate in the hands of a few well-fastened tarps, some slate shingles at the tops of the walls, and a whole lotta flax husk in the mud plaster in which we dressed her up for the occasion. Well, the monsoon was merciless: It was the longest and heaviest in recent memory at nearly four months of battering downpours. But it turns out flax is up to the task!

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Monsoon Update

Zen and the Jazz of Green Building in India

The biggest news on the construction of the Dharmalaya Institute is in regard to our race against time to get the roof on our baby building before the onslaught of the monsoon rains this month… and the update is that, well, we couldn’t win, so we’ve done our best to change the game.

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Earthville Orchards Slideshow

A few lovely pix from the Earthville Orchards at Dharmalaya Institute in Bir. 

Planting a Vertical Orchard

Transforming a Landslide into a Garden of Fruity Delights

This week, during our first service retreat program (see news article) on the Dharmalaya Institute’s new Himalayan eco-campus, we had a precious opportunity: our friends at SanghaSeva brought sixteen wonderful, hard-working volunteers from all over the globe to work with us, so we figured this was the time to take on a couple of major projects that could only be done with that kind of person power.

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Fueled by Kindness

Good Hearts & Hard Work Move Mountains (Or Fix Them When They Fall Down…)

So much in life can’t happen without the kindness of others, and this is especially true here in the Himalayas. In a “subsistence-plus” economy such as we have here in Himachal Pradesh, most villagers have enough land to feed their families, more or less, so they don’t necessarily need to work…

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