Leaving Ka'ata, Bolivia

As Agapito left Ka’ata in the Apolobamba this time it felt like it could be the last time. He chipped the dirt from under his nails, peeled the sunscreen off his face and, stained green, he pulled the last coca stem from between his teeth. He shook the grain husks from his hair and noticed he smelled like dank donkey fur, powdered with adobe. His eyebrows furled a bit more than when he arrived and his skin was one crispy layer thicker. Looking down on Medicine Valley from the last pass before heading down to Charazani and the bus back to La Paz he had a last look at the Apolobamba Mountains and the terraces that drop from the glaciers like generational striations from the corn down by the river to the fava beans and then the potatoes at the top. He then realized that there really is no last time here.

Ka’ata moves with him as the burden and blessing of human existence. It is the dirt into which the holy breath has blown and brought about creation. Here is the tierra and the alma, the son and the holy ghost. This place can never leave because it is the very mesh in which we live. Each breath in Ka’ata is filled with the fundamental impulse to cut into the earth and allow her, Pachamama, to nourish while also granting that she devours just as much as she gives, no more and no less. It is the body before the mind or the mind giving way to the body, to being.

Agapito learned that donkeys carry a cross on its back, literally. Have a look, every donkey has a cross etched into the ratty matted coat on its back. Similarly, this valley carries the Christian cross on top of its pre-colonial cosmology just as the pre-Columbian Andean Cross has been altered to that of the crucifixion in most parts of the Andes. Here in Ka’ata the herding Kallawaya woman wraps a traditional weaving around her head and a felt hat over that while her healer husband carries a colorful pouch of medicinal herbs over his shoulder. Demons, achachilas and ordinary animals are woven into the fabric that they fold around the child as they harvest potatoes at the start of the Bolivian winter.

Ka’ata is both beautiful and tragic, the same as the world. The infant wrapped in the intricate weaving is more likely to die soon here than anywhere else on the continent. The communal enthusiasm that the village has for tilling, planting and harvesting each year is frequently met with the tragedy of insufficient harvest; and so growth, life and death are all woven into the collective memory as well as the perceptions of the present. Visiting Ka’ata is a reminder of this and a reminder that this reality has infused all creation. It is impossible to shake this fateful reality and for this there is no leaving Ka’ata.

Spring

Agapito woke the morning of March 22nd after a rainstorm and fell in love. He had never felt better. Thinking back on the day, there was nothing special. Sure, the buds were budding and the geese returning and as he walked through the back alley he noticed only one last pocket of snow persisting from the winter behind the compost pile. But it was the feeling that was different within him, even though his surroundings were exactly as they should be around the equinox. You know days that smell like love, that feel like love? As if someone slipped some wine in your morning tea and you walk around in a love-drunk blush, giggly and rosy-red, reaching down to touch the sidewalk just to know how it feels?

Agapito did just that; he ran his finger along a section of sidewalk to where it met the crease between that one and the next section. He found it to feel something like the interface between hope and reality, where hunger meets satiation and it felt a bit damp. He noticed there were buds even in the crease and it reminded him of the avocado tree growing from the compost that a friend once found and placed in his living room. It never gave fruit, being Colorado, but it grew to an impressive height considering it came from a compost pile. Tich Nhat Hanh, the renowned Vietnamese monk writes of roses and garbage and of the beauty found in both, not because of an argument of aesthetics such as garbage makes you appreciate the rose (which is also true) but because there is no inherent difference between the two, where one ends the other begins. And it is not about creating an illusory reality where no garbage exists, but about loving the reality around you and loving the garbage too, as it is. For this, Agapito fell in love that morning. As he ran his fingers along the crease he unveiled and undressed the beautiful eternal goddess with all of her mystery and saw her in every stranger he met that day.

His finger ran over half of the crease one last time before detouring onto a crack that split out the next section of concrete. As he traced the fault his finger ran into the resistance of partly painted toenails protruding from a pair of sandals. He tried to pass the obstacle, up over the toe, racing across the tendons of the feet and onto the ankle, wondering if he should continue up the curve to see where it would land when he realized his absent-minded stroking had made its way onto real nerve-endings and was now being felt by another. A girl was standing above these partly painted toenails, and she may have been standing for quite some time, from the curiosity etched on the edges of her smile. The feet were still pale, this being the first appropriate day for sandal of the year and her face had been touched by the early spring-sun, a tinge of rose on a white wintered-face. She was beautiful.

In the same way that his finger had been moving along the concrete and then onto her feet, his eyes now coursed her face, neck and down before slowly moving back to her face, where they remained transfixed for an embarrassingly long time. She giggled, “That tickled.”

Agapito had been on his knees and he rolled back to sit clutching his shins and look up at her from a better angle. She looked equally beautiful and continued to smile. “Have you been here long?”

She nodded and squatted down to his face-level. “What were you doing?” she whispered sarcastically, mocking the importance of the activity.

He was about to open his mouth and paused, reconsidering his response. “Well, I thought I was looking for something beautiful in the crease of this concrete, and I guess I was. I try to find it in difficult places and . . .”

“Why try so hard?” she asked. “Why be so dramatic?”

Agapito furled his eyebrows and thought for a minute, considering the question seriously while not realizing the irony in his reaction. His face looked dramatic, pensive.

She bent down and squatted with him at eye-level. “Why try so hard?” she repeated, this time dramatically.

Agapito felt the clutch of spring, the irresistible flow of intimacy and attraction and it moved through his body like smoke in sunlight – not quite dissolved but mysteriously and brilliantly dancing. He followed the sensation and asked, shifting his pitch, “Why are you so curious?”

“Because it seems important,” she laughed, “or at least fun, I can’t remember ever caressing concrete.”

“I don’t even know you and you’re making fun of me. It isn’t really important, do you want to try?”

“Yes,” and she bent down, pressing her pinky to the soil between two slabs of concrete. Her approach was much less defined. She followed the crack in the sidewalk to its edge and moved her exploration to the soil on its edge, pressing her fingers into the soil that sits below the slabs.

This is the art of romance, pressing between the creases, pursuing a curiosity that penetrates behind the piecemeal slabs of persona. It is the same curiosity of the spirit that guides any inspired sense of wonder, be it academic, spiritual or romantic. The trick with love is in allowing the other to do the same and Agapito wished he new in which areas to give way so that she could explore. But almost effortlessly this girl, in this marvelous spring encounter was beginning to probe the seldom-explored aspects of his being, the soil beneath the concrete, the underside of the sidewalk seeking both roses and garbage.

And this is the love of the spring, the possibility to see the world fresh and explore it as if for the first time in all its beauty and madness – the rapture of romance and the exaltation of beauty.