Fennel, Yoga and Music at Casa-Museu Dalí, Port Lligat. With Sònia Isart (Nomad Yoga) and Frances Bartlett, cello and voice.

A cool, humid breeze exhales across the sheltered bay, not strong enough to stir a ripple from the lazy water. We are ‘between heat waves’ and by the sea. Our bodies sink into this coolness, which is 29ºC, so not really that cool, but a clean 10ºC less than what we’ve been sweating in all week.

My cello sparkles in the humidity. Salty fingers expire on the fingerboard. I choose my spot next to Sònia’s yoga mat on the rastel pebbled floor, the bay kissing our backs. 

We welcome 20 yoga practitioners with a drop of Sweet fennel (Foeniculum vulgare var. dulce) to inhale as they walk in contemplative quiet down ‘The Milky Way’. Salvador Dalí set this soft white polished path that traces the shore line to a beach the size of a postage stamp at the end of his property. It was his swimming spot. Closed to the public and especially opened for our intimate gathering. 

Above the beach is the ‘Sala de Trons’, the room of thrones, with a splendid flint bench nestled into the dry wall to admire the view from. In the far corner is an ancient fireplace with drift wood and roots, softened and gnarled in awkward petrification above the chimney in Dalian arrangement. Brutal, violent even, with gestures of compassion and defiance. 

Curious then, we chose Fennel to open our first session of ‘Where there is Sea’. Fennel, that helps to stimulate the flow of breast milk. Fennel, the flower that protects in astral journeys. Fennel, renowned for its fertility symbology, resounding in Dalí’s white eggs that dot the building and patios. Seed of life, vessel of the sacred V, whose gift of resilience enables us to complete all our marathons. 

We settle in intimate closeness in the dark stones quartyard, a cypress and an olive overlooking the proceedings. I play a Capriccio in E minor by J. Dall’Abacco; softly climbing scales with harmonic references in the lower notes, following the vertical shape of fennel that grows to 2.5m at least, invading no-mans-land, roundabouts and verges across this arid region. By the coast, we find sea fennel, a smaller, more succulent version that clings to cliff tops. The bass harmony reminds us of those ‘white shark roots that snap through my days’. I conclude our opening ritual with my fennel song with references to the wind, so iconic in Port Lligat and Cap de Creus national park. The Tramuntan wind hits this area straight in the face, holding back nothing from the north. Hardly any trees reach their ‘natural height’ here. Pines grow parallel to the ground on some slopes! The sparse vegetation reveals the dark jagged dragonscape rising from the water, or fallen from the flaming heavens. 

Sònia led us through a series of asanas exploring our V shapes and space, ripe with possibilities between our arms, between our legs and within our bodies. She invited us to feel our breath as the sea, gently moving our bodies, another container within a container. Layers of meaning and feeling are revealed (like white layers of a fennel root, scrumptious in fresh summer salads!) as we open ourselves through asanas and breath to feel the fertile present moment, and relax our ideas of who we are to invite who we might become. In the space of the V, the vessel, the uterus, we become open to endless possibilities and invite some nutritious gifts into our life – gentleness, friendship, spaciousness…

As Sònia invites the group to the floor for some slow spinal twists, I play the Capriccio in E flat Major by Dall’Abacco. I feel fennel might just resonate in E and E flat, around our solar plexus and sacral chakras. Connecting us to the place where dreams are born and where they are materialised. Fennel is well known for its therapeutic uses in treating digestive cramps and menstrual spasms. It’s also a cardiac tonic, regulating palpitations. The Capriccio in E flat is a marathon, for the left hand, maintaining chordal postures like a guitarist does for bars on end. The right hand has ‘tricky’, as in trickster baroque bowing on some ornamentation and there are the virtuosic arpeggios to contend with also. It’s a piece of resistance; i.e. if you’re not in form, you don’t make it through in one piece, or even get to the end, but have to stop, left hand spasming half way through.  I had to play it. This is fennel territory. Fortunately I could explore the rising arpeggios and harmonic gestures in a meditative way, letting them float on the ripples behind me and in the deep, relaxed, open breath of all present.  

I had written a little ditty especially for the occasion. Sònia sang a gorgeous second voice (she’s also a wonderful alto!) and we closed here, in gentle contemplation of the changing evening colours, metallic blues and baby pinks reflecting in the still waters. We all sat in silence, digesting fennel and this stunning location that Dalí fully incorporated in his mundis imaginalis and that we all became a part of. 

Fonoll, fonoll la barca

que ens porta sempre més lluny

Via, via làctia

camí lactosa que creu el cel

(Fennel, the boat that always ferries us further

Milky way, creamy path that crosses the sky)

The wind is racing and I am pacing

what I hear is the true call into this body fluid sense of cell self, float self, present in a time self, listenself, christenself, rolling sense of essence self.

The wind is indeed racing

and blasting self, face, body, stone

into one cast, one egg, one unit of birth.