Bolad’s Kitchen - The Salamander’s Hand
2023 Registration
Bolad’s Kitchen
The Salamander’s Hand
A return to in-person teaching:
Session Ten: June 10th – 18th, 2023
A live, in-person session of Bolad’s Kitchen
combining the Tule Pond and Salamander’s Hand ongoing classes
For Ongoing Salamander’s Hand Students: To register for Session Twelve in June of 2023 (which will be a combined session with the Tule Pond class, in-person at Bolad’s Kitchen), please DOWNLOAD the PDF registration form below, complete it and send it to us with your deposit by February 20th, 2023. Please note that the session will begin the evening of Saturday, June 10th, at 7 pm, and will come to a close the following Sunday, June 18th, by 12 noon.
Send completed registration by Mail to: Bolad’s Kitchen, PO Box 338, Ojo Caliente, NM 87549
Send by fax to: (505) 583-0029
2022-23 Schedule
Session Eleven: October ’22 – April ’23
In session eleven: 2022 The Salamander’s Hand and Tule Pond continue with our Responding School, learning to read in a bigger way, cherish and swim inside the spiritual and cultural richness of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s beautiful 13th century epic poem Parzival, this time picking up the trail in Book VI and onward.
When, due to the state of enforced lockdowns and restrictions designed to contain the first Covid-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020, the school could not meet in person, I never felt that we needed to halt learning in a Bolad’s Kitchen style, but we should keep going strong in a different way. So hitting the ground running (like those rib-tickling baby shore birds, who run right out of their birthing shells down the beach ready for bugs), I immediately wrote all the Salamander’s Hand and Tule Pond students, if they would give their endorsement and kind permission to receiving my teaching by mail, with a promise that they would each respond in writing to whatever I presented.
When so many said, “yes!” the 6th century style back-and-forth-missive-flurry-Bolad’s-Kitchen-Responding-School was inaugurated.
Because the Tule Ponders had twice missed the in person class on “Parzival,” even before Covid, they were already reading designated sections of that text, writing me by email, about their exuberant discoveries after which I would return a letter of my own trying to cover a few things they might have overlooked.
Though all the Salamander’s Hand had already read and studied all types of old texts and sagas, some rare, some more widely known, and everyone had learned inside a whole session of Parzival (or two!), we all wanted even more time with the depth that Parzival had hidden in those strophes.
So when Covid hit and the longer-going Salamander’s Hands were invited to add their tributary minds to this thinking river of letter writing souls, the amazing flood of increasingly literate thinking called the “Responding School” became a kind of “wing” of the Bolad’s Kitchen Bird.
I also began sending letters instructing an “afternoon” hands-on session analogous to the afternoon times in our hall.
While at first some few have regarded my modern version of this antique missive way of learning and “afternoon” sessions as simply a “second best” interim contrivance to keep the school afloat until we could safely come together again in person in our old magical mud building, this “Responding Course” surprised everyone by growing into a major anchor to the shores of sanity in what turned out to be very hard, wobbly times for a lot of people. This phenomenon of self-motivated learning at my direction right in the student’s homes and farms and families, has caused the emergence of students of greater kindness, substance and some practical spiritual facility with feeding the Holy in Nature they can’t truly yet see with a never-before-seen beauty they never knew their hands and voices could make.
With students like that, we can really “get after it” when we meet again (hopefully, Gods willing, next spring).
all blessings-
Martin Prechtel
2022-23 Registration
Bolad’s Kitchen
The Salamander’s Hand
Session Eleven: October ’22 – April ’23
For Ongoing Salamander’s Hand Students: To register for Session Eleven and the ongoing Parzival Respondence Course for the period from October of 2022 through April of 2023, please DOWNLOAD the PDF registration form below, complete it and send it to us with your payment by October 1st, 2022.
Send by Mail to: Bolad’s Kitchen, PO Box 338, Ojo Caliente, NM 87549
Send by fax to: (505) 583-0029