In the summer of 1990, a group of friends, one of my sons and I went to a remote alkali
lake bed in the high desert of southeast Oregon to inscribe a large Sri Yantra in the earth.
It was to contain a central point large enough to live in. The site was chosen because of
its beauty and remoteness. Almost no one, except a few ranchers, ever went there.
Inscribing lines in the alkali surface would not disturb any vegetation and it would be a
transitory event, eventually disappearing back into the surface through the natural
action of wind and the occasional water that floods the lake bed every few years.
The design was made without machines or modern tools except binoculars and a simple
hand plow. We used only ancient principles of geometry and long wires and sharpened
poles as tools. When completed it was 1/4 mile across, covered over forty acres and
contained over thirteen miles of lines. The lines, plowed with an old fashioned garden
cultivator pulled by three crew members and steered by the fourth, were about four
inches deep with the hard alkali crusted dirt cast to both sides of the furrow.
During construction, we were careful to minimize the disturbances to the land. We
chose to walk several miles daily from camp to the site rather than use vehicles, and
refrained from using other motorized devices such as a tiller. We did not want to leave
tracks or other marks, not to preserve anonymity but out of respect for the purity of the
process.
Construction of the Sri Yantra took ten days to complete. As soon as the last line of the
design was plowed, heavy clouds began to collect in the south. Within an hour, our
valley was filled with high winds, intense lightning strikes and about 1/2 inch of rain.
The result of this storm was that all traces and tracks from our working were dissolved.
Like a finished painting, it was as if the surface had been varnished. Remarkably, the
lightning and the rain were limited only to the small valley where we were working, a
fact that was the source of much speculation by a nearby rancher who wanted the rain
on his land. --
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