Agapito de la paz

This pilgrimage will be advertised: IV

2010-01-08T23:32:00.000-08:00

Agapito ordered four Cusqueñas and offered up a toast to the evening, unsure why he was sharing it with Leo but sure that something was brewing that needed him to follow through with a few things. The air that settled on the night in Aguas Calientes was thick and panting, damp and invasive. The breeze that meanderled down from the Sacred Valley as the Andean air cooled was as pleasant respite from the otherwise stagnant and saturated cloud forest clime. On one such breeze Leo traded out his full-brimmed sun hat for some local woolens, a chu’llo with the ear flaps and llama figures skipping their way around his dome. He had bought it his first day in Cuzco.

Agapito tried to lighten the mood. “Do you always travel solo?”

“Ohh, never solo, you know, there are always people. Like you, what was your name again, I’m sorry, our conversation has me confused?”

“Agapito, ‘Pito for short, no problem. Thanks for asking, in fact. Most people won’t stop and ask a second time and are ashamed to have missed a name the first time, you know. I always need to ask at least a second time before I can remember a name, and I try to use it frequently in sentences. Well, not with yours, that’s a bit easier. But Agapito is a bit more difficult and foreign, so I understand. Anyway, Leo, you were saying?”

“Thank you. I was saying that we are never alone, people like you, or sometimes a girl, always a companion. So, never entirely solo.”

“I see, that makes sense, I experience that too, fellow pilgrims finding each other on the path . . .”

“No, not pilgrims, backpackers. People who travel, like me. I don’t understand this pilgrim word. In fact, I have made many friends that I see over and over again. Here in Peru, then in Morocco, then in India, Cambodia. I went with a girl one time to Jordan. Have you been? No? Well there are caves there, caves where you can still hear saints whispering from early Christianity, where, when you yourself sit still you can hear all these saints sitting around long stone tables debating how to tell the greatest story ever,” Leo saw the chance to stop some of Agapito’s awkward questioning and didn’t want to lose it. And plus, like many seasoned travelers, he would rather tell his own story than listen to someone else’s. “And so we did this one church cave in Rihab where . . .”

“What did you do? How do you do a church cave?”

“Well, it’s an expression, we went to the cave and looked at it, talked about it, learned about history, things like that. Does this make sense?”

“It does, I just don’t understand the language people use when traveling, talking about doing this or that thing, doing this or that country. I mean, how do you do Peru? It’s a country, not an amusement park ride. Like now, are we doing this restaurant? Or doing Machu Picchu? It sounds just so abusive and arrogant to talk about doing a place,” Agapito continued, as Leo now really wished he were at home with a cigarette and his headphones, listening to the latest Ulrich Schnauss release.

Agapito’s rant faded off and Leo took the chance to interrupt, “Well, sorry my grasp of your language is second hand and I may not be so exact with my words.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that as criticism, and actually your English is excellent, getting better as the night progresses and your imbibing increases. Just a worthy point of contention with the traveling world in general, sort of like the importance of the journey over the destination and such. Anyway, what was going on in the caves as you were doing them?”

“Well, in visiting zee caves in Rihad with this girl Ernestine, oh a lovely girl, we were in love from college in Leiden and after graduation we both wanted to see the Middle East. In the Netherlands we have many Muslims and we are generally so welcoming and open-minded but these days there is so much tension. So many Muslims come and we take them, they live with us but they show much less interest in our country and culture than their own, and can be violent and insolent, really. Like people anywhere, but we’re having trouble now in Holland with thiz.”

“Oh, there and everywhere else, Leo, how can we get people to understand each other? I mean, it’s true, Dutch people I’ve met are an excellent bunch, much more naturally open-minded than folks from the US. And actually I’ve had it pointed out to me by a beautiful Dutch woman named Ernestine, huh, do you think it was the same one? Well, she pointed out that folks from the US choose comparisons as a point to reference – but still, like I was saying, you are Dutch, open-minded as they say, but even there you have violent conflict that you have trouble resolving, not to mention what’s going on in the Middle East, or what happened here in Peru in the ‘80’s. I mean, isn’t it usually enough to just get people together to talk through things and we find that we are all human, all struggling, all pilgrims seeking truth and then find something to laugh at in our paradoxical state? I guess the more people we gather together the more difficult it is to find a gathering point, since every human is like infinity coalesced, and so six billion infinities is greater than three billion, no?”

“Actually, no, one infinity is just as great as six billion infinities . . .”

“You know what I mean, though, right?”

“No.”

“Yes?”

“No”

“Well, I guess it makes more sense that Dutch and Muslims don’t make sense of each other then.”

Leo had spent a year of his university study in Cuba, in the agricultural department of Piñar del Rio, in the far West of the island. This was in 1994, soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union and during some of the island’s most challenging times with their socialist experiment. He had studied sociology and was interested in exploring the result of the Soviet collapse on the domestic tobacco industry from Piñar del Rio. What he found was really what he had expected – the industry was performing better than ever – and his findings added little to the academic journals of the time. Ending his seven years of doctoral work he wrote, ‘I have unequivocally found out that I greatly prefer Cuban tobacco to any other.’ He also realized, during a horseback ride through some of the fields, drinking rum and coconut water that he would rather be unimpressed and unsurprised abroad than to be bored back home.

The sun began to rise again over the ceremony, which had already passed an entire night with dozens of deaths, screams, sighs and cheers. Pachacútec listened intently to what Agapito said of sacrifice, listened as though the empire depended on is actually. Meanwhile Agapito began to wonder what Koa was doing with her gaze, as it explored the steady drops of blood falling from the altar. The warrior continued to breath life as it fled away from him and she looked at his toes. Toes, for the first time since their birth, were relaxed on his feet, no longer required to bear the burden that life and gravity conspired against them.

“Why do you think people walk so much, Koa? And why don’t they let their feet rest?”

“’Pito, just as worthwhile a question is why don’t feet let their people rest? It may just as well be that whatever innate force led people to demand their feet to walk also led their feet to demand their people to walk. Why would you put the center of volition in the people and their will, why not in the feet?”

Agapito was watching Sand and Koa mingle fingers as the latter spoke and he wondered if the two of them planned their words so perfectly before these moments, because they were truly precise. The sun was rising fast as it does in the tropics and as the rays landed on her face she let her long brown hair fall over that side to block its intensity. This single motion along with the preceding pontification gave Agapito such an intense sadness that he collapsed to the ground. He had a scientific response to what she had asked but could not articulate it for the immensity of emotions he immediately felt. As if the obsidian knife had carved into his heart and also cut off his feet. He reflected on his travels as a shaman and on the struggles of the people in the Amazon, the struggles of the plants for life, even the struggles of each individual ant that carried a leaf in a line through the forest. He felt his own struggle and his own solitude. Simultaneously there was his pride, passion and will that would not let himself engage in the selfish emotion of sadness, but recognizing this only deepened his sadness.

Looking between the gaze that had settled between Sand and Koa, Agapito noticed a partly bald white man leaning against the Stone of the Seven Skies – this man had a backpack and was wiping his brow in the intense tropical sun. He looked at Agapito and waved his hand vigorously.

“Hola, Agapito, it eez Leo, how are you enjoying your most recent visit to Machu Picchu, pilgrim?”

Leo had lifted his hat an as he did a pulsing yellow and red orb hovered between his burned scalp and his hat. Agapito scratched his two-week old beard and looked over at Pachacútec.

“Go on, ‘Pito, answer the man, he is your pilgrim friend from Holland, remember?”

“How do you know, P-tec? Hehe, I’ve never called you that before, I like it though, like a stage name, P-tec. How do you know who this is?”

Leo mumbled something and was confused by Agapito’s nonsense talk. “Oh, have I interrupted you in something, I wanted to make it yesterday but was so damned hungover that I stayed in bed until last night and decided to come early this morning. I am so glad you are here still.” And then Leo asked, “Agapito, are you ok? You seem pretty out of it.”

When he heard that last question the previous day’s adventures came flooding back in to his awareness and the previous scene in front of him fluttered like confetti. The llamas and alpacas turned their snub noses upward and skipped off in four directions. Pachacútec stood up, pulled his hair back to a pony-tail and donned his silver crown studded with lapis-lazuli, crossed his arms and became a rock that blended into masonry on the condor’s wing at the temple. Sand dissolved back to the earth from which she came. The executioner looked Agapito in the eyes and with a glare that burned his being, he leapt upward into the sky, quickly being absorbed by the sun’s intense light. The Aymara warriors transformed to tourists and they donned their backpacks and sun hats and began to take pictures of Agapito leaning, collapsed now, against the stones at the temple of the condor. Koa turned herself into a collection of herbs and seeds and a solitary hand that reached out and presented itself to Agapito. He ate them and the hand disappeared. Leo remained and looked perplexed at Agapito crouched in the corner of the Temple of the Condor.

In Aguas Calientes two nights before, where we had left Leo and Agapito bantering away and slowly beginning to appreciate each other’s company, the pile of Cuzqueñas made Agapito realize that maybe piling stones up to make the great pyramids of Guatemala and Egypt wasn’t such an astonishing feat after all. Their table had acquired an impressive amount in just a couple of short hours. And granted, piling beer bottles are not quite the same as many-ton stones, but he imagined the process may be similar – find a friend and put yourself to task with them. And that’s maybe the heart of human ingenuity and all great works manifest of that.

Leo was pretty drunk now and appreciating the humidity and tropical climes of Aguas Calientes, where his flip-flops, locally bought futbol jersey and cargo shorts were sufficient for the night’s clime. They had made their way through conversations of race, travel, love, sports and different approaches to education. There was a bit of a pause after the last one before Leo broke the silence. His English at this point was impeccable.

“Have you ever come across San Pedro in Peru?” Leo inquired. “In Mexico I have done mushrooms, in Morocco and India I have smoked a lot of hashish and at home in Holland I have done a whole variety of party sorts. I was wondering about San Pedro here.”

“What do you know about it?”

“Well, I know it is mescaline, like peyote or the synthesized version, and that it lasts a long time and is a really wild trip. More than that I don’t know, but many travelers I have met have told me it is a really fun time.”

“To be honest I have no idea what fun means when talking about hallucinogenic plants, fun seems like a description of recreational activities and I see it more as medicine than recreation. I have done San Pedro countless times, including a full month wandering around the Bolivian altiplano with San Pedrito as my guide. You can actually, incidentally, buy it at a number of stalls at the San Pedro market in Cuzco. Go with a guide, though Leo, definitely with a guide, and some good friends. And I’d just say it’s not about getting high or getting messed up but about having some specific intentions that you want from the experience. Coming back to our pilgrimage talk, it’s all about having a direction and intention and then from there the learning comes fluid. Most people take hallucinogenics to get out of their mind, but I can guarantee that with San Pedro, setting the right intention will allow you to get so amazingly in your mind. Actually, speaking of being in your mind and by that I mean present, consumed by the present, floating it in and freely swimming down deep or even splashing your way out over the break like an orca, you know the way they jump and splash and then go back down for more. Or up for more . . .” he was quite noticeably slurring his feigned philosophy at this point. And had his chin rested heavily in his left hand. They said goodnight and headed back to their hostels

The next day Agapito hiked with Tristeza and her mother Rosmari to arrive at Machu Picchu with the first bus and the growing line of pilgrims right around sunrise. Rosmari was from the Sacred Valley above the town of Urubamba and had moved to Aguas Calientes three years before to sell her woven crafts at the market in the train station. She felt that she could do better there but when she arrived she realized that so many other women from the Sacred Valley had the same idea. And she found it almost impossible to compete with the factory-produced products from the city – the flapped hats that say “Cuzco” or the mugs that say the same, or the t-shirts proudly claiming “I survived the Inca Trail”.

Who would pay for her two weeks of time she spent in making a baby alpaca sweater? She asked this to Agapito in a Spanish cut deep with Quechua, as they waited in line next to a Japanese couple that was staring at them. In fact, the whole line was looking at them – she was the only person in the entire park dressed as an Andean. Her embroidered hat was fastened around her chin and the intricate floral and swirling patterns matched both her outer coat and her outer skirt. Her chin-strap had dozens of beaded strings and they framed her weathered and sun-worn cheeks and enormous smile.

He had decided to spend most of the day showing them around and sharing what he had learned. Mostly he wanted to hear what they saw in the place, since really it was their site, the ones that lived so near. He translated what some of the guides were sharing with their clients and they wanted to know how people knew so much about the place. They hiked to the top of Huayna Picchu, the precipitous peak that stands above the main city. There they found their way through caves, up the vertical stone staircases to the summit where they could look back at their climb and at the main city 1000 feet below.

They sat and Agapito set out a small square textile to begin a hallpay or coca chewing-round with them. Rosmari began to shy away and became silent and a bit embarrassed. She first tried to politely refuse but as Agapito persisted she was obliged to disclose that she became evangelical when she moved to the city and no longer uses coca leaves.

“Si!?” Agapito clarified.

“Si”

Oh, well, what do you do in moments like those? As a foreigner he had really taken to the coca rituals found in the Andes and now, here with an Andean woman he was forcing a habit that she did not engage in. He apologized and Tristeza pointed out a brilliant orange orchid jutting between two stones. But, he thought, coca has been used for millennia and is such an important part of life in the Central Andes, how can she just give it up for a religion that is not hers? That is sad, he thought, a loss of cultural diversity in some form and, who knows, maybe actually detrimental to her health. But his assumption was that something “traditional” in the Andes is unchanging and should continue. What about in the US? 200 years ago we grew hemp and even 50 years ago we used it in just about every form of manufacturing. Now it is illegal and most don’t even know this or that it is any different from marijuana. Regardless of how unfortunate both of these scenarios is – Andean losing their culture and us losing ours – the point here that Agapito missed and that many travelers do as well is that there is a romantic assumption that traditional cultures should not change because we in the north do enough changing for them. But maybe Agapito was aware of these things even as he felt sorry, for no reason at all, for Rosmari.

He pictured her in an incomprehensibly large ocean, afraid and out of control, unable to see the horizon for the size of the waves and her boat just a bit too small, the sail a bit too worn. But again, where were his assumptions that she was thrashing in a sea of change and globalization coming from? Most likely from his own guilt and shame, or at least lack of pride in his culture. He found himself in a bit of a philosophical dilemma.

Can I show you something else? He asked Tristeza and Rosmari in Spanish. There is another temple down below us here, a bit of a walk but well worth it, often called Temple of the Moon. They nodded, looked at each other and giggled, nodding again. They headed off Huayna Picchu along the sharp ridge that heads to the east and climbed down through cloud forest, constructed wooden ladders, almost halfway to the Urubamba River below. His two companions moved so confidently and agile, through the forest or the precarious trails; they were unaffected by the heights and showed no fatigue in their hiking.

Alone with Leo and the photo-takers and the Temple of the Condor Agapito finally greeted Leo, “Did you come for the ceremony? It has been spectacular so far, epic in proportions and beautiful in its conduction, all night really, with so many beautiful folks from all over the kingdom. This one here with the obsidian blade is a dark one for sure, consumed by demons from somewhere, but I have seen past the blade and think that he, too, is trying his best to live an honest life. He just kills a lot of creatures. Odd, I have been here so many times but never met this one. He live right here under the condor’s left wing. Have a seat and observe for a spell.”

“Oh, right, San Pedro, dear god Agapito, have you been here all night?”

“And many more, right? I was journeying in the Amazon and was a famous healer and part of this massive city and an entirely different time and, wait, we shouldn’t talk too much, I am just waking up and need to hang on to these images and not yet be distracted by full consciousness. Hold on, I’m going to write in my journal, come back and talk in a half hour. Sorry, great to see you Leo.” He began to write in his journal – of pilgrimage, meeting Leo, Tristeza.

There came a part that he held only vaguely in his memory. He was on the top of Huayna Picchu with Tristeza and Rosmari talking about religion and their views on Evangelicalism, Catholicism and Andean traditions, and then they hiked down to the Temple of the Moon. There they connected with his good friend Daniel and, oh, that’s right Magdalena, Maria and the two Brahm brothers.

It came back in pieces to Agapito as he wrote in his journal. Daniel was explaining the smoothness of the stones and what that could mean for our understanding of advanced technology. There and then Daniel suggested that they take San Pedro to help understand the hidden language of the stones, just as the Peruvian ancestors had. Agapito had been fasting that day anyways and so felt adequately prepared for this second pilgrimage – a pilgrimage within a pilgrimage, per se.

And there we return to the initial proposition of pilgrimage. What makes a pilgrim? Is it about the place? Or the person? Or the mode of the journey? Or is it simply a matter of intention? At that very moment, and precisely because he had been meditating on these questions for days now, he decided to take San Pedro with Daniel, Magdalena, Maria and the two Brahm brothers.

He was obliged to leave his two Quechua companions at that point, the two whose faith now precluded them from participating in this next journey, but whose gratitude for the visit to their own patrimony was infinitely appreciated with their head bows hugs and massive smiles. And with his new pilgrim companions he set off in a march toward the Temple of the Condor as the day was now growing late.

This pilgrimage will be advertised: III

2009-01-26T09:59:00.000-08:00

Tristeza agreed to meet Agapito the next morning at 4 to climb the two-thousand feet to the entrance. And he invited her mother, whom Tristeza assured had never been to the Incan citadel either. He would have invited her father too, but he was in the jungle picking coca for the season.

After wandering the streets of Aguas Calientes for a half an hour Agapito finally settled on “The House of the Inca’s Nephew” to bed down for the evening. Apparently the name, “The House of the Inca” was already taken, as were other permutations of the name involving the homes of The Inca’s more immediate family – his son, daughter, wife, mother, father, etc. So Agapito was resolved to sleep at the Ancient King’s nephew’s house.

Later that evening Agapito found the Dutch man with the burned forehead eating a bowl of potatoes with peanut sauce alone near the main plaza. He sat and joined him.

“My name is Leo,” he commented, “like the puma, no?” He laughed and tucked his chin as he did so while Agapito cracked a smile.

“I’m Apapito, a pleasure to meet you Leo.”

“No no, the pleasure eez mine young man, tell me, where do you come from?”

“Well, I have been on the road for a while, to be honest, but these days I feel that I come most from the wherever I am at any moment and more generally from the Americas, yes, definitely from the Americas. You?”

“Holland. Can you believe? I come from below zee zea, now to so far above zee zea in zee Andes. But really, no joke, no big deal either. I’ve been to zee Himalayas. And I’ve climbed Mount Kilamanjaro too, so I know high. Hehe, all of Holland knows “high”, even zo we’re so low. I’ve actually been to zee other six wonders of the world already, and when I heard this Incan Citadel, as they call it, was a new wonder, I just needed come.”

“How were the Himalayas?”

“Big, but full of marijuana, poverty, bombs and Israelis.”

"How was Mount Kilamanjaro?”

“Melting and full of people quoting zat American, Hemingway.”

“It’s melting?”

“Yes, fastly, which is maybe why people quote Hemingway so much, you know The Snows of Kilamanjaro? Zat short book where zee lion or some other cat is stuck in zee snow? Well, there is no more ice or snow for any cat to be stuck in anymore there. I mean, maybe a small house cat could be stuck in one of zee ice blocks on zee summit, but definitely no larger African cats, you know. They’d need their own freezer-size blocks, and those are melting or gone, little lagoons of water in zee crater summit. But zat’s why I travel, because zee world changes so much.”

“So you’re a real traveler, eh?”

“Yes, it is really what I live for, why I work, why I live.”

“And why do you travel so much?” inquired Agapito.

“Well it’s always more fun zan home, and definitely zee views are better. I mean, when I’m home working I just works my ass off, you know? I make money, selling jewelry on zee circuit of parties in Europe - Ibiza, zee Love Parade, you know, those things. And so when I have enough money it’s just so free and so much cheaper to travel. Mostly, you know, I can live for a year what it would cost me to live a month in Holland, especially since zee Euro. Why do you travel?”

The first llama spat twice but only managed to land the cud on the Aymara captives. The priest with the obsidian knife paid no mind and – with a helper holding the legs – he began to offer the first prayer of the evening and set three coca leaves in the llama’s mouth before tilting its head back on the altar block and slicing quickly and deeply through its throat, nearly decapitating the beast in one stroke. The llama’s legs kicked, but were tied and held. Her eyes pierced and wailed but found no sympathy in this crowd, none of them a stranger to death. Her hindquarters quivered and flexed before settling limp on the cold stone.

The priest tilted the llama’s head and torso to the side and lifted the hind section with the help of his assistant to drain the blood into a massive stone bowl. With her blood drained, the llama’s eyes became glazed like the moon, reflecting not their own internal warmth and light, but that of the outside. The space beneath the eyes was cold and in the process of transforming. The priest turned her on her back and offered another prayer before cutting aggressively into her chest plate to remove the heart as symbol of moving energy to the four Suyus extending from Cuzco, the heart being the source of a being’s life-energy.

Each remaining llama was sacrificed in turn as the afternoon began to grow late and the Aymara warriors stoic.

Agapito turned to Sand and Pachacútec and asked, “If given the chance would you risk losing your mind to find truth? Snakes shed their skin and lose themselves in the forest each time they grow. Do you ever try to crawl out of your skin?”

“No, but I try to crawl into other’s skin,” teased Sand, while Pachacútec ran his thumb and forefinger along the spine of a coca leaf.

“You know, Agapito, that is for you to ponder and for the plants of the Amazon to teach you. I am a leader and not a mystic. I do what my people ask and what my father demands. Please, tangle your mind around the vines of the Amazon and teach me all you gain. What have you learned in losing your mind?”

“Well, that Inca must accumulate, with food and with wealth, but with no mind accumulation seems irrelevant, for no mind is no future and no future leaves planning to be excessive and only the present to be impressive. Do you know that the future is behind you, brother? Can you see it? No. All you can see is what is in front of you, and what is in front of you is what is true. This is the world. Why worry about the future that is behind you? And so why accumulate?”

“When you came to visit me here at my home in Machu Picchu, ‘Pito, was your path in front of you or behind you? And, if it is in front of you, where you walking into the past?”

“Of course I was, and if not, how did everything that was in that world of walking get there but in being from the past? The trail was built hundreds of years ago by your father’s grandfather, and every other thing that was touching my present moment was only embodying a past leading to that point. So, yes, I was walking into the past, even though time was moving me into the future, I was not walking into it.”

“Well,” Agapito took a few minutes to gather his thoughts and reply to Leo, during which time the energy at the table turned a bit awkward, because, the truth is, Agapito is not too articulate in casual conversation. He took a sip of his glass of Inca Kola, and another, and then he spread some picante on some bread and turned an ear to the music that was playing. Leo sipped his beer and grimaced, obviously feeling a bit uncomfortable with his companion. “I prefer trails to trials and horizons to borders. When my feet move, my mind moves, and when my mind moves, I optimistically believe that the world moves. Maybe a bit Narcissistic, but that’s how it feels, Leo. Agapito had been trying to get in the habit of saying new acquaintance’s names to help him remember. “And I know the world moves of its own accord, but you know, the more movement we each do as well, I feel that counts for something too. And like the Hindu pilgrim who claimed, ‘What is important is not the object worshiped but the depth and sincerity of the worship,’ as he stepped off the train at Benares. That makes sense to me as I move, even in visiting such popular sites of worship as Machu Picchu”.

“Are you ok?” asked Leo.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I was just wondering why you travel and it seems to stress you. I mean, I just met you, but I wonder if you’re ok.”

“Yeah, I’m ok. I guess simply put, I travel because I’m looking for something and I know that something is not at any particular destination but permeating the air around us all the time. It’s just that when I move, the air around me seems to flutter and that makes me feel that something more acutely than without movement. Err, I mean, seems you’re not much for metaphysics tonight. Let’s just leave it as I travel because I’m looking for something and it’s not stressful. Say, have you ever read that Herman Hesse book Journey to the East? You remind me of the ‘Leo’ in that book. He was a good guy, Leo. You seem like a good guy too.”

“I know zat book I read it in German, his original language. Do you believe we read zee same book? I speak German too, as well as Spanish and French and a bit of Danish. With a few beers in me I can even speak Flemish, but it always makes me laugh. We Dutch are good for zat. Knowing language zat is, not laughing,” Leo grinned and chuckled to himself.

Leo and Agapito shared their thoughts on Journey to the East, and Agapito is taken by Leo’s ability to analyze precisely but matter-of-factly Hesse’s thoughts on pilgrimage. “And in zee book, ‘Leo’ just sort of flew beside the others, unaware of the intent of the journey but eager to make it and most committed to it for sure. Zee faithful lion. But such an ignorant bunch of travelers, those ones. I mean, if you don’t know where you’re going, why are you going? Get a map and ask some people and it’s easy to find the path in this day and age.”

“But that’s what I mean, Leo, that’s exactly how I feel! I feel like those journeyers to the East. And that’s why I travel.”

“So you have been to Machu Picchu before?”

“Yes”

“So, you know where you are going?”

“Well, geographically, my good inquirer and philosopher, but not spiritually and mentally. I mean, I think pilgrimages can be made so many times with both different paths and different destination while still being to the same place, you know what I mean? Would you say you are on a pilgrimage, Leo?”

“No.”

“And you know where you are going?”

“Yes. To Machu Picchu.” Leo seemed to become a bit irritated and wishing he had just stayed in his room and finished the last of his smokes while listening to music on his headphones. “Are you sure you’re ok? What do you want from me?”

“YES, I’m ok, thanks for checking in again. I can go from ‘ok’ to ‘not ok’ amazingly fast. But, to answer the second question, what I want is for us all to at least wake up and realize there are things we are doing that we don’t realize you are doing and also places that we are going that we do not realize we are going and finally that there are things that are seeing that we don’t realize are seeing. That, I think is the least we can hope for from a life with even a modicum of consciousness – which is, so says much of science, the one thing that makes us different from the rest of the breathing and pulsing world around us, even though I disagree with that as well. And I want you to realize you’re on a pilgrimage. Damn, sorry Leo, I forgot you’re not into metaphysics or, I guess, ethics tonight. Are you into drinking?” Agapito always alternated between excess and recess and he had a feeling that this was a night for the former. Especially since his watch started to tilt toward a new day and Tristeza would be passing by with her mother in a few short hours. Better to be awake than to be asleep for such an unsatisfactory length of time.

When he was younger Agapito would leave the house in the early morning to soak his feet in early-morning moon-lit pool in the high plains of Bolivia and see if he could ever find the reflection of the reflected moon yet again reflected in the sky. He would pass entire nights in this way, always convinced that there was something hidden in the mirrored recesses of the night moon glow, convinced that there was infinitely more magic in a night without lit detail than a day without shadows.

As he reached his adolescence he began to live as a shadow, never letting himself be exposed but finding great insight and curiosity in the those nooks that others passed unnoticed. To say he was happy in this place would be romantic, but at least we could say he was engaged. And being engaged he became a bit estranged from his unengaged peers who would spend their days doing practical things such as flirting with girls and playing futbol or studying.

The first Aymara warrior was serendipitously sacrificed as the sun rolled its tired wheel one more turn behind the summit of Huayna Picchu. Pachacútec took the knife and aligned it to the evening star shimmering in the evening blue, the first star to puncture the fabric of the night sky. Many hunting cultures saw the sun as the quintessential hunter, shooting down the stars one by one as it rose, with its piercing rays. And now, as the hunter moved back out of the picture the wild stars filled the landscape once again, now unafraid of the sun’s arrows. The Warrior closed his eyes and saw himself traveling the great Yawar Mayu, the blood river, back through the ground, feeling fortunate to die as the sun set so their two spirits could travel this river under the ground together. As the knife carved into his chest and he felt the air leaving him, he dreamed of a condor coming and picking his decaying body off the icy summit of a high mountain and carrying it over a river as large as the milky way. There the condor dropped him just as the sun god dove from above and started to swim back up river.

The second warrior tried to run and for that had his feet crushed at the ankles before being lain on the altar. As his ankles crunched and cracked he fainted and had no awareness of what happened after that, turning himself to a snake, armless and legless, now with no pain where his ankle joints used to be. As a snake he pictured himself writhe and wiggle his way through the layers of earth to the Yawar Mayu. There he found a doorway opening on to a beach of snakes that guarded the entrance to the river. To pass the snakes he turned himself again into a vine to hide as he fell into the river off a tree and began to float up river to return to the earth.

The third Aymara warrior cried in anger and died with bitterness in his heart for being forced to fight in a war that was not his. For this he was granted no visions in his death, only a feeling of cold and stagnation. This feeling would last the next 280 years until his soul were granted a chance to reconsider. As the shaman held his heart to the morning star in the early glow of the night he saw that the star reflected on a heart as still and frigid as the glaciers of the sacred Ausungate.

Koa, one of the women participating in the event was the most beautiful in the entire estate and had, it was said, been born of the moon and the morning glory flower. One evening 19 years before, the moon had drank to much from the forest and was saturated with water and so had cried to let some drain to be able to continue moving through the sky. When this drop fell to the earth it skipped off one of the morning glory flowers at the top of Huayna Picchu and as the petal recoiled, Koa was conceived in the roots of the plant. She had never left the city of Machu Picchu and slept on a bed of morning glories. As the seventh warrior was closing his eyes to open his heart to the obsidian, Koa was chewing on morning glory seeds and pouring chicha on Agapito’s palm saying, “From birth to earth, from worth to dirt.”

“You see,” Agapito offered “It is time to end the sacrificing, my good friend.”

This pilgrimage will be advertised: II

2008-05-02T12:58:00.000-07:00

As the soirée made its way to the Temple of the Condor, dusk began to descend and the evening glow reflected purple and yellow against the granite of Huayna (old) Picchu (peak), the sacred peak rising on the ridge above Machu (young) Picchu.

A condor propitiously circled Huayna with the grace and surrender of a piece of driftwood caught in a river eddy.

Agapito handed a k’intu or stack of coca to his friend Pachacútec, holding between his thumb and forefinger the two most complete leaves he could find against the backdrop of the cloud forests 2000 feet below, to represent the harmony inherent in the world’s dual elements of male and female. Pachacútec reciprocated the offering, also with two leaves, to one of the maidens named Sand, who abashedly lowered her eyes while flirtatiously shooting past his fingertips to his palm before stroking in retreat and graciously accepting. Agapito smiled at the implications of this exchange.

Putting this aside for a moment, Pachacútec began, “Agapito, with whom I have had thousands of journeys, you are my closest confident, please never forget that. I want to tell you something. As I sat my last evening on Lake Titicaca and watched my men run the Aymara into surrender it was as if all the mountains were within my grasp. I have wanted to give this gift to our people, that we can teach mountains to talk and thereby learn to think and they will rise in our favor. And this is the place to learn this, here at my home on this mountain. People will learn these things for many years, can’t you see?” Pachacútec proposed to Agapito and Sand.

“As the llama fat nourishes our relationship with Pachamama, so this land will nourish our relationship with future generations,” Agapito offered in reply.

They both sat quietly as the local priest prepared the table of offerings and the four llamas and twenty warriors fidgeted anxiously, while a maiden apiece began to massage and wash Agapito and Pachacútec’s feet, occasionally moving up their legs to tease toward the evening of celebration ahead. On the table was prepared a representation of the universe, with its three tiers placed in the infinite Pacha of space-time. And in our middle-realm of existence were placed objects representing the myriad manifestations of existence in this tier: clouds, llama and warrior figurines, coca and herbs. The priest held a glass of chicha and poured half to the ground on the four sides of the offering, to Pachamama, and drank the remainder. Agapito and Pachacútec did likewise, each also offering drinks to the captives and the women – the chicha circled around and around until the mood became infused with a touch of levity for an otherwise grave moment. And Sand took the chance to flirt again, offering to Pachacútec that, “Not only does alcohol loosen our tongue to speak to the earth but also to each other.”

The train bumped through its final tunnel and the loudspeaker commented in English only that Machu Picchu village was 2 minutes away so people should begin to ready their things. The Dutch man blinked awake, scratched his forehead, grimaced, and stuffed his fleece jacket into his rucksack, with the warmth of the lower climes removing any need for layering. His face was pink and his eyes renewed with a look of curiosity. Agapito asked him how long he was traveling for and if this were his first time here. As most Dutch do, this man spoke impeccable English and commented that his stay is yet to be determined, being on sabbatical and that of course this was his first time. He was as jovial as a dog about to go out for its daily walk, and Agapito appreciated both his innocence and his wonder.

Heading to Machu Picchu Village, or Aguas Calientes as it is often called, Agapito closed his eyes and raised his head toward the hot mid-afternoon sun burning between the steep jungle-clad slopes of these lower Andean valleys. The Sacred Valley is a fertile depression that rolls north from Cuzco toward the tropical lowlands and, along with Cuzco, is the most continuously inhabited and farmed stretch of land in the hemisphere. Corn, potatoes and quinoa have grown for thousands of years and cities are built upon cities upon endless history. Annie Dillard in For the Time Being describes dusting or sweeping a home as simply postponing our inevitable burial considering the impressive rate that sand and dust fill a place. And this is no exception – with farm-fields most likely plowed and tilled above entire pre-Incan homes and hamlets which were, in like, plowed and tilled above their ancestors. Through sedimentation, Andean winds and simple disregard time has piled earth upon people and places for dizzying amounts of years while all this rich history now nourishes the crops that feed the distant descendents of a people once proud.

The Sacred Valley curves with the sacred water of the Urubamba River past countless sacred ruins and sacred stones and caves, reminding a pilgrim that a pilgrimage is sacred, lest they forget. The river meanders and slopes and it picks up a sense of urgency as the valley becomes a canyon and the open Andean slopes give way to steep jungle-clad cliffs. And mountains that were content to yawn a few kilometers back now begin to shout and show their teeth and stab sharply toward the sky.

Is this what happens when a place becomes sacred, it is bold enough to point and cut into the heavens?

The Urubamba swells and pushes against canyon walls that, along with the jungle’s desire to conceal and cover, allowed for Machu Picchu to be hidden from Western archeologists for hundreds of years. It is no wonder, while traveling on a modern train to Aguas Calientes through the overgrown canyon, that the ruins played such an impressive game of hide and seek and how many more such sites remain? Endless similar valleys pour into the main Urubamba drainage with high ridges, waterfalls, three thousand-foot chasms and humbling mystical mettle.

As Agapito bore the heat on his cheeks, his senses opened and the Urubamba River bounced and ripped through the canyon above Aguas Calientes while the clank and clunk of construction machinery resounded heavily against the granite walls, giving the impression that the entire ground was being scoured from under him. Aguas Calientes was no town before the explosive tourist phenomenon of Machu Picchu in the last thirty years. Now hotels, restaurants and ubiquitously kitschy Incan craft shops wind and cut into the steep walls of the canyon 2,000 feet below the famous Incan citadel – a modern show of construction that pales against the construction of Machu Picchu itself.

The train schedule was such that pilgrims arrive to the town no earlier than breakfast time, when crowds inevitably begin to fill the walls of the ruins. Agapito preferred to wait for the crisp early morning to walk the steps to Machu Picchu and have the solitude and fresh night-ionized air to explore the grounds.

On his first trip Agapito was curious.
His second visit was to affirm the first.
His third was again of curiosity since the second was lost to affirmation.
Now on his fourth visit he came to seek.

His seeking was simple. He was seeking a pilgrimage, a circular intent of which he was well aware. For a pilgrim seeking or a seeker making pilgrimage inevitably will meet along the same path and recognize one another. If he began as a seeker intent on making a pilgrimage, thereby recognizing himself as a pilgrim (as noted above, we all are), of whom all are seekers, well, where do we begin? The truth his, Agapito knew not what he sought, only that he did. And being still young on his path he had embodied the mantra, “It matters little WHAT you seek, only THAT you seek.”

He stepped over a pile of cement and felt a tugging at his wool sweater. Looking up from two feet below, a young girl of no more than 6 years held a tray of bubble gum, cigarettes, Kleenex and llama figurines, asking or maybe requesting “Buy please, meester?!” And whether she asked or requested mattered not to Agapito, he was busy looking at the combination of items on the tray and wondering how these came to be the first things he was offered upon arrival. An odd array, but he chose not to share this concern with the girl, leaving her to the throes and thrills of informal market madness while smiling and replying, “No gracias.” He wondered of other pilgrims arriving and in what shape that they perhaps would need one or all of the offered commodities for the coming journey. What arrangement of poor planning and/or spontaneous necessity would create a demand for this sales-spread?

“Y tus padres? Donde estan?” Agapito softly asked as he squatted to eye level.

The girl looked down and to her left, shyly fidgeting her right hand in the pocket of her miniature apron. On her feet she wore a classic pair of rubber sandals with her sprouting toes plunging off the front edge and probing at the ground in front. Beneath the apron a skirt was layered over another and she had a dull grey sweater that contrasted her brilliant dark and smooth face. Her hair hung long and was caught in her lips. She tried to pull it off her face as she looked up at Agapito and replied, “Buy me some, meester?!”

Innocence was not a virtue prided by the people of Tawantinsuyu, least of all by the leader, the Inca. Raw and honest, bold and confident, the people from Cusco set out to level taboo and build an empire.

The high priest of Machu Picchu pulled his obsidian knife from a llama-leather sheath and began to chip and sharpen the atom-thin blade. The llamas would be slaughtered first, in respect for the solidarity of humankind – not out of disrespect for the natural world but out of respect for different elemental spirits in the manifest world. On the block now in the Temple of the Condor, the first two llamas were dragged to the altar. And there is no sound or sight more undignified than the squeal and spit of a llama off to slaughter. For those accustomed to the soft whimper of a llama in the field, it is hard to imagine that it is the same animal making the noise. With the high-pitched wail of a siren yet with a guttural growl of a grumpy gorilla and the panic of a hyena, the llama digs deep to prevent its fate from manifesting. And with the guttural growl comes the green cud, partially digested grass that the ill-fated llama will hurl at all in its proximity.

Donkeys are the beasts of burden that held the Old World with minimal complaint. Llamas are the beast of burden that held the New World with a whimper, a spit, a shout and a scurry. A llama is a curious and cunning creature, aware of both this relationship and its powerlessness to change it. And they fight it tooth and nail, vocal chord and green cud.

As the llama snorted and spat and shouted and squirmed its way to the alter block, the Aymara warriors stoically squinted their eyes and withdrew their jaws, knowing that any self respecting warrior would have a much more dignified gait to his fate.

But then, who ever asked a llama to fight? Who ever sat with them and said, “We have a very noble and important cause, and we need your expertise, we need your sophistication in this matter. You see, the future needs progress, and you are the perfect fit. You must only forgo freedom, free-will and comfort and the world will progress WITH you, beneath your fluffy little shoulders.” Without this respectful and honest conversation, who could actually expect a llama to be slaughtered with any level of grace or dignity?

The soldier, on the other hand, had a rational control over his impulses because he had been informed as to the nature of his fight. He was only captured after a stronger force had overtaken him and until that point he aimed to be the capturer. And so he has a conscious understanding of his relationship with his enemy and with humankind at large. He had fought a noble fight and lost. What llama has ever been given a choice in the matter? I’d squeal too.

But elements of sacrifice are as myriad and misunderstood as culture itself. And to sacrifice in the name of knowledge may indeed be a dignified aim. To hunt for food is as equally or even more justified. To kill an animal to restore the balance, or ayni with the natural world, is a rite long lost and rued – human or otherwise. But the truth is, the human race has shown no more respect for the inherent value of the natural world or their human brethren since the abandonment of ritual sacrifice.

Tristeza was the girl’s name. Her real name was Elena but for some reason she would not reveal to Agapito, she had taken the name Tristeza, the tragedy of which was only immediately apparent in her vending cart. Each morning, she explained, she would ride the train to Aguas Calientes with all the confidence her 9 years of being could offer and sold Kleenex, cigarettes, bubble-gum and ceramic llamas. She noticed nothing different in her exchange this day with Agapito so far, only that he lingered for a spell longer and that in his eye was a twinkle she only sees in the stars over her home just up the train tracks.

“Mama is all we have, and she is ill. Papa, I don’t know where. Mama won’t say. Meester, buy me some?”

“No Tristeza, but have you even been to Machu Picchu?” Agapito asked.

No response.

“Well, it’s just right up there, whatya say we go together tomorrow morning, my treat? It is really special and you would love it, everybody does. You must get to know it,” Agapito offered.

A tiny smile.

A growing smile.

Eyes peering up.

Eyes lifting up further from under her dangling bang that was still caught in her lips and they were wide and beautiful.

Tristeza nodded “SI!”.

This Pilgrimage Will be Advertised

2008-04-11T07:45:00.000-07:00

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.

Prophets and Profits

2008-04-11T07:29:00.000-07:00

In a day when profits are so quantified and prophets less than qualified, knowing which of these wisdoms to put in your pocket can be challenging and undignified. As if the two words just happened to strike a conversation to realize their distant filial roots and next jump at the opportunity to reunite in the 21st century.

An extraordinary Profit spoke to an unlearned Prophet and told him of all the best gains to be made in all the worst ways and the two of them struck an unconventional partnership. So where is your Profit? Who is your Prophet? The high point on the graph, the bottom line of moral misconception fundamentals? The problem with fundamentalist Prophets is their number one concern is the moral bottom line, and the problem with fundamentalist Profit seekers is that their number one concern is the financial bottom line. And as if you ever thought that the two were distinguishable anymore, consider which informs the majority of the modern world’s decisions. Prophetical profiteering pioneering a new period of growth for the human wallet and soul.

So following too close to a prophet or a profit must lead to despair and completely undermine the bold beauty of human authenticity and individuality. But if you want that, if you truly WANT that, then don’t expect others to follow the economic or ecumenic evangelism with any enthusiasm.

Frutilla, more fog and a present moment

2007-10-05T10:54:00.000-07:00

I have been walking through a cloud for 6 days and the cloud continues thick like an avalanche. The Andes are all around but the mountains can’t be seen for the fog. And this is not unusual.

When I left my home in Chojalpaya last week I intended to return by nightfall, but when night fell I found myself unable to see up from down and even was maybe lifted up, buoyed just slightly by the thick and damp air. As if the water were so thick in the air that the medium had changed, were the lakes now air bubble? Had gravity switched positions from down to up? My breath is full and lungs lubricated by moist Amazon air that filled each cubic inch with super-saturated jungle water drops.

And now Chojalpaya has become a memory, one I pay no mind to in my present foggy awareness. I could be in a valley or on a mountain top and it would make no difference, for I am here in a cloud and directions have been lost with my home.

I contemplate my name, Agapito, and the way that each lingual movement can be felt, from the aspirated beginning the throaty middle, bouncing again to the lips with a pursed “p”, then to the palate with my tongue and again with an aspirated “o” to finish the song-let. Aspirated ends with a rhythmic belly, a dynamic name as important as its meaning. “A little bit of God’s love, A little bit of God’s love . . .” I chant my name now as I move through the valley-top, or wherever I am, sharing the present moment with God’s presence.

I am 15 years old, from the Bolivian Andes, raised below the Condor’s nest, growing up in the puma’s print, covered with the llama’s wool. In my medicine bag I hold the hair of my first haircutting when I had 2 years. It reminds me of my past. So does the landscape, for here is where my ancestors lived and continue to hold watch: “Pacha” is both the place around me and the time that is woven into it.

I have not eaten since I left Chojolpaya and know that if I can drop toward the rising sun I will have coca and wild potatoes, but for that I would need to know up and down, rising and setting sun, I would need to have a sense of the five directions, which the clouds are keeping from me. I sit and walk and sit and laugh, and lay to sleep.

Just as I lay down for a siesta, I hear heavy panting from somewhere near me, to my back. It is the breath of a puma for sure, and I jump to my feet. The condor guides the heavens, the serpent under the earth and the puma this middles realm that humand inhabit. Her presence may be auspicious but it is also frightening. Running ahead I hear the breath behind me, growing stronger, growing closer. My breath becomes heavy, and I can tell that my path is ascending. I am running along a ridge now for sure. I am winning, I am ahead of the puma, how is that possible?

I see a massive dark object ahead of me and as I approach I realize it is a cliff, I will be cornered by the puma for sure and die quickly, at least this death will keep me in this middle realm. But this cliff is not too steep, maybe I can live for a while longer, maybe long enough for the fog to lift, either way it’s worth trying to climb this right now. So I move up, and the cat takes a jump at my ankles just as I scamper above it. It misses and I feel its breath on my heels as I climb far above. Free from the menace now I continue to climb with ease, but the rock is loose and I become completely present with my ascent toward the condor realm, taking care to use only the most solid holds. It is precarious.

As I climb up the top begins to become clear, a grassy step where the cliff ends. I am pulling onto the top with lucid vision, so lucid that I feel the fog may be lifting. And as I gather myself, standing upright another wave of fear enters through my ears and settles in my lower stomach as I hear the heavy breath of a second puma right in front of me. I can make out its swift gait, approaching as a blurry spot as I rapidly climb back down the cliff. The puma swipes once at my hand and stand perched over the cliff above me as I move back down, hoping that the puma below has lost interest and headed back into the fog. As I descend I hear it’s heavy breath below and realize it is still waiting. Calmly perched on a ledge I quiet my breath to see if either of the pumas have left.

Still in front.

Still behind.

In my Aymara language the past can be found in front of us and the future behind us. I name the puma ahead of me “Times-Past” and the puma behind me “Times-Ahead” and sit down on my perch to see what comes. The rock has been crumbling since I touched it climbing up and now the ledge where I am sitting begins to fracture. I stand up and find some new holds that are all loose and now with a heavy rain they begin to loosen even more. I have not eaten in a week and with Times-Past above me and Times-Ahead behind me, I become present with the hunger in my belly. I notice the most colorful strawberry on a vine right in front of my face. Moving my hand to grasp the vine I pluck the strawberry. It is cold and I run my finger over the seeds, plucking one off its skin to taste the seed. I have never done that before. What does the seed taste like without the fruit?

Looking at myself from a condors view I pull back and see my precarious place between these two frightful beasts. I can see myself and the strawberry seeds and fruit and Times-Ahead and Times-Past in a miniscule scene on the side of a mountain while the rest of the world exists outside the fog. I swoop and see the forest below, following a river from a glacier to the Amazon and I empathize with the puma’s need for food and survival as essential as the water’s path down the mountain – I am content with time and with endings and change. Standing with myself and this present moment on this crumbling ledge I throw the whole fruit into my mouth, the only one on the vine. As I cut through it’s flesh the fruit explodes into my mouth and I am more satisfied than I have ever been.

Valle Cochamo and the Soggy Fog Goddess (Wilderness part II)

2007-08-12T21:58:00.000-07:00

LA LLEGADA AL SUR
Agapito and Juan were both intelligent, philosophically inclined and advanced beings and Juan knew better than to be cynical of the lack of preserved wilderness in a foreign land. The exoticism that he carried as well as the romanticism that Agapito carried was naïve and they could only blame themselves for being let down but they both still wanted that experience of the Wilderness – Juan a bit more so. So they continued south – zigging and zagging now and again into the forest wall and swamps of the Amazon, across the vast altiplano of Bolivia to which Agapito would later return, past the nitrate and guano fields of northern Chile, over and around the dotted volcanoes that speckled this landscape, through the vineyard of central Chile and Argentina to the lakes, fjords, glaciers and jungles of Patagonia, the end of the world.

In Patagonia they found the four elements to be as present as their four limbs, as the four stars of the Southern Cross – they were impossible to ignore. The fire of the volcanoes The water of the ocean, rain, rivers and glaciers The earth of the jagged peaks and ancient trees that cut into the sky The air that never stops moving.

They found giant Alerce trees that maybe existed at the same time that Egyptians were beginning to write. The stories in the trees’ rings record over 4,000 years of history. Juan likened them to the redwoods of California. And like the redwoods, they found logging cutting into this history with mighty saws, hauling them out of the once-vast Valdivian rainforests. Juan became disheartened and began to wonder if their search for the Wilderness had been made in vain. If not here then where? Continue to the South Pole? They both agreed that true Wilderness is not wilderness out of lack of options. Not wilderness in the way that icy mountaintops or polar icecaps are wilderness, not void of life. These wild places are wild out of necessity, out of impossibility. The Wilderness they sought was full of life but devoid of the rapid alterations of humans – the kind of place that gives us a glimpse of what lies beneath our dim-blanket of human awareness, hairless human skin and creative impulse, humans hands before we invented the hammer.

EL VALLE
Together they found the Valle Cochamo tucked in the mountains lining one-such rainforest in the northern fjords of Chilean Patagonia. In this region around 6 meters of rain falls each year. A Fog Goddess (yes, she’s obviously a she-goddess) perpetually plops on her soggy haunches for 350 days of the year, and the valley was shrouded in mist as they approached 20 kilometers from the coast. And even for the first week they camped at La Junta, the confluence of the valley’s two largest rivers, they saw no more than the trees around them, clouds and rain keeping any other sights mystifyingly veiled. And oh, this moved them into something more primordial, with visual stimulation around them being fuzzy and mystifyingly blurred, the landscape within them became increasingly intriguing – it was as if they moved in a time where substance existed but form had not yet been found, perhaps like the primordial soup as the first molecules were beginning to come together. With all the moisture it definitely felt like a soup, organic of course.

In their closed world they moved back to a sort of nascent beginning where all possibilities were still being considered, no rules put in place about what this world could look like. True, they were oblivios, hidden in a cloud and unable to see the massive 3,000-foot granite cliffs that bordered the valley on all sides, or the rancher’s house right across the river. It was a dream, really, stumbling with a frame of reference that extended no further than the billions of water molecules right in front of their eyes and for all they knew, this was the entire universe. Their search for Wilderness became a search of inches rather than one of thousands of miles. What this allowed was for the landscape to take on a formless existence, one where they could make up their own story, like children still putting the pieces together for this strange life. The bamboo they cut through and pulled in attempts to explore steep valleys and peaks became snakes, each one with wisdom about how to grow old with a youthful snap. They heard the water molecules so thick in the air bumping into one another and making music like the symphony of the spheres, and when they listened even closer it seemed that they could hear the symphony of the fundamental superstrings. As they crossed a river once, they truly felt that they were in the pulsing veins of Pachamama with the fog around them obviously adding to the feeling of being INSIDE her.

Even Juan was in rapture and at one point found Agapito in the fog after losing him for four days and said, “I art thou and I am inside thou! Hallelujah, hermano, THIS is what we were looking for!”

And it was during these intense meditations in the fog that they realized Wilderness to be ubiquitous, and the apparent loss of it in the physical world simply being manifest of the loss of it in the spiritual world. Humans would lash out into the wilderness of the natural world for fear of embracing the wilderness within themselves: the one that Jesus explored for 40 days or that aborigines explore in a rite of passage Walkabout – the vast irremovable Wilderness with strings that tie this physical place to the raw expanse of universal spirit. And it is true that these natural places open these doors, moving the outside in and the inside out.

EL RETORNO
Around day 18 of exploring the soggy underside of the Fog Goddess, she decided to stand up and wring out her damp underpants in a sunny spot for a while to allow Juan and Agapito a larger view of the wilderness they had been stumbling through. They rubbed their eyes – eternally thankful for the Fog Goddess and all the introspection she had allowed with her suffocating squat – and allowed them to scan this massive landscape unveiling. They could finally see the warped crown of the 4,000-year old Alerce trees and, sitting in the grassy meadow of La Junta, their view turned skyward and toward the horizon. A dozen granite domes emerged from under the Fog Goddess as she stood up and Juan spoke of his first time walking into Yosemite Valley. They could see distant glaciers at the head of the valley and both felt they were in one of the most beautiful places in the world. They also both agreed that this was not the Wilderness they thought they were looking for 5 months prior. Juan pointed to the wooden ranch house with Alerce shingles and said, “Nope, not it, see, the house there? Definitely not what we were looking for.”

They both laughed as they embraced both the macro and micro views of the world around them, giving thanks to each and feeling a bit naïve in expecting that their search for Wilderness need take them thousands of miles from home.

Agapito kneeled down and peered beneath a bush, giggling “Oye Don Juan el Viejo, have a look under here, I think I found it. I don’t see a single trace of the human fingerprint in here.” His nose was in the dirt and was talking about a square inch of earth.

As Agapito stood up, Juan put his hand against his chest and said, “You know ‘Pito, I feel the strong presence of Wilderness right here. And I’m ok with that cabin over there, just as I’m ok with leaving this place and the pursuit of wilderness. I’ve been around, mi hijo, and I learned something new when I’d thought I was done learning. And I’m ready to head back out of here. While we go, though, let’s do a k’intu with some of those leaves you have left from Peru. I’ve never been much into blessing and prayer but that soggy lady changed something in me. How do you do a k’intu?”

“Here, I’ll do it.”

“No, show me and I’ll do it. It’s time I learn something about blessing and prayer rather than just thought and action.” And Agapito fetched his bag of coca leaves, explaining how to pick the finest leaves for the offering and stack three of them in a fan. He explained the symbolic convergence of the four directions at Tawantinsuyu, with east as rebirth and insight, the west as death and wisdom, the north as clarity and cleansing and the south as the source of wisdom from plants as well as reproduction and regeneration. He showed him how to also recognize the convergence of these directions in here and now, in the place they stood as time and place were intricately woven together. And then finally the sacred breath that is blown on the offering and following these steps, Juan performed his first k’intu.

They allowed the breath to carry. They actually felt Juan’s breath turn to a breeze. As the breeze turned to wind it began to howl and a song took form in the trees and the high passes of the surrounding peaks. The three coca leaves were lifted from his hands and began to dance. One leaf spun to the ground and was covered by the earth. Another hovered around eye level and rose to the crown of a nearby Alerce before moving back to eye-level and quivering there. The final leaf fluttered up then swirled back down before a gust put it into flight far above and out of sight.

With three tiers of the universe auspiciously marked with the wind and leaves by this k’intu they decided it was time to move out of the valley. As they walked down the trail a wall of bamboo sprouted in their wake and the Fog Goddess squatted back down and began her cold-dank perspiration. Cochamo vanished behind them and they carried Wilderness with them.

The Cochamo Valley is one of the most spectacular and wild pieces of Patagonian wilderness that remains. The preserved Alerces, Valdivian Rainforest, wildlife and watersheds are among the last of their kind in Patagonia, a place where similar landscapes were abundant in the recent past. Add to this the ribboned waterfalls and gigantic granite mountains and you have one of the most beautiful valleys in the world, deserving of the comparisons drawn between it and Yosemite. The place is receiving increased visits from backpackers but plans are underway that could open a road through the valley to Argentina. This would be a disaster for the preservation of this one-of-a-kind gem of natural splendor and would open it up for logging, mining and development. Who will benefit? This story is obviously not unique, just worth sharing. And conversations about this being a developed vs. developing or first vs. third world issue must be kept for another page.

Rio La Junta Cascadas (natural waterslides)

5.11a crux of 22pitch, 3,000 foot Bienvenidos a mi Insomnia

The Soggy Fog Goddess

La Gorila framed on the 16km approach

Slacking at Refugio La Junta

Looking for Wilderness in the Americas (Wilderness Part I)

2007-08-12T18:37:00.000-07:00

LA SALIDA

Agapito met Juan Espejo in Mexico in 2004. Espejo was walking from Yosemite to Patagonia looking for the “real wilderness” at the end of the world. It was as he was debating with the Park Service over the quality of American wilderness, specifically over the presence of dams and other “human atrocities against the ‘wild’ in ‘wild-erness’.” Agapito had heard of the great conservationist from a condor that had followed Sr. Espejo through the Sierras on one of his tireless journeys into the wilderness. The journey of Agapito de la Paz and Juan Espejo through the south of the Americas has been one of the greatest conservation stories ever forgotten.

By the time Juan left California Yosemite was full with traffic, road development and was about to see the construction of a new dam just to store water for Curry Village. He left The Valley to the landscape-architects, motor-homes, hungry bears, dirtbags, still-life photographers and smog clouds knowing which battles to leave and which he had a chance of wining. Setting out disgusted by the conservation movement in this country – one of urban intellectuals who may touch a piece of paper but never the bark of the tree from which it came – he sought a place where conservation was not an academic concept but a way of life.

He thought he would find this view of the world in the uncontacted tribes of the Amazon or the Maya of Central America, or at least find pristine lands in Patagonia, the end of the world; he was mistaken in each of these, for humans throughout were – above all – attempting to survive for as long as possible in the battle with mother earth and her struggle for her bountiful resources. At each step he found forests burning and fertile land eroding toward the sea. But he did find Agapito and in the far south what he also found Cochamo, a valley in Southern Chile that he came to love and despise just as much as Yosemite – a place where even he felt that he shouldn’t stay – where you will see that he put the blessing of preservation and lifted a veil that would hide the valley indefinitely from human interests.

EL ENCUENTRO
Juan was on horseback when Agapito met him in the Lacondon Rainforest of Chiapas. Through conversations and alignment of dreams, the two found their paths quite similar and Agapito was moved to be a part of this great pan-American adventure. After a few days exploring still “undiscovered” ruins along the Rio Usumacinta, Agapito bought a caballo and named her Ayni, attempting to sew together his rift with the earth through the Incan word for “reciprocity”, manifest in this case through his animal husbandry. He moved in stride with Espejo in his exploration south.

With their horses they intended to move overland, through the jungles of Central America to the Andes, which they would traverse from Colombia to Patagonia, bouncing from the eastern to western slope, into the Amazon and over to the ocean, to the pampas and to the Pacific fjords but always following the spine of the world’s most extensive mountain range.

As the two pilgrims traveled south along the Andes they found very little wilderness. At least not the Wilderness that Juan knew existed in places like the far north of Alaska or Canada. Sure, they knew that vast tracts of Amazon existed untouched, but what they found both in the forest and the mountains was anything but wild. And the forests they explored were not the open wilderness that elevated their being and sent their views to the horizon, knowing they could walk endlessly unimpeded. The forests were closed, limited in their ability to be explored – although obviously infinite in the possibilities for exploration. In the mountains they found agricultural terraces and towns that had existed for a thousand years or more, open pit mining being siphoned directly to the British Empire and then the North American Empire ever since the Spanish Empire’s decline and forest that had been slashed and burned by the local villagers since centuries before the conquistadors. They found a wilderness greatly altered and inhabited by humans.

EL DILEMA
Throughout the journey Juan and Agapito engaged incessantly in a philosophical dialogue about what they were looking for and where, if anywhere, they were finding it. They often held different views and different values. For example, they would stand on a ridge in the Central Andes where a glacier would be calving into a lake at 15,000 feet and Juan would comment, “Nope, this isn’t wilderness, see there, a stone wall. And the llamas right up there, see? No, definitely not the Wilderness we’re looking for.”

“Yeah, but where is this divided, I mean do you want it to be a chasm that separates “us from them”, “I from thou”? You’re such a cynical naturalist. I, at this moment am ecstatic with connection, the rapture of I fusing with thou, as Buber had it. In rapture both with these cloud forests and that rock wall, the Amazon down there and those llamas up there. Who cares if the llamas are only there because humans massaged their genes over thousands of years? Who cares that nature threw these stones one place and humans came collected them in another?” Agapito argued.

Agapito was ecstatic with what the places they were exploring, and it was somewhere in the Q’ero heartland near the Ausungate massif in Southern Peru that their dialog about the nature of wilderness really came to a head. Blissfully and, perhaps idealistically, Agapito commented, “Here they don’t even need to try for ayni, they are already in union – it’s inherent. I mean this is what I was talking about with the stones and the llamas, Juan. We are such a part of it . . .”

“And we’re so afraid of it so we fight against it. We’re afraid to sleep on the ground on hard rocks, or to actually let our feet touch the earth; we aren’t one with it and never will be. We’re silly beasts that don’t even have hair, we let plants and animals grow our hair for us. We manipulate them for our survival because of how hopelessly we’re designed. We’ve even been made to walk upright to further remove our sense from the earth.”

“But that’s how it is and there’s a reason for it. Now we can talk about it at least; we can think about it. We are upright to free up our brains to use our opposable thumbs and make music and write in celebration of what we’re sensing in this world. The more we try to box in “Nature”, with a capital ‘N’ the less harmonized our awareness is and the more schizophrenic and unhappy we become,” Agapito was rolling now.

“And the more we try to be a part of it the more we ruin it. Like an infant grizzly bear playing with a mouse, wanting to be friends but clumsily bludgeoning it for it’s own enjoyment. And our presence is just that, too much for a fragile earth to handle,” Juan said pessimistically.

And Agapito thought for a minute, agreeing in so many ways with Juan but remaining eternally optimistic. “Don’t you think our Pachamama deserves more respect that that? I mean, she’s strong, she can handle us and she will most definitely shake us off when she’s had enough. I agree that we’re at that point, actually that we’ve passed a point and she’s about to shake us. But pure preservation won’t help. It won’t help to try to put these things in glass cages. It’s like the whole Leave no Trace farce. Leaving a trace is inevitable and if we pack white gas and synthetic tents and such out here we’re leaving a far greater trace in the mining and industrial waste going into these products around the world. The world is far too inter-connected, and I’d rather gather some sticks, make a lean-to, make a fire or make one of those rock walls; I’d rather leave a small trace locally and be eternally grateful for providence in the world’s design than to displace my trace on other parts of the world. That’s the idea of ayni, compadre. It’s give and take and . . .”

“You think I’m that naïve?” Juan interrupted impatiently. He fingered the tip of his beard no less than one foot from his chin, “I spent two decades living in lean-to’s, trapping pocket gophers in the alpine of the Sierras. I know this earth is strong, I know she provides and I know about give and take.”

“Oh Juan, much respect, I know you could whoop me in an ayni battle. I’m just a curious young kid, eager to share these thoughts. I didn’t mean for it to get personal. Here brother, let’s do a k’intu with some coca to give some positivity back to this space we just projected some conflicting words into,” Agapito reconciled.

Juan was grizzly, wary and jaded, jabbing back at Agapito, perhaps to get a rouse, “You do it, I’m going to knock down these rock walls and scatter the stones. They haven’t been used in at least five-hundred years . . .”

“And now they’re such a part of this landscape. Don’t knock those down. Shit, I’ll have to do another k’intu just for your disrespect. I bet they have been used too, same as they have for the past thousand years, I’ll bet they’re still used each day,” Agapito argued as he gathered coca leaves for his two k’intus. He closed his eyes and recognized the four directions and then the space in the middle where they found themselves, blew the sacred breath across the layer of three coca leaves and opened his eyes to Juan hurling stones down the hill. Agapito sat down and picked up his quena. Blowing on his traditional Andean flute he thought about the way that at the very least breath was something shared throughout the natural world. And humans gained a unique ability to even alter breath into something such as music. But birds do the same, just without tools; and the wind does the same through high passes or a forest canopy, making its own music in its own time and . . .

“Hey, plug that thing, ‘Pito,” Juan shouted from down below, “Let the Andean wind make its own music, it’s a much better composer than you and it’s been doing it for far longer.” And so another dialog about humans and nature came to a halt.

Leaving Ka'ata, Bolivia

2007-04-29T12:00:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-29T10:19:00.000-07:00

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.

From the Austral Highway

2007-03-05T10:46:00.000-08:00

One of the most intriguing parts of Patagonia, for me, is the Austral Highway, a narrow slice of dirt that cuts 100's of miles from the Valdivian rainforests and steep-sided fjords in the north to the open beech forests, massive lakes and wide glacier-carved valleys in the south. A seldom-traveled route took us from the Laguna del Desierto near Chalten, 31 kilometers north to Lago O' Higgins, across which starts the Austral Highway.

"Big Dream, Caution! One at a time." The imagination only supports one truly big dream at a time, I suppose?

Lago del Desierto, Argentina

Lago O' Higgins, Chile

Villa O' Higgins, Chile

Carretera Austral, Chile

Puerto Bertrand, Chile

Freeze and thaw

2007-03-02T15:48:00.000-08:00

The Patagonian summer of 2007 was a timid one indeed, not really sure how to assert itself over the waning winter and so it didn’t. It sort of sat back and watched the winter keep its hold on the glaciers, on the forests where it continued to drop snow and on the skies where it kept away the summer’s sun. Summer tried a few times in January and actually punched through the crisp and cold curtain but only briefly before the winter’s wind kicked back in again and chased off any hopes for warmth or even thaw. This year winter came in and stuck. Agapito knew it was a large-scale shuffling of currents and tides, air temperatures and atmospheric composition – everybody knows that these days, especially in the south of the Southern Hemisphere where the ozone is badly in need of a bandage that is yet to be built by modern medicine. Although the hole in the ozone layer and greenhouse gas emissions are two separate entities, they are definitely two heads on the same monstrous body, two manifestations of the gross underestimation of the mesh-like nature of the world.

Agapito was tired of wondering about the hole in the ozone layer and imagined himself flying and poking around for a few days inside of it. He was climbing Osorno, a cylindrical volcano so nearly perfect you would think it were spinning on a potter’s wheel with some cosmic hands perpetually smoothing it’s contours. He walked dizzyingly up and around its flanks, lost in the continually perfect curve, when he noticed a speck of light above the summit. He first saw it as a star, but in realizing that no other stars were in the sky and that it was eleven in the morning, Agapito regained the focus and sense of awareness that he had lost in his conical course. About UFO’s Agapito had always been agnostic and about miracles increasingly accepting – he had seen his share of miracles but never a UFO.

Thinking back to encounters with people who claimed to have seen UFO’s he became even more skeptical, with each of the stories and personalities touched with lunacy. One such encounter was with a woman in San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico from “Watts, Los Angeles” who spent two hours reciting a poem about blue-blood lines, Illuminati, terror and conspiracy, active human incinerators in the US and, ultimately, the battle between good and evil that is coming to a head. This is all tragic and probably true and eternally disappointing and overwhelming and it brought Agapito to tears with each new revelation about the struggle for light in these dark days, until the woman turned to Agapito and asked,

“Have you ever seen a UFO?”

He actually considered the question seriously for a moment before losing all interest in the conversation. She continued to tell the story of her first UFO sighting near her campsite by a mountain lake in New Mexico . . . and Agapito began thinking of how yummy the mango on a stick sprinkled with chili powder that the Mayan woman down the street was selling would be at that moment. Although she spent the next hour talking about the various UFO sightings she’d had, Agapito’s attention never strayed from his belly and how badly it wanted to be filled with mango and chili. His agnosticism about the matter was so chronic and debilitating to his attention span that he was never able to learn whether the ‘F’ in UFO stood for ‘flying’ or ‘floating’ and whether the ‘O’ was for ‘object’ or ‘obstacle’ or whether the whole abbreviation stands for “Un-objectified Feminine Object,” which is also a rare occurrence these days.

He came to again on Volcan Osorno with the celestial mystery still speckling the sky above the summit and his curiosity piqued by the recent absent-minded daydreaming about the woman in San Cristobal. Was this his first UFO sighting?

In the Ralun hot springs just south of the volcano, a few days prior, he actually had a conversation with a man about the relationship between the hole in the ozone layer and the presence of UFO’s in the area. Although Agapito’s attention at the moment was put toward how much better the hot-springs would feel if this man were not talking to him about UFO’s, he did manage to glean the theory that the ozone hole opens and closes depending on the size and quantity of objects that want to fly or float into the Earth’s atmosphere at any given time. Being that the hole is directly above this part of Patagonia, this man had seen countless UFO’s. Agapito remained a paralyzed agnostic on the matter and for that he only heard a few words of the man’s two-hour monologue, diligently maintaining that hot springs should be UFO-free zones.

So again, Agapito is on Volcan Osorno, staring up at the speck of light in the late-morning, full-daylight, full-azure sky, remembering these two conversations about UFO’s and wondering what the heaven he is looking at. He wanted to go back to ask Fitz Roy, who he suspected must have many similar encounters in this part of the world. But he was now over a thousand miles from the Fitz and was not sure when he would return. As he closed his eyes he began to think of another woman who had left the US to live in Costa Rica because her communication with extra-terrestrials who were involved in controlling world economics and were going to implement universal-debt relief and forgiveness, including debts to credit card companies and “third world debt to the first world,” was less impeded in the tropics than in the US because the US is full of mind-control devices and . . .

He began to journey.

A sombrero began to form on the volcano, which is like a lenticular cloud that forms when ice-crystals consolidate from cold air and high winds. The sombrero that forms on Osorno is a curious thing in the way it forms a large shade-giving brim, a perfect disk that looks like a 10,000 gallon Mexican hat when viewed from afar although the sterile white color of the thing is not quite as spicy as its typical Mexican counterpart. The sombrero does not move in from the west as many clouds do, rather it forms out of thin air, manifesting from the moisture in the air that is affected by the wind and cold, and “poof,” there it is! It spins in a perfect circle as well, like a record player spinning vinyl. As Agapito began to drift, he found himself spinning on the sombrero, standing on ice crystals and rising toward the speck in the sky. Surfing on his ice saucer he neared the light and as it expanded he began to see that although it displayed a brilliant light, this object was actually refracting the sun’s rays and was a thick floating chunk of ice.

The ice was spinning, and was shaped like a diamond, colder than ice at the bottom of a glacier and as hard as glass. Agapito imagined it to be a large chunk of Ice 9, from Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, which can instantly freeze any water it comes in contact with, because of its extraordinarily high freezing temperature. Agapito was suddenly very cold and realized that he had been cold for months now. He was glad to know at least that this speck was not a UFO (unless that stands for ‘Unidentified Frozen Object”), so he could remain agnostic about the existence of extra-terrestrials. Circling the ice, he wondered about our future existence and whether the Earth would get warmer or colder or both, whether the ice was coming or going and for how much longer; he was somehow mystified to find himself alive at such an exciting time in history.

Everything happening these days seems to be the most important to have ever happened in the world – at least as far as human existence goes. But then he thought about the countless other high civilizations that may have come and gone even before the Egyptians and Chinese and Greeks and Mayans and Romans and the infinite others that could exist throughout the universe, and realized that the play here on earth was small beans indeed – so small yet so important and worth caring passionately about while also worth realizing how relatively microscopic the beans we’re playing with are. But this is different, isn’t it? This is new in history, a world completely connected, all the world’s cultures able to communicate and travel? This time the Apocalypse could be for real, right? Maybe so.

He knew what the ice was all about, he knew it was about to spread itself completely over the southern hemisphere’s summer and that winter was now here to stay. It didn’t bother him as much as it could have yet he began to cry tears that froze immediately to his cheeks. Could he live in such a cold world? Could the ingenuity of humanity thaw out such a cold world? Maybe so.

Circling on his saucer he knew he would not find those answers talking to a hunk of ice in the stratosphere and began to descend back to the volcano. As he neared the volcano, the sombrero on which he was flying began to circle rapidly around the summit and he was tossed off his stance, finding himself laying on his back on the summit ice-cap looking up at the same blue sky. The speck was gone and he was shivering on the cold ice, eager to return to town for a cup of coffee and an empanada.

The following day Agapito was on a bus toward the coast in central Chile, eager to catch a moment in the sun. His headphones were on and Modest Mouse was playing something off The Moon and Antarctica that goes like,

“So
long
to this
cold,
cold
part of the world . . .”

La Chocolateria de Chalten

2007-03-02T15:36:00.000-08:00

In Chalten there is a chocolate shop where magic is crafted into obscenely delicious delicacies voraciously consumed by wind-weary travelers and climbers revolving around Fitz Roy or Cerro Torre. Like Water for Chocolate could be a good book or movie as a starting point for understanding this place, the romance of Patagonia and the desires of all Patagonian adventurers mixed into the uniquely Native American and ubiquitously sensuous smack of cocoa, the food of the Gods. Sure, chocolate is a far cry from the Xocolatl of Mesoamerica, a far cry from the food that “Mr. Chocolate,” one of Mayan Tikal’s great kings ceremoniously consumed, but the way the bean moves into our hidden passion-pipes has been the same for millennia. These days you can buy chocolate advertised not only as a giving elevation to your libido, but also packs antioxidants and other goodies with a force that muscles away pomegranates and spinach – chocolate as a dietary supplement. Fine by me.

And here at the Chocolateria of Chalten, in one of the original log cabins of this frontier town, they know how to make chocolate with a rustic, rugged, Patagonian twist. Cakes and crumbles, bars, stacked cookies and liqueur: what is most impressive about the place is not necessarily the sweetness of the treats or the view the mountains from the log-loft, or the fact that it is the most ambient place in the end of the world, but the fact that the food moves you and is moved by those that make it here. When thinking of Patagonia, some would think of leather and big skies, some of jagged mountains and maté, dirt and longing, contrast and culmination, condors and sheep, wind and water – I still think of those things as well as La Chocolateria here in Chalten. It’s magical.

Summit

2007-01-24T07:51:00.000-08:00

A summit, a climax, a gathering toward something definitive, from this point you can travel no further unless you change the medium through which you are traveling, from the summit of a peak, if you want to continue moving in the same element you must go down – sure, we are capable of continuing up but we need wings, we need wind, we need tools that we have not used to get us this far: a summit is a culmination, all paths converging in this one element to come to a point, and in writing a period is a summit and since this piece has overtones of punctuation as defined by a mountain summit, periods are not included, have been shunned, it has been decided that the real summits about which are being spoken are more potent than the periodical summits of punctuation in writing and that this piece, for those reasons, is not broken by periods, but by the rolling waves of commas, the direct arrows of dashes – and the doorways of colons: not that this is unique in writing, I’m doing nothing new, Kerouac and Hemingway paved the way, many others before them of whom I’m not aware, just as earlier climbers have paved the way to the mountain summits around these parts of Patagonia, many of these people connected in text by hyphens: Terray-Magnone, Comaseña-Fonrouge, Kearney-Knight, etc. . . ah the ellipsis, the staccato “b-b-but wait there’s more” of the ellipses but I'm speaking no more of this because really this piece is not about punctuation but about summits, the way they collect the mass below them and bring it to definition, like the Earth Summits, collecting the mass of the environmental movement and defining it and in the same way a mountain summit, such as that of Fitz Roy bring the rocky mass of the peak to definition, the clearest, most concise way of saying, “This is who I am,” and so it is toward that definition that seekers seek, arrows point, mountains rise, summits entail this and on that unique point of Fitz Roy, the aspect that holds not a single nook of protection from the relentless winds off the Southern Patagonian Icecap, something poignant is pushing at your feet, with the mass of this mountain aiming up at that point on which you stand, and you feel something quite definitive.

Nice to meet you, Mr. Fitz Roy

2007-01-18T09:22:00.000-08:00

Agapito’s first conversation with Fitz Roy was a troubling one indeed. He had journeyed a tireless journey and found himself face-face with a living legend, a mountain deity of such impressive power and wisdom tucked in the mountains of Patagonia at the end of the world. Climbing three vertical kilometers he grew tired of the noise of the incessant wind, the cold and all the harsh elements so he began to verbalize some of his frustrations and his questions. The conversation was stopped short, as most are with Fitz, but he got answers to some of the questions he was looking for, but for every answer a dozen new questions popped into his head, leaving Agapito craving more conversations. Fitz has a way of throwing a fit when he is perturbed (thinking long and hard about the role of the masculine and feminine in this world, it has been decided that Fitz Roy is most definitely masculine, not just for his shape but also for his character), with patience in short reserve and Agapito found him on a no nonsense kind of day with a fit that chased him out of sight.

As the wind began to pick up and precipitation of all forms began to whip into Agapito’s head-to-toe Gore-Tex, Agapito commented, “You know, Fitz, you really carry a bad attitude. One-love, you know, go talk to your brother Jah, we're all one and you don't need to throw such a harsh front around. I mean, you could be more sociable, put on a party shirt and invite some folks up there sometime, knock off all that noisy music you always play, chill a little and put on something a bit more ambient. I mean, you don’t always have to be so hard, you know? Well, you are a big chunk of rock, so you’re inherently hard and I’m definitely not one to change someone or something’s inherent qualities, but . . .”

“You think this is funny, that I should have a sense of humor? When the whole world is laughing at something they don’t even know what, you think I should have a sense of humor? You don’t come up here with your party shirt and I don’t ‘chill’ as you say. I’m here as a reminder that while everything has a time and place, some things are meant to be hard, a lesson long since forgotten in your country. I’m here to be the biggest mirror you’ve ever had thrown in front of your face and you will have a glimpse of what you and all things are made of. If I were soft you’d have nothing for this to bounce off.

"If I didn’t exist as a constant and defined boundary you’d have no boundaries to test. You and the rest of your poets, comedians and artists would continue laughing at the world and pretend that there is always something funny in it. While humor can be found in the most unlikely of places, I allow none of it here, so again, leave your party shirt and your ambient music at home. Here I howl and shriek and scream and make sure anyone who comes near hears it. When I stop it is because I’m yawning and bored with the games played below at my feet.”

“But everything has it’s contradictions and juxtapositions, even in darkness I can find some light and all extremes are contained within the whole, nothing in this world is truly . . .”

“Except for me, and a few other things, like mortality and birth, a sip of water and a breath. These things are defined, clear and crisp boundaries, with no room for questioning their value or their quality. They truly are as they appear. True, life is contradictory, apparently polarized and myriad in its manifestations. Two poles exist, as exemplified by the feminine and masculine, dark and light, and within this are infinite colors. I do not exist in that middle, though, but rather am the most vacant darkness and the most blinding light, but nothing in between. It is in between these two that you are allowed to dance and laugh, talk about contradictions and wear a party shirt, but on either extreme you must come prepared, serene, humble and with no sense of humor. Come with embrace, for sure; come without attachment. You can even enjoy yourself in the moment on these extremes, but give yourself AND ME more respect than to laugh - not here. Laugh at the memory of this moment, laugh at other coming into similar situations, but do not laugh when you and I are intimately engaged as we are right now.” As Fitz Roy roared this last sentence, Agapito hunched behind a rock and gripped tight at the rope he was tied to.

“Can I ever get any of your respect and maybe be here with you comfortably, you know, friendly and such?”

“Agapito, it seems you are always trying to gain other’s respect, this is not about that. You can never gain my respect and you shouldn't try. I am not here for that and you are not here because you need it. You are here to learn and I am giving you a great lesson simply by existing as my rock-hard self. True, I cannot teach you how to laugh, nor to dance. I’m a rock for Christ’s sake; I sit here. Lightheartedness is not in my nature. Nor do I care whether you or a million others attempt to learn my weaknesses and climb through them. I am a rock, a mountain and my quality is to endure and to watch. That is the lesson you can learn and I’ll teach you if you are a willing student . . .”

“I am, I’m willing to learn anything you . . .”

“Oh stop, eagerness doesn’t make a good student, patience, humility and observation do. I know you have those qualities, and urge you to focus on them, sharpen them. You will, I know you will, and I’ll talk to you again when you have. Chao Agapito.”

And with a gust and a shriek that took the “But wait . . .” right out of Agapito’s throat and sounded as if it had ripped the neighboring spire of Poincenot in half, Fitz Roy sent him sliding down the mountain one rappel-rope after another, leaving his flanks to the ice and rain and the solitude he has created for himself. Agapito went to rejuvenate and await another chance to converse with the Fitz.

Ruta 40

2007-01-10T10:23:00.000-08:00

Highway 40 in Southern Patagonia looks as if it were carved from Butch Cassidy’s boot, with a sliver from his spur or a tail from his horse that was tossed up into the sky as a cirrus cloud. “Frontier” knows no truer definition than the pampas at the end of the world.

Becoming loose with comparisons, Patagonia is, like, one of those places that other places are compared to. It is raw and gritty, fierce and overt, subtleties are not it’s game, when it wants to speak it does so with a shout. Oh sure, subtleties are there when you look for them, as with any place, they can be found around here, but what smacks you first is the massive and conspicuous extremes of everything – the rise of the mountains, the expanse of the pampas, the strength and persistence of the wind, the excessive precipitation. Patagonia knows no middle-path and its excesses are downright gluttonous. To be honest, its existence is absurd, more appropriate for fantasy or dreams than for reality. And what it inspires is an acceptance of extreme possibilities.

As far as roads in Southern Patagonia go, Highway 40 is on the east in Argentina and the Austral Highway is on the west in Chile. The former is of gauchos (rough and rugged, maté-totting, leather-bound, wind-friendly Argentine cowboys) and the latter is of wilderness (vast, wet, broken-fjords, rainforests and mostly unlivable). Neither of these is a “highway” and although increased pavement and bus-access is steadily turning a Butch Cassidy boot landscape into on of sneakers and city-lights, Highway 40 maintains a level of desolation and solitude so complete that you wouldn’t wish it even upon Edward Abbey to try and write poetry here. We chose to travel the eastern route from Bariloche, winding for 2 days through rolling landscapes, past shrub-grass, chasing guanacos (the region’s camellid) and rheas (a flightless ostrich-like bird) from the road, over rivers, under vast skies, into ranch houses for empanadas, and catching distant and fleeting glimpses of the mountains to the west. The pampas through here are a steppe-ecosystem, sitting in the shadow of the Andes that have captured any moisture in the air and deposited it in endless forests, glaciers, and ice fields, mostly on the Chilean side.

Superlatives and embellishments abound in works written about Patagonia and I am adding to this, for sure. But I take no blame, Patagonia did it to me, has done it to all that have enjoyed its rapture from Bruce Chatwin to Yvon Chouinard. It says what we have all been thinking, gives confidence and substance to our strongest-held beliefs. Highway 40 exists because it must, with nothing cyclical in this argument. It is psychologically akin to dreams of hidden doorways and secret passages a slice of accessibility in the world of the improbable. These paths and passages must exist for us to really believe in possibility. Give us a road, give me a sign, show me the way to your magical under-side, the one seldom seen but often spoken-of, the treasure trove, the mythical chalice, to Moby Dick, to Patagonia. Highway 40 is this.

Once you finally get a view of the spires and peaks near Chalten it could be another mirage, a glistening topographic illusion for contour-thirsty travelers. But there they are, and when you move up into them they sure feel real. The rock is hard and the wind bites and stings as if it were real. And so it is, so it is, everything we’ve been told is true.

Photos from the first two weeks

2007-01-02T11:47:00.000-08:00

From the top of Torre Principal in the Frey, near Bariloche:

And some others from the Frey:

Wind, air and flight in Argentina

2007-01-02T11:18:00.001-08:00

Where the wind blows let it move fresh breath and exhilaration into this moment. Agapito’s experience with air from the start was one of misunderstanding, considering that Earth and Air rarely mingle in the natural world, Agapito’s grounded Earth element kept the air above him and the wind blowing around him – never really embracing its power or beneficence. He fought against the wind, on the losing side, of course, but nevertheless he would brace himself against it and staunchly defend his planted space in the world.

When it's understood, wind allows for flight! If you can only embrace its spontaneity and ethereal grace and plan then you can truly be at peace with change. For no element is quicker in its motion, more undetectable in its presence and more abundant in its generosity. It can fuel fires and put them out, it can effortlessly spread seeds and deliver scents, carrying infinite vibrations undetected in its web.

Everything we project we project into the air.

Agapito was once diagnosed as having contracted a “Wind-Cold” illness by a practitioner of Chinese Medicine. To him, this diagnosis made sense – considering the times he felt most stressed in the natural world were the times he was cold and the wind was blowing. It is during these stressed time that Wind-Cold illness can creep in. It manifest as little cyst-like bumps that migrated from the back of his calf to his upper arm or his earlobes. It moves location because it is Wind and it clumps together in bumps because it is Cold.

During another bought of illness in La Paz, a Kallawaya shaman diagnosed his diarrhea as an “Invasion of Malign Winds.” This was the Kallawaya that read his Tarot cards, the Don Iberio of previous tales and his remedy was a tea of healing herbs from the Andes and Amazon. Wind has apparently been his foe.

So why Patagonia, Agapito? Why journey to one of the windiest places in the world?

To know it and be intimate with it, of course. And only in embracing his greatest challenges would Agapito succeed in his desire to learn in this life. So he dove in, to the thick walls of wind that push their way around Patagonia. Walls of wind, not gusts, because when they hit you it’s like a crash or a punch, no gentle tingling of his shin-hairs, these walls actually lift you off your feet, knock you into the rocks and have even been rumored to reach in and rip your long-underwear from your legs while leaving your pants in place – it is fierce, conniving and relentless. It is hard to believe that this same element is carrying oxygen that fills our blood, moves our life impulse. This same element moves our prana, or chi the world over – the very breath of life – it just moves in faster and harder in Patagonia.

Wind is to air what death is to life – it moves opportunity into the present. It keeps change coming and going and so on and fights forever against stagnation. Just as you can’t run away from death in this life, you cannot block the wind and expect to be able to breathe.

Agapito found walls of wind, condors, rain, snow, sunshine and powerful granite gods in a single week outside of Bariloche, Argentina. Refugio Frey is a European-style mountain hut that sits an afternoon’s bus and hike from Bariloche, in a nook on the west side of Cerro Catedral. It is an aptly named mountain cathedral, the construction of which is most definitely Gothic, not in a dark medieval way, but in a jagged “my reality is harsh and you should know that and show respect” kind of way. Needle-thin spires scrape the sky above the refugio, pinnacles and gendarmes, a destination for climber, hikers and romantic couples. Here Agapito spent time rock climbing on the beautiful golden granite.

While standing on the top of Torre Principal, the highest tower in the region, after climbing its northern ridge Agapito had his head skimmed by a condor with nearly 4 meters of wingspan. As the condor caught an updraft and disappeared to the south side of the tower, Agapito noticed a glistening bit of his hair whipping from the condor’s mouth. With their sighting being always auspicious, Agapito took a deep breath and imagined the millions of different landings his kidnapped hair could have, with wind carrying the condor, carrying the thread, carrying parts of his protein. A gentle breeze blew and tickled Agapito’s shin hairs.

Going up and coming down in the Andes

2006-12-26T15:29:00.000-08:00

The Maipo Canyon, El Cajon del Maipo may be most famous for its place on the label of Concha y Toro wine bottles, but it was also an ideal place to spend our first week in Chile. Descending from dramatic 6,000 meter peaks through myriad rock formations and compositions to chaparral valleys and vineyards, the Maipo river defines and has created this marvel at the southeastern stretch of Santiago. Chile is often only around 200 Km wide, the “Long-Thin Country” as Pablo Neruda put it without his usual poetry, and is one of the few places in the world where you can literally be standing on glaciers in the morning and surfing in the afternoon. The top of the Maipo Canyon is a short and beautiful ride 2 hours outside of town, past some of the most accessible rock climbing in the country to the town of Baños Morales, a sleepy mountain town with a mix of cowboys, oddly placed Swiss-style chalets and green fields with grazing sheep. From here to the beaches of Viña del Mar would be around 4 hours. So as for orientation, that should get you here from wherever you are, should be able to place all of us geographically in this edge of the world, and having journeyed with us to the airport where Alejandro (un buen amigo Chileno) picked us up and sped us up the canyon before even having a chance to wave at Santiago we all find ourselves (yes, you reading this too) in the mountains and camped in the High Andes which are below the Southern Cross 30 hours after leaving Denver; are you with us?

So, in the Cajon, on the glaciers and in the presence of such massive mountains, the mind begins to wander, fears creep in, humility takes a strong hold and expectations that were put in place years ago slowly begin to wane. It is time to listen. These are the mountains of my childhood reading articles on climbers, reading book s like Banner in the Sky and imagining myself occasionally in these places, on these glaciers and slopes. And speaking of glaciers, oh sure, they are retreating at a sad and rapid rate but damn they are still big around here. The first lesson is in scale, which, as with all of the world’s great mountain ranges, is humbling. It’s hard to contemplate, hard to gain perspective, but rises that should be easy climbs are actually mountains in their own right; it’s the “mountains beyond mountains” that we’re after but to get there, remember, we must climb mountains. And they are MOUNTAINS, placed in Colorado these would be the range’s landmarks, but here they are simply foothills and guardians of the further mountains. Thus the humility, and true blessing to have the opportunity to be smacked and intimidated by natural forces.

The South Face of El Morado was our first intent and we were swiftly stymied by doubt and prudence, two healthy bits of our conscience we are trying to ride with on this trip. We decided to stay in Central Chile before heading to Patagonia in an attempt to have some sunny days in the mountains in case our time down south is tent-bound. Well, our time in the Cajon was largely tent-bound as well, as we watched black clouds come from the coast and shadow the menacingly black 600-meter south face (notorious for poor rock) and the darkness of the whole scene made us doubt our ability to safely move up it with an impending storm. And so the day consisted of a 3:30 wake up – a climb up to the base of the South Face – a (mis)assessment of the weather – decision to turn back – climb up one of the “mountains before the mountains” – 3 hour nap in the tent – attempt to climb up an easier route on El Morado – being blocked by an 8-meter wide and 10-meter high crevasse – another decision to go down to the tent – a final decision to go all the way back to Baños Morales – a bottle of wine (that we had actually carried with us to our base camp hoped to drink after our climb) in town and an excellent-night’s sleep in a soft and u-shaped bed.

Salud.

We left with a whole load of health and well-learned lessons on the Andes, what moves them and what moves us in them. I write this from Bariloche, Argentina, where we have stopped in our journey south after descending from the Maipo. We are at the cusp of Patagonia, but not Butch Cassidy’s Patagonia, this one is one of t-shirt and chocolate shops, of night cubs and fine Argentine cuisine. While much of the isolation has been paved out of Patagonia, it is still inevitable that time here be an adventure. As you sit looking across a white-capped lake with wind-ripped clouds and vast peaks and then turn around to see the vast pampas with cows, cowboys and bunch grass, wind-swept desolation and smoky barbecues, the magic of Patagonia still hits you. Or, stop sitting and move into the end of the world, the Patagonia of metaphor and myth, move into it, far up into it, to the granite peaks that rip a giant gash into the visual fabric of the world.

Here we go . . .

along with everyone else, from Israel to Sweden to the US and Australia. We’ll chase these wild places while we can.

An Illness and a Cure: Finding Peace in La Paz

2006-12-14T23:05:00.000-08:00

Losing It, Finding It, and Peace
Every so often in his explorations Agapito had sudden outpourings of tears. They were more frequent when he was alone and most frequent when he was happy. They were moments of release, moments of ecstasy, moments where his body grew to be the body of the Earth. Some moments his body was the Earth expanded to be the body of the Universe before dissolving to nothing like honey in tea, at which times he would shudder, close his eyes and mumble, “My God, My God.”

He had such an occasion when he arrived at the shore of the Rio Pata Tuichi in Madidi, Bolivia. Upon concluding the mystical outpouring Agapito left his backpack, machete and residual bits of fear on the Western shore of the river and dove in to the rainforest-warm water. The current was swift and he was a Taurus, making for questionable swimming abilities and so the Tuichi carried him down. The river and its many rocks knocked Agapito unconscious within 100 meters. His journey from there to where he was found 100 kilometers further in Rurrenabaque was undocumented except by God who still processed his persistent nerve-synapses.

Whatever happened in his unconscious travel, some said that it must not have been too bad because he was washed ashore with a smile on his face, an erection and the claim, “God and her milk have been good to me!”

At this point Agapito broke into a sweat and the rash enveloped his body. The heat from the rash became unbearable and his fever elevated to 102 for three days. He was put in a jeep and carried directly 15 hours to La Paz, “The Peace”.

In La Paz Agapito had the chauffer drop him off on Sagarnaca where it was rumored that a great Kallawaya named Don Iberio kept a clinic. A single inquiry to a toothless Aymara woman was fruitful. She would not tell them the whereabouts of the clinic, however, until Agapito bought the shirt off her back, literally.

Arriving at the clinic, Don Iberio already had Agapito’s cards and coca leaves laid out on the table with a grin that spoke of expectation. For his rash Don Iberio recommended honey to be applied generously and frequently to all afflicted areas as an immediate remedy while he concocted the healing tea. The sugar of the honey would be cooling to the heat of the rash. In this time he stayed in his hostel naked with a fan blowing directly between his legs in attempt to cool himself.

In Agapito’s cards, Don Iberio read that he had been invaded by evil winds that were now passing, and in the coca leaves he read that Agapito was looking for a love. When told he would be married within the year, Agapito figured he should set to finding a beautiful woman to be his partner. As we shall see below, his search for love and his marriage there-to would be of a much different nature.

On the third day of drinking it, the healing tea drove Agapito to delirium. He fell into what seemed like a dream. Draped in his white sheet he began to float above his bed. The roof disappeared and his ascension went unimpeded higher into the atmosphere. He noticed that as he rose, a giant tower with a flashing red light at the top was rising in pace with him. At the upper extent of the stratosphere the tower stopped growing while Agapito continued into the blackness of space. He cart wheeled upside down and looked back at earth with the flashing light keeping pace to his breath. In an instant, and not because of Agapito’s lucid-will, he was pulled back to earth and began to tumble beside the tower.

His fall accelerated with the increased gravity but the Earth remained at a suspended distance so that his fall became more of a flight. He could not dictate his trajectory but was definitely not pulled straight down by gravity. At times he would drift right or left and at other times he would cut sharp 90-degree turns into the clouds. The Earth kept its distance.

With one final jerk, the Earth pulled heavy on Agapito’s body and he plummeted toward the ocean. As he entered he made no splash. It was a transition from one medium to another, more similar to a person finding the atmosphere increase in density as they move from the mountains to the lowlands.

He swam to the sandy bottom and landed akimbo next to a bubble-mouthed 100-year old leatherback sea turtle. Agapito slowly fell onto his back with a force that initiated a somersault backward and buried him in the sand. The sand washed over him and the gentle sway of the ocean bottom slid the sand side to side. The turtle let out a large bubble and waddled over to him. At that time Agapito could no longer see his body, and when the turtle dug its nose into the sand to release him, only the dust of his bones were released and immediately dissolved into the water.

Agapito no longer had a body. In a strange sensation, there was a field similarly corporeal that encompassed what was left of his existence. The focus of his being at this point, however, was a ball of white light about the size of an orange that sat in his absent chest cavity. This remnant light recoiled into the sand and then shot upward, breaking the surface of the water again without drama and landing on a boardwalk on a popular beach.

It may have been California, Mexico or Cuba, but also could have been Thailand, India, Tunisia or Alaska. The people on the boardwalk were featureless, emotionless and alone. For all the masses scattered along the shore and on the boardwalk, they were alone. His light penetrated the heart of the crowd and not a single face turned. He walked along the boardwalk, away from the shore and moved back onto the land. As he moved people began to give gentle nods, acknowledging smiles and occasional laughter. Their faces would light up and their posture would straighten.

From then on his white ball of light moved agelessly through the world at chest-height. And those that heard of this phenomenon began to call it “Agapito”. For example, you could hear the man Heinrich in Switzerland turn to his wife after a walk into the mountains, “Ahh, I had the most beautiful Agapito today by the lake!” It meant a momentary appreciation, a glimpse of eternity and an acceptance of reality.

He found Don Iberio as he hovered through The Peace one last time and they exchanged acknowledging smiles and a piercing cosmic laugh. Agapito could hear Don Iberio continue the laugh as he hovered his way over to Sao Paulo.

The word was absorbed into the World’s language with a quite literal connotation from the Greek word “agape” and the Spanish diminutive:

A little bit of GOD’S love.

The Amazon by Foot

2006-12-14T22:46:00.000-08:00

Into a Womb and Onto a Shoulder

Agapito, by this time, was unstoppable. He did not stop to eat or blink, his eyes began to dry. He brushed his teeth with coca leaves and strolled up and down the cobblestone streets of the nation’s capital laughing his awful new laugh.

He set north with a machete to the mysterious Apolobamba Mountains, abode of the acclaimed Kallawaya medicine men and the most remote corner of the High Andes. The Kallawaya spoke a language of their own, neither Quechua nor Aymara, and claimed the language to descend from the ancient Tiahuanaco of Lake Titicaca. They used this language solely for medicine which involved knowledge of over 1,000 healing herbs collected from the mountains from Argentina to Ecuador and down to the Amazon basin. They were known to wander thousands of miles on trails they had built carrying only a small herb-satchel.

Due to their proximity to the jungle, the Apolobamba Mountains are in a perpetual fog. Agapito walked into this foggy world from Curva, at the southern extent of the range, and did not emerge for 6 days. He walked on a Kallawaya trail that brought him over icy 5,000 meter passes, catching glimpses of native villages that emerged from the mist for an instant only to be engulfed the next. He met colorful figures on the trail, mules, llamas and children. They would emerge and then vanish back into the cloud. For six days figures, places, shapes, trees, rocks and entire mountains would emerge and disappear, like a microcosmic display of the macrocosmic dance between form and space, creation and destruction—manifestation from the white void and subsequent dissolution, a sort of womb.

Out of this womb, six days later, Agapito emerged on a gentle shoulder. Dusk was approaching and the fog around him began to lift. Slowly, larger forms appeared: first the trail stretching out in front, then the slope down the valley to his left, then a river below. As his eyes followed the river to the darkness creeping in from the East, he saw the Amazon basin of Madidi National Park stretching to the horizon: the Amazon born from a damp womb in the heights of The Apolobamba.

The Amazon: Happy with Life, Happy with Death
The transition from the Apolobamba to Madidi in Bolivia is the most biodiverse place in the world, period. It is one of the most beautiful and terrifying place in the world dancing between two opposing poles as all this world does. The extreme poles of the Amazon allow for myriad creations to move within the poles. Madidi is home to the most spectacular life forms and the most frightening methods and quantities of death: bountiful life demands a consumptive feast. Sometimes it was only the beauty and blessing of the place that was in him, other times he was absorbed by pain and fear.

There in Madidi landscapes and mindscapes raced past, and the visual and mental horizons were right in front of his face, cut further by his machete: strangler fig, fern, leaf-cutters, pigs, waterfall, bees, slender yellow snakes, blue-morpho butterflies, fear, inspiration and excess. Everything glittered in his immediate periphery.

As he descended from the mountains the trail began to fade, consumed by the thickening jungle. After three days of stone trails through cloud forest and highland jungle, his path vanished.

Chew your coca. Now move!

Cut, run, slah, duck, dart, snag, rip, sweat, drip, snap, ouch.

Somewhere along the way, a bug peed on him. The urine became a rash. The urine! Agapito’s elbow began to itch, and his waist, and his wrist. He sweated in the heat, and the itch worsened. He dove into a river and showered in a waterfall, cooling the rash.

Ghost Towns, God’s Movie, and a Good Life
Agapito followed no trail for three days straight and in that time stumbled through a half-dozen villages enclosed within the jungle. His rash worsened. He met people pressing sugar cane and picking bananas—he met people that did not know the name of their country—he met a man living in the branches of a ceiba tree and another living in the roots—he met one woman that loved living in the jungle and met a child who didn’t. He spent the majority of his days on a strict diet of coca leaves, coca tea and bananas. Agapito could not stop to eat because as soon as he would stop bees swarmed and stung until he moved again. When he set up his tent at night they stung until he could get his mosquito net set and dive inside.

His skin boiled and his eyes would still not blink yet he was composed. He developed streaks of white hair with each frightening turn he made yet he smiled. These were all signs of his new insight. His perception once moved up into a tree where he swung from branch to branch transformed into a child. At the same time he saw himself as an old man moving slowly through the same jungle. He began to realize that he was not simply exploring the jungle.

Agapito wondered about throwing himself into such desperate situations and the benefit of this behavior to humanity. He had a thought that humans and all other animate and inanimate objects and all their perceptions may be a sensory recorder for God as God attempts to know God. So all possibilities of the world must be explored by creation. This makes some people go to war, other become explorers, others simply fuck their whole lives, while still others despair their whole lives in melodramatic displays. All extremes of sensation and experience made God’s movie that allowed God to understand just what God was. Eyes provided the sight and other sensations such as bee stings, itches, loud noises, bitter tastes, heartbreak, and stubbed toes provide subtler sub-plots to this movie. This is the point of the billions of eyes and infinite nerve connections as well as the myriad macro and micro organisms and non-organisms that are manifest from the jungle-consciousness of God. As Agapito saw and felt these things of the Amazon he reasoned God was happy because now God knew that they existed and—since everything that exists (and doesn’t exist for that matter) is God—this new knowledge gave God a deeper understanding of God. As God grew to know God better, the World was fulfilling its purpose, which was good.

“This,” cried Agapito at the jaguar that was whistling to his South, “was why Geronimo had to fly!” He was almost right.

Agapito laughed his new laugh and a tremor was set in the ground in front of him. As this tremor moved forward he noticed a trail opening in front of him, and as he laughed more the trail was cut further. This continued until the forest opened into the mighty Pata Tuichi and Agapito saw his laugh create a wave that rippled out across the river. He stopped laughing and sat down on the bank and he knew this journey was not coming to an end. On the other side of the river began a road that he could walk to Apolo, from where a shuttle could carry him to La Paz.

Viracocha, Thunupa and Altiplano Magic

2006-12-14T22:35:00.000-08:00

God and Her Milky Nipples
On the northern shore of the flat could be seen the cone of Thunupa, wandering mountain goddess of Aymara mythology who was blessed with beauty and magic, finding a home here in the middle of the Altiplano after being impregnated by Huayna Potosi. It was on the northern shore of the present day salt lake that she spilt her motherly milk and inundated the land around her, creating the Uyuni and Coipasa Salt Lakes. Agapito and Pimiento were walking on Goddess Milk, wondering if remnants of this same milk hadn’t been swept up into the Milky Way creating that mystical lactic wisp.

They were shaken awake that night – after drifting off to sleep with dreams of goddess nipples and swimming in bowls of maternal milk, lapping as they liked – by dampness in their sleeping bags and a sloshing all around them. The ground beneath them became liquid s they were lifted above the lake on the back of something great. The object began to take shape and they realized it was a reed-boat like those used on Lake Titicaca. A solitary man was at the helm. He commanded the two groggy-gringos to help him raise the sail. Their sleeping bags were soaked, smelling of raw milk and they realized now that the boat had risen from the lake and was floating on the very stuff they were only minutes before sleeping on. They were flustered.

The man stopped what he was doing and stomped over to them infuriated by their paralysis. Did they not know who he was? As the man approached, Agapito hurriedly dug around inside his bag for the fetus, the rigid, sparsely furred little fetus that the woman had handed him two days before. The man grabbed the emaciated leg of the thing and accepted the offering before him. Without hesitation he laughed as he snatched the fetus and began to dance around the boat. He even set the fetus down, jumped overboard and began to flop in the milky lake. Agapito swore he heard the same laugh from the sun a few days earlier.

As he crawled aboard he said in perfect English, extending his hand for a shake, “I am Viracocha. You’ve met my brother, Quetzalcoatl? Perhaps you’ve heard of me?”

“Oh shit,” Agapito and Pimiento replied simultaneously.

“Oh no, please don’t fear. Yes I am a God, well, actually THE God around these parts. Many people are afraid of me but my way is peace I assure you. And, I guess you may be afraid of the fact that my very being here precedes the End Of The World. I am here now, waiting for the waters to rise so I may set sail again. Years are running short, you know? The world should be prepared for it now. We left them plenty of wisdom and prophecies. Humans have gained the wisdom, right? Say, that reminds me of one time when I was in Giza and I said to this guy Ra . . .”

In pre-Incan mythology Viracocha had played the same role that Quetzalcoatl played in Mayan and Aztec: a wise civilizer, a stonemason and a healer. He too was chased off by an evil God after building Macchu Picchu and Tihuanaco with the prophecy he would return. He spoke with a convincing boom.

Agapito and Pimiento looked at each other, let out a scream and jumped overboard, swimming frantically toward the shore of the lake. Agapito heard that same booming laugh and this time Pimiento heard it too. They saw the ship sailing off toward Thunupa and they swam panicked in the opposite direction.

In the next instant they found themselves flopping about on the hard surface of the salt lake in the middle of their camp with their donkeys nowhere to be seen. The moon was full and their hair and clothes were drenched and white, but the ground was solid.

They stayed awake the remainder of the night and packed up their camp in the morning, fitting what they could into their backpacks. Leaving much of the food and climbing gear, they walked toward Thunupa but veered far west. After two weeks of journeying they landed on the northwestern shore of the Coipasa salt lake in the town of Pisiga. Pimiento left the next day for Colorado.

Bolivia and the Altiplano

2006-12-14T15:31:00.000-08:00

The Fire of Love and the Love of Fire
The following year, in a pilgrimage to the site in the middle of the Mexican desert, Agapito asked humbly into the fire that was burning entire agave plants, “Just what is meant by love and passion?”

As the fire dwindled to flickering coals, a large coal that was shaped like a heart replied, “Love without fire is cold, fire without love is scalding.” That morning, the scalding sun rose in the house of the peyote daemon Mescalito and singed his puffy green eyes.

Donkeys 101, Laughter and Other Facts of Everyday Life
It was these experiences that led Agapito to Bolivia the following year. He was in San Juan near the Chilean border with his amigo Pimiento, with an ambitious plan to traverse 500 kilometers across the altiplano to “Learn about earth, horizons, the significance of the flying body and just what the hell the fire-heart was talking about.”

Agapito and Pimiento kept open their satchels of coca leaves and simultaneously removed the stems, chewed the leaves and smiled. Oh, the magic green mystery of the Andes that turns white as it moves north—revered for thousands of years, now banned by the very same culture that consume its ugliest face: cocaine. The ticket to American law school and Hollywood super-stardom, the dust that Freud blew into modern psychology, the secret of a Coca-Cola world. For Agapito and Pimiento’s sake they were in no way interested in cocaine. They were interested in coca, the mild herb that is gummed by mine-workers and gringo mountaineers alike.

San Juan was a clay and thatch village at the southern end of the Uyuni Salt Lake in Southwestern Bolivia, the largest in the world. Just outside San Juan they stumbled upon the necropolis of the Lipez people that had populated the land in the 1200’s C.E., 200 years before the Inca arrived; mummies were found buried beneath limestone tufts along with ceramics and llama-wool weavings. It was here, recognizing that the bodies were facing west (a fact actually explained by the toothless and coca-crazed Aymara man that watched over the grounds) that Agapito began to understand death and its relation to the movement of the heavens: for to gaze at the horizon as the sun sets is to experience death each day. This is what the Lipez people hoped would guide their deceased into the afterworld: the sun in its daily death on the western horizon.

Agapito stood in the crepuscular stillness, smiling with bits of green leaves stuck between his teeth and turned to Pimiento, “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?” Pimiento replied.

“Laughter, or kind of like a giddy scream like the ones I’d make as a kid when I’d get to the top of a rollercoaster,” he explained.

“No, I didn’t hear that. Is there an amusement park around here?” They looked around the desolate desert at the roof of the Americas. They counted seventy-two llamas, 108 thatch roofs, twenty-one colorful dresses and infinite space. No amusement park.

“It wasn’t an amusement park,” Agapito affirmed, “unless the sun carries some sort of amusement park on its fiery back. So I really think it was the SUN that was laughing! I think the whole universe heard it.”

“You’re nuts,” Pimiento complained, “let’s get to bed, we’ve got some burros to buy tomorrow bright and early.” Agapito smiled.

The night was filled with menacing thunder and in the not-so-bright but early morning they hopped on a pair of shoddy local mountain-bikes and headed to the neighboring town of Santiago where they hoped to buy three burros.

The first time Agapito went through the Altiplano on a tour four years earlier, he was amazed that they were fed quinoa, the hearty and healthy grain that was gaining popularity in health food stores across the U.S. He thought it was a special exotic vegetarian meal for tourists. His Aymara guide snarled to him that for three thousand years they ate quinoa with potatoes “every maldito day, you ignorant prick.”

Now he knew the truth about quinoa and noticed it growing ubiquitously on the plains below the potato fields that could be found in rock-walled plots through the hills. The combination of quinoa, potatoes, llamas and coca allowed life to thrive at over 15,000 feet. It could be said that the flower of quinoa, growing from a man’s chin, might resemble the bearded god Viracocha, patriarchal God of the Aymara and Incas, father of Pachamama. We will meet with him later, but for now must focus intently on the fact that quinoa and potatoes are carried to this day from fields to towns on the backs of the burros that Agapito and Pimiento were purchasing. Their backs were rubbed raw from the tons of harvest they would move each year from the lofty slopes. To remedy the chafing, locals apply llama lard to the affected area. Agapito and Pimiento knew they had strong burros by how severely their backs had been chafed.

As they loaded their gear, locals asked what they used those sharp points (ice axes and crampons and such) for. They replied with a spit of green saliva, “To measure the stars.” They were sincere too—what else would alpinists do on the steepest, highest and most terrifying pyramids of the world?

The Burden of the Beasts
“One thing to remember, a word to all aspiring donkey wrangler,” counseled Pimiento through the muffle of his coca wad in the plaza of San Pedro, the first town they came to after hiking 45 kilometers, “is that burros are real animals! They need food, rest and companionship just as we do. Treat your beasts of burden well lest your hearts be filled with the burden of the beasts!” The people of that town and almost the entire The Altiplano spoke not a word of Spanish, let alone English, yet they understood.

One short and squatty young lady with a bowler hat, an apron with pink roses, and a Green Bay Packers sweatshirt, walked up and handed a llama fetus to Agapito. “Please give this to Viracocha when you see him,” she pleaded in Aymara. She smiled with two solitary gold teeth in her mouth and a long coca stem protruding from between them. Agapito understood not a word but would know what to do when the time came.

Leaving San Pedro the next day Agapito and Pimiento began to break the boundaries of civilization and peacefully live outside of time. They headed directly across the flat, bleached-white expanse of the Uyuni Salt Lake, 100 km wide—a dizzying spectacle of mirages and celestial landscapes. Agapito later described The Altiplano as “Nevada on steroids and peyote.” It had the desolation of that state but swollen to muscle-bound heights of over 20,000 feet with mountains, valleys and lakes of epic proportions. It was a twisted, warped and melting mineral landscape: bizarre long-necked camellids and oddly placed flamingos – like some kind of bio- and geological circus act. The center-stage of this extraordinary Altiplano circus was the Uyuni Salt Lake. It was the essence of purity, exemplifying whiteness. Horizons disappeared as they moved into its dish and their minds moved into equally hallucinogenic and boundless realms.

This story explained

2006-12-14T15:21:00.000-08:00

So if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to interrupt this story, the one about Agapito and his forays south of the border. I need to give you some background about this story and the context for future blogs. These are actually nothing new, the posts I’ve made so far. They are a part of a short story originally published as “Diminutives of God’s Love” in Matter magazine, a local non-profit arts publication in Fort Collins Colorado. The publication is brilliant. Have a look at www.wolverinefarmpublishing.org. The stories thus far and the next few that I will be posting are from “Diminutives . . .”, and are based on a few years traveling through Mexico, Cuba, Guatemala, Belize and Bolivia, from around 2002 to 2005, and I just felt a need to get it out here, lay it down and let the future build on this. See, I’m heading to Chile and Argentina this Sunday and will have more stories from that but at least want to get this foundation before I do. There will be climbing stories for sure, the desolation of Patagonia, the icy summits and granite stones of the end of the world. Stay posted.

Cuba and Guatemala

2006-12-03T16:25:00.000-08:00

Giving up the Bull
Three years ago, Agapito was alone on a pilgrimage to give up The Bull, and drop the weight of the Earth that he had shouldered for so long. His 1992 Ford Taurus sedan was the symbol of this burden.

He drove his Taurus to the navel of the Americas and tried to rid himself of it, both in Chiapas and Guatemala. He plied and pleaded and even offered to pay a Mayan woman in the highlands of the Cuchamatanes Mountains of Guatemala to take it. He tried to convince her that she would be able to drive her children to school and soccer practice. She looked at him amazed and sold him tortillas, mumbling “Hail Mary” in her Mam tongue. Agapito could never have imagined that she lived inside the goal of the soccer field and that her one living child had lost his feet to the war along with his father, three sisters and two brothers.

In San Ignacio, Belize the Taurus found a proper home with a cab driver who bought it as a gift for his large Afro-Belizean wife. She was tending the fryer when they met and responded to her husband’s gift, “Dat be kine, bootzo ah!” There the car must be to this day, with its name changed to “Too-razz” and Belican beer cans molded to the brake pad.

A Brief History of Cuba
Agapito took the money and bought a ticket to Cuba where he happened upon Fidel in the Plaza de la Revolucion. Fidel was a poet. He told him that Cuba was a ship in the Sea of Babylon, and that his forefathers founded Atlantis. He told him that he was the messiah and that he wears his beard to buffer the blinding light that permeates from his face, “so as not to frighten anybody.” Fidel told Agapito that he cuts up hand grenades to put with his cassava and uses cyanide as mouthwash. He lit a cigar.

“No shit?” Agapito replied.

He then pulled Agapito aside and pointed with his cigar to the silhouette of Che Guevara on the Department of Industry building that sits on the northern flank of the plaza next to his famous quote, “Hasta la victoria siempre!” Always to victory! “Che Guevara,” he whispered, “was a Taurus. Although a saint, he was not a savior. You know why?”

“No”

“He had no poetry!” Fidel shouted as a crowd of Germans scurried frightened to the far side of Jose Marti’s monument which stood as a phallic monolith reminiscent of Washington’s Monument, only Cuba’s icon was “terribly communist,” as then President L.B. Johnson proclaimed.

“No shit,” Agapito concurred.

“Che is dead. He left fire, but no poetry. He left ideas, but no melodies. He could never dance, and could barely swim,” Fidel finished, exhaling a plum of smoke.

Fidel then walked out across the waters of the Caribbean for an important meeting with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales, “Down south.” When Fidel reached Hispañola he stopped and shouted back to the bewildered group of Germans gathered near Agapito, “At least Cubans can drink their OWN damn rum in their OWN damn country!” He was right. None in the group that witnessed this had any desire to ever visit the Dominican Republic or any other country that lived on its knees to imperialism.

For Agapito’s return from Cuba to Cancun, Fidel had commanded his Minister of Foreign Relations to allow him to ride on the spine of the sacred feathered serpent named Quetzalcoatl. Quetzalcoatl was a bearded and pale-skinned shape-shifter who had taught the ancient people of Central America art, architecture, math, agriculture and peace before fleeing from the Yucatan over three thousand years ago. He often shifted shape to a feathered serpent and left behind bewildered Teotihuacán, Olmec, Aztec and Mayan cultures to ponder his words, “I’ll be back” before he was chased off the coast of the Yucatan by an the evil god Tetzcaltipoca.
Cortez was mistaken for Quetzalcoatl and landed in the New World the exact date that had been prophesized for the God’s return, thus allowing him a swift upset in their invasion. Agapito realized that the feathered serpent is the trump that Cuba had up its sleeve! Rumor is they will reveal this secret to the world in 2012 on December 23rd: that Quetzalcoatl had tried to make it to Europe 3,000 years ago to teach the ways of true mathematics and peace, but had been hung up in modern-day Cuba where he fell in love with the women, created rum and cigars and invented salsa music. He was the devil in Fidel’s ear and if he had made it to Europe then they and their offspring would better understand peace. Agapito thanked him and promised, “I won’t tell anyone of this but will tell them your word.”

Desire

2006-12-03T16:02:00.000-08:00

It was after a few years that the significance of the flying body became apparent to Agapito. It was not quite apparent as he followed donkeys 500 kilometers across the Bolivan Altiplano, but almost. It really began to show itself in the ensuing weeks that found him slashing his way into the Amazon alone with a machete. What solidified the significance of the flying body was his encounter with the Kallawaya medicine man in his back-alley clinic in downtown La Paz.

But before we put the donkey above the cargo, so to speak, we must give clarity to where the flying body came from and how it came to change Agapito’s life. It is not a story we will soon forget.

THE FLYING BODY AND THE ESSENCE OF DESIRE
A few days prior to the encounter with the flying body, Agapito called out to all things sacred from the middle of the Mexican desert that he be “shown clarity in all desires.” Fasting for twenty-one days gave him the gift of clairvoyance that was shared by his compadres Sencillo, Memo, Roberto and Don Genero. They waited in the middle of the desert until sunrise before returning to their camp inside El Potrero Chico (The Little Portal.)

They returned to the most violent rain and lightning storm that Don Imeñez – a local bandito and vaquero who tended the cattle in the camp – could “remember in 80 years inside the Potrero.” This followed the two weeks of crisp blue that had crowned the days prior to the pilgrimage to the middle of the desert. Thus, even before hearing about the flying body – with their newfound gifts of clairvoyance – Agapito was able to say to Don Genero upon their return, “There is a change coming.”
Don Genero looked at him pitifully and replied, “No shit.”

At that instant the sky was split by lightning and rain came in buckets to splatter the parched Mexican earth. Raindrops bounced like gymnasts off peyote buttons and the coyote didn’t leave his cave for three straight weeks. Not even to play a trick, he threw not even a yelp or an omen into the wet fabric of the world.

It was then that Sencillo learned from his amigo Don Miguel of the flying body. Their mutual friend Don Geronimo had set on an unintentional and ill-fated flight from the top of a mountain the day before; the same day that Agapito had asked that he be “shown clarity in his desires.”

The last time Sencillo had seen his friend was three years prior when Geronimo ran nine days through Venezuelan rainforest to get Sencillo and his two legs – shattered from a fall into a sinkhole – to a helicopter to bring him to a hospital. At that point Geronimo had no illusions of wings, but the two of them had climbed Angel Falls together and maybe then he got the idea he could fly.

Sencillo shared the story of his friend’s death to Agapito and Don Genero back at their camp. The three of them made their own teary rain to match the heavens’ and moaned repeatedly, “A change has come, a change has come again.” The rain persisted through the night, flooding them out of their tents and inside the car. They hunched and huddled and slept to the patter of rain on a cow’s back.

THE FUNERAL

The following morning their tears had cleared while the rain continued and Don Genero looked Sencillo up and down before blurting out, “You look like shit!” It was true, there was snot in his dreadlocks and his shirt had been left out all night to be shat on by a toro. He had a brown cow pie stain that looked like a cinnamon roll spiraling on his belly.
Sencillo smiled and replied insightfully, “Geronimo is dirty, I may as well empathize with his condition.” He hurried off to greet Geronimo’s family who had just arrived from Caracas.

Agapito and Don Genero went to dry out and have a cup of tea. While waiting to hear news of the funeral, Agapito commented that, “Something feminine is coming. First sun, now water. First activity, now reflection. We were five men, now comes the woman. Who else can give such nourishment?”

“No shit,” Don Genero responded just before Sencillo arrived with a new amiga Doña Amparo.

Agapito was enjoying his new gift, so he tried it again, “Next there will be 10 women!” [To this day he is waiting for that prophecy to be fulfilled.]

Agapito, Don Genero, Sencillo, Memo, Don Roberto and Doña Amparo journeyed across the middle of the desert and into the center of La Huasteca, the mountain home of the Huasteca natives. The funeral was at the mythological place of Huasteca creation. There the flying body that landed in death two days before would be sent flying again as the wind carried his ashes into the misty sky that dripped off the limestone ramparts. It was more a celebration than a drab epitaph. Friends and family members would share the gifts that Geronimo had given in life before creating an ear-splitting applause that resonated throughout the canyon walls.

Fiction and fact in this blog

2006-12-03T14:59:00.000-08:00

I apologize, first off, that this blog does not fit the mold – does not really give what many travel blogs aim to give. I really hope to not sound pretentious. Truth be told, I was never really made to blog. I don’t like to write about myself directly. I’d rather do it indirectly, with added fiction. I don't want to just tell you what I’ve been up to and how it made me feel, and so that is not what I have set out to do. I don't expect you to care. It’s my inferior ego, my desire to be humble. I have fear of writing about myself, mainly it just doesn’t seem like my life is special enough to be documented in first person. If other folks want to write about me, in third person and find it interesting, have at it. Maybe I’ll write a memoir someday, or if things go really well, someone might find it worth their while to write a biography, about me. I enjoy reading other’s biographies. I also enjoy reading their memoirs, narratives and blogs. It’s just not me to create the same at this point, capiche?

I love to travel, and mostly love movement. I love movement and connecting to people, sharing and creating stories, and learn what this world’s all about and what I am doing in it. Stories in this blog take place all over and as I continue to travel they will take place in other parts of the world. Maybe some of them will take place in my local coffee shop here in Boulder, or at my parent’s house, but they will be seen and perceived by Agapito. Some will take place in the past, or the future. As for me, my name is Tim, another character – a medium sized, Midwest US-raised, Caucasian male that now lives mostly in Colorado – the one putting Agapito’s eye into words. And this blog is more about Agapito than about me, but somewhat about me, you know, stories and updates for friends, information for fellow adventurers, etc.

Agapito’s a character. Actually a real character – the name and the person were inspired by a donkey wrangler that taught my friend Pepper and me the ins and outs of wrangling that allowed us to walk with donkeys in the altiplano of Bolivia. That’s a true story. I mean, truth whatever, it was something I did with a friend. Most of the stories here are made up. I tried writing narratives, documenting things, and also writing pure fiction, and writing about myself in third person but all these approaches came up short. The tarot cards in the picture placed and read by a Kallawaya in La Paz gave birth to the Agapito of these tales.

I want magic, I want the magic that is present in the world to come through in words but not be limited to the factual. This is Agapito’s eye, what he allows. But I do, however, want this to be as informative as possible for folks wishing to travel so the blogs go back and forth. There’s a mix of fiction and non-fiction. I don’t know yet if this is the right medium for this, and I don’t want to be in a place of talking through the origins of the fiction. I don’t know if a blog can really get at it, but I’m giving it a try. Check back in a year or two to see if it’s working.

So, most of these will be stories. They revolve around Agapito. His stories are inspired by and typically include bits of my personal experience but that is mixed with magic and language and returned in the form of fictional stories. Even the purest fiction can’t be separated from experience so I try to let creativity inform my life and my life inform my creativity.

'Agapito' literally means, “a little bit of god’s love.” I see this as a fitting description of all humans, the way we sort of pop out of the world and then slowly are absorbed back into it. As if the entirety of this love, the love that gives life, is the ocean on which each of us little waves ride. So these stories are happening to Agapito as a sort of target at which small arrows of the truth about being human are shot. Those arrows are shot from various moments in my life, some hit the targets and others may hit the wall or fall to the ground. Neither of us may ever be able to tell the difference.

OK, enough metaphors.

Let’s get to it, to the stories and not the incessant justification. Agapito loves you all just as you may grow to love him.