This Pilgrimage Will be Advertised

Everyone’s suffering, and everyone’s a pilgrim.

If you don’t believe me, look at the bestseller list – look at the evening and morning news. We all believe there’s something we’re running from when we wake up and something we’re running towards as we go to sleep. Nothing’s changed in the Promised Land since the first. The sooner we realize that we’re pilgrims and that we must make our pilgrimage, the sooner we’ll end this farce of the good life we’re convinced we’re living in and begin the true one. For the pilgrim path is a long one, you may be rained on, you may be blistered and sore, lost, confused, full of doubt or even close to death, but at least you’re awake.

There’s a wound we’re trying to heal and a wellspring we’re looking to sip from. So we must go out, we must go in, we must take a long journey and also stay put. It’s not only that we need to be healed but also that we need to be more, ultimately that we need to realize there IS more and humbly accept that we are less. None of us is satisfied with the routine of occupying the space between birth and death with only the regular maintenance of eating, sleeping, shitting and, with good fortune, making love. We crave something greater, something more meaningful; we need to be more. More full, more inspired, more aware of truth, more in touch with God, more intimate with nature, more . . . human. And in a very real sense this feeling of MORE can only be arrived at by emptying all that we assume we are – a practice in humility that such physical and spiritual travel affords. Travel not necessarily across an ocean, but into our shadows, into those recesses we know we are entering as we sleep. And then occasionally across an ocean.

The pilgrim is an artist, which makes us all artists – in potential. An artist’s role is to identify what is true and shed a unique yet universal light on it. And such is our pilgrim path.

So whether the pilgrim travels to his local grocery store, into a trashy plot-less novel or off to a distant mountain peak, it is true that she is looking for something that sustains, something that lessens his suffering and something kindles her spirit. What the pilgrim does with her time in these places is as myriad as creation, for each infinite moment we create and add to the history of this remarkable place.

Don’t get this wrong – it does matter where the path is directed. A pilgrim who travels through TV channels will end up less full in most cases than a pilgrim who walks 108 times around Mount Kailas – The Great Spirit is a deep and murky swamp and while some pilgrimages leap on superficial lilies, others delve to the dark and dirty bottom. The bottom is profound. And just because we are all pilgrims does not mean we have all made pilgrimages, because a pilgrimage requires intent and awareness. The unnoticed pilgrimage is like a holiday dinner forgotten in the oven that neither the cook nor the guest is able to enjoy. It is like a seed thrown down to a drought.

Agapito thought of these things as his head bounced again the window of the train moving toward Machu Picchu. He looked around at the other pilgrims on the train and wondered what their intent was, where there awareness was. He was at a point in his life where he still felt a need to affirm his (more) righteous path in these places by comparing himself to others. A French man called forward to his wife who was dozing against her respective window that the llamas across the river had little bows in their head that looked like the bows their neighbors tied on their sheep back home. She mumbled something unamused and went back to sleep while he put a new memory card in his camera and sneaked a picture of a barefoot boy selling finger puppets through the window. The boy hid his head behind his hands, causing him to trip on a railroad tie.

Agapito, in his cynical self-affirming comparisons thought of the holiday dinner in the oven that was most likely forgotten by the bulk of these passengers. As if their grandparents had set a turkey, squash and maybe an apple or blackberry pie in the oven and left it for them to enjoy. The magical ancestry of the place had set everything in ornate detail while neglecting to tell them directly the importance of this meal but left signs and notes for them to follow. They left faith for them to pursue, nothing more tangible than that. And dubious, these grandchildren sit by as the feast is charred black. By the time they were on their flight back home the feast would be charred – un-enjoyable – forgetting even who was cooking and who was eating this sacred meal. “Can’t you smell that?!” Agapito shouted in his head. “It is still such a delicious feast, go fetch it from the oven and waste no time, it’s ready, it’s warm, it’s ready for you, unique and beautiful seekers!”

The Andean sun beat from above unmoved. They say that the sun lacks an ozone barrier in the southern hemisphere and the middle-aged Dutch man sitting in front of Agapito began to burn on his forehead that rested against the window as he slept. He was alone and looked as if he had needed sleep for the past 20 years.

And they were passengers too, he realized; they may not even see themselves as active in this process. And their tour operators made this even more apparent, making sure that without lifting a finger they would move to and from this pilgrimage with no real participation in it other than entering their credit card number from a distant computer on a nice-looking webpage. These days even the pilgrims en route to Mecca have their trips pre-arranged. A quick flight, short cab-ride and a brochure of things pilgrims should and should not do allow these sacred places to be visited in an extended weekend by those with the financial clout. “But they are pilgrims!” Agapito shouted in his head. And he began to wonder what motivated him to seek and why he felt that he was different than the man making cute remarks about the New-world camellids. He actually hoped that maybe he wasn’t so different.

Agapito was on his fourth pilgrimage to this famed Incan city. He was in love with the land and the way this citadel made minimal intrusions into it – “ecological design” as modern architecture would have it. To quell his churning cynicism on this train ride he tried to remember his previous three trips here, remembering the first time, noting the changes over the next two and always carrying the romantic notion that on this next trip he would show up and things would be exactly as they were in 1491. He imagined that he would arrive just as the Inca himself arrived from Cuzco.


Pachacútec, the Inca who held Machu Picchu as his private estate, had recently returned from a military incursion in the south against the Aymara of Collasuyo, the southern quarter of the rapidly expanding Incan Empire. Agapito greeted him at the stone archway and congratulated him on his successes, commenting that his father would be proud before also commenting that the new quarters of Machu Pichu seemed to be coming along at an impressive rate and that the rains had been nourishing that year on his terraces, auspicious. Agapito fancied that they were old friends that grew up together in Cuzco, he being the son of a noble shaman in the Cuzco court. They had been apart for years during Pachacútec’s military escapades, but now it seemed they were both finally at a place to enjoy the solitude of Machu Picchu as old friends should.

Agapito was eager to share his travel stories with the Inca, having recently returned from shamanic rites in the Amazon lowlands, involving a month of hiking toward the east, a month of retreat with the Ashaninka tribesmen who had still maintained hidden during the Incan expansion. Agapito learned about hallucinogenic vines and through these incorporated the healing spirit of the jaguar and knowledge of the tree of life. He gained a new skill in dreamtime travel that allowed him access to the clairvoyance of the condor and knowledge of the seven skies. And his hair now began to grow long and grey. In these rites Agapito had returned, in local shamanic circles, a true healer, with knowledge now of the plants of the high Andes and the low Amazon, a claim no other Cuzco healer could make and only possible through the Inca’s recent road building and expansion into the Ashaninka lands. The two friends arrived to Machu Picchu this time as heroes and together they passed through the entrance to Pachacútec’s private estate, both eager to share a jug of chicha in celebration and feast of alpaca meat and quinoa with laurel and locoto peppers.

As they moved to the inner rooms of Pachacútec’s estate, he sent for the four ceremonial llamas to be slaughtered in respect for the four directions of Tawantinsuyo, the Incan Empire, along with the twenty captured Aymara soldiers that earned the privilege to also be sacrificed as an offering for harmony within these four regions. Their entourage now expanded to include the 8 most beautiful women at the estate, four llamas, twenty Aymara warriors, a local priest and the local chicha brewer. Other servants and helpers began to file in as they made their way to the Temple of the Condor.


As the train rattled past a series of terraces the female guide introduced herself to this car as Cecilia – “Like the famous folkloric music of Simon and Garfunkel”, she added – and was obviously thrilled to be fortunate enough to share her 117th trip to Machu Picchu with a group of Evangelical Christians from Missouri. Along with the French couple, their guide and the middle-aged Dutch man, Agapito shared the car with this group of 37 blonde-haired, chubby-cheeked and bellied, corn-bred folks, ages 14-63 from the great American heartland – a group of folks who were utterly unaware that the Incans and their “New World” brethren domesticated the corn that now, with various genetic modifications and sterilizations, fed their corn-bred countenances – the Angus fat that filled their cheeks, flapped in their arteries and shut their aunt’s and uncle's blood-flow now and again.

CORN. Don’t forget it, the people of this New World found it first. They found it before the soda industry, before Iowa, before movie-theaters and circuses, before Doritos and Con Agra, before food processing, before high fructose anything. They found it purple, they found it blue, they found it white and even red and their palates were capable of savoring any color or size – they ate it, drank it, slurped it, tossed it, stomped it, boiled it, toasted it, TOASTED it, chewed it up and spat it out, told stories about it, made songs about it, built myths around it and built their lives around it.


Cecilia explained the complex system of agricultural distribution in the Incan Empire that allowed for a well-fed and nourished population in very simple terms. She expanded on this in the way that Machu Picchu sat in a middle ground between the Andes and Amazon, between high alpine to tropical lowland ecosystems, where varied crops grown along these ecological steps allowed for a balanced diet, especially with the inclusion of high-protein grains such as quinoa and amaranth and the amazing variety of potatoes that would grow up to 15,000 feet above sea level. And she mentioned that most likely these terraces would have grown corn, which was best suited for that ecological tier. “Even when the Espanish, arrived, they was amazed of the nutrition the Incan persons exhibited. It were much more greater than the persons of Espain of the same time. And which remind me friends, if you hungry or thirsty, please know breakfast is served on this one-hours ride to the Machu Picchu City. We don’t wants to be hungry like the Espanish, no?

“And so here’s, in the Valley Sacrado and the Machu Picchu City, in the center of whats was known as Tawantinsuyu. “The Incans”, as we calls them today was not called like that before the Espanish. “Inca” was whats was called the ruler and “Tawantinsuyu” was whats was called the kingdom. And this, friends, was where we see the Four Directions converge, with the Cuzco middle and how this is said in Quechua, the mother tongue of the Inca is “Tawantinsuyu” . . .

“Damn, who’d uh thunk they wuz farmin, you know hun. I dunno, I guess I jus always thought they wuz more, you know, savage or sumthin. An they had an Empire, she sayin, greater than anything in Europe then. Good thin our Spanish brothers had God with them,” a large and wheezing woman said to her sleeping and nearly snoring husband. While the husband leaned on the seat in front of him Agapito noticed his white t-shirt bearing the line, “Red Springs Evangelical Church of Christ: An old God for a New World,” in English, Spanish and Quechua.

She continued to listen intently to Cecilia as the Andean version of El Condor Pasa took to the airwaves and then her husband woke and commented, “Hey I know this diddy, ‘cept I think this jus some bad cover of Simon and Garfunkel. See, they always tryin to be like us, they want our people, they need our god, you know?”

“Yeah, I think yur right,” she replied. “I’m, jus glad we could come here an lurn this first hand, you know? It makes it jus so easy to keep wantin to save their souls, knowin from tha horse’s mouth jus how down an out these folks be without Christ, or even with that sad Catholic Christ they been thrown. Say, hun, let’s come back with the kids next year, maybe set up a booth at that Machu Picchu herself. Ain’t never seen it yet, but I ain’t never hurd of no booth or house of God there yet. I think they’d need one. Like they’s sayin’ in that song ‘Yes I would, if I could.’ Well, we could, you know? An’ God knows since we could that we should.”

Agapito tried to drown this chatter and settle into his meditation for his journey ahead and to remind himself that humans around the world were just doing their best to live well in a seemingly paradoxical world.