The Himalayas are a holy place.

For a moment, I forgot this. And remembered them only, as big mountains. But slowly crawling along the valleys and ridges of the Earth’s crust had the effect of a pumice stone on my soul. For 15 days I walked. And for 15 days I was scraped. Scraped of the thick residue of petty life details that had settled onto my body so sneakily that I had not realized the extent of the accumulation until I looked at the floor and saw the scaly pile of skin I had shed off.

And then I kept walking. For that is the nature of a pilgrimage: to walk, encounter, and keep walking.

I kept walking. And with layers undressed and pores unclogged, my skin, for the first time in a long time, breathed. And my pores, for the first time in a long time, wept. Big salty tears for all that had passed that I had not mourned. And for all that I love, that I had not appreciated.

And then, one day, many days deep into the range and peaks of mountains tops and thoughts, I kicked a rusted, fallen, horseshoe. I leaned over to pick it up and, at that same second, someone yelled and pointed a finger to the clouds. I looked up and two white wingspans, the length of my own arms, swept silently over my head. As their shadows passed over me, I fell in awe of the grace of those wings: requiring the will of not a single muscle, but hitchhiking a breeze and riding the wave of the wind; cutting through space and air utilizing (only) the power and momentum of the play between elements, earth and air.

Could I do the same?

Could I stop fighting gravity? Stop pulling up and pushing down? Stop submitting to pressure and exerting my strength on the immovable mountains of my life? Could I catch my own wave, with the bend of a wingtip, and ride the will and wind of the universe?

I stood on that cliff and looked out. And suddenly I saw.

I saw a thousand paths. I saw a thousand lives. I saw a thousand dreams. And I saw that they were all mine. My eyes watered and my heart wanted to burst in bliss.

“I’m staying in India,” I whispered to myself.

I turned to my friend walking with me and said louder, “I’m staying in India.”

He smiled.

I ran up the hill to the rest of my companions and shouted, “I’m staying in India!”

They hugged me and said, “Really? You’re not coming back with us? How long will you stay?”

With the confidence of the sun, I smiled and said, “No less than a year or two. With infinite options.”

Two weeks later, with the essential blessing of my loving boss, I have officially been granted my wings for a few revolutions around the sun in this beautiful country called India.

****

Friends and family, it’s confirmed: I’m here for all of 2008. It was as much a surprise to me as it might be for you. Only my soul knew. And it just took “some big mountains” for the secret to surface. A special “thank you” to Chris Yager for his precious support of my life path and permission and encouragement to pursue it.

The new India album is now open.

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*sol bows her “namaste” and gratitude to World Nomads Travel Insurance, ThinkHost and Merc for their ever-supporting roles in the realization of her dream.

It’s been three weeks, so give me a minute to gather myself, upload photos and compose my mountain top thoughts…

peace,

sol

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*sol bows her “namaste” and gratitude to World Nomads Travel Insurance, ThinkHost and Merc for their ever-supporting roles in the realization of her dream.

Before we leave the village of Quelqanqa , we take one last tour of the sites laying (quite physical) tribute to the successes of our manual labor. We walk down the valley to visit the new stone bridge and draw our names in a small patch of its still-soft cement. And then we turn around and follow a mile of trenching up towards the reservoir, stopping at one of the houses along the way to, ceremonially, turn on the tap for the first time.

As I strap and snap myself into my backpack and double-knot the laces of my boots, I recognize that I am- all at once – dirty, satisfied, exhausted, excited and ready and sad to leave. I can’t avoid the allusion to the trip being a mountain range of emotions; physical symptoms, energy levels and sentiments that have risen and descended in just as dramatic elevations as those we’ve climbed.

There is a final Andean value which is appropriate, now, to introduce: ayni. Ayni refers to reciprocity and the exchange of kindness, knowledge and/or labor between humans, nature, spirits and the environment.

On my plane back home from Peru, the flight attendant passes a UNICEF donation tin down the isles and through the passengers. And as the coins jangle and make empty sounds in the metal bin, I can’t help but hear an absence of ayni in the transaction. We name it a “bridge”, or a “reservoir”, or a “community service project”, but its physical form — of concrete or water or stone – is never as important as its function as a channel. And I am very happy to borrow such a nice little word to name that channel and call it both the essence and highlight of my adventure in Peru: the exchange of kindness, between humans, nature, spirit and the environment.

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*sol bows her “namaste” and gratitude to World Nomads Travel Insurance, ThinkHost and Merc for their ever-supporting roles in the realization of her dream.

Our bridge is only a few hundred hauled-stones away from completion when I wander up the hill following a rumor that the men of the Quelqanqa are constructing a traditional “earth oven” or pachamanca in which the feast, celebrating the completion of our mission, will be cooked.

Indeed, on a hill overlooking the soccer field, I find a few dozen men squatting, squinting and otherwise overseeing the construction of the last of three pachamancas. The process of stacking the stones is quite similar to a game of reverse-jenga; it’s a delicate equation in which the placement of every stone is crucial to the whole of the balancing act and yet a single weak or teetering point can send the whole thing tumbling down.

And tumble down is exactly what I watch the aspiring pachamancha do twice before I add my own two hands to the twelve already collaborating. Our strategy is to slowly build up, and then hold down, the vertical walls, while making a bridge of locking vertebrae stones that will function as the skeleton of the pachamancha.

After ten minutes of careful construction, we reach the roof of the dome and, with a collective held breath, finally connect one side to another. At the same time, we each quickly reach for smaller stones to stuff and support the cracks. But we pay dearly for this lapse in concentration as the entire pachamancha crumbles, in a mere fraction of the time it took to construct, to a clumsy pile of rubble on the ground. All the men lean back on their squatting haunches and exhale the long breath of tested patience. And I do what I always do in most situations of emergency, exhaust or fury: I laugh. In response, one of the men tosses out a comment in Quechua to which all the rest fall in fits of laugher and then he turns to me and says, “Every time, you laugh!”

He says it with a sincere smile, but I suddenly take into account, for the first time, that I am the only woman represented at this party. I begin to fear if perhaps I have crossed inappropriate cultural boundaries, or even worse, will be blamed for cursing the work! I’m horrified at these prospects but shake the new fear from my hands and follow quick suit as the men all lean forward to begin construction again.

I work on a small front wall and begin to pride myself on how sturdy my interlocking rocks are proving themselves. When the stones on the top of the dome finally begin to reach across and link solidly together, this time, without lapsing our concentration or held breath, we manage to swiftly snap into piece all the smaller supporting stones until every hesitant hand has slowly released its grip and we tumble back in a simultaneous gasp of satisfaction.

I am particularly happy that I have proven myself not to be a curse and, unable to hold back my laugh any longer, am delighted when everyone joins me in sounding our shared joy and relief.

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*sol bows her “namaste” and gratitude to World Nomads Travel Insurance, ThinkHost and Merc for their ever-supporting roles in the realization of her dream.

After a night of tossing through below-freezing temperatures, the sun finally rises. And as I peer out of my tent to watch it chase away the shadows, melt the frost and fill our valley with fuzzy light and flushing warmth – I clearly understand, and immediately convert to, worship of the Incan sun god, Inti.

Watching the clouds traverse the sky, I come to the slow conclusion that I have no idea what day, date or time it is. I only know that the light is golden, the shadows heavy, and the sky clear; my first, second and third clock hands all pointing at the precise time of, “morning.”

When given the rare opportunity, Nature quickly reassumes her authority over my senses, replacing my watch with new, but natural alarm clocks like, “wake when the light opens your eyes” and “eat when your stomach sounds for it,” and “sleep when the sky shuts its lids.” After only a few days in the Andes, I can already feel my umbilical cord to the revered and worshiped, pachamama (mother earth) tugging me closer. Can I imagine the implications of being born here in the mountains: feet accustomed always to being bare upon the earth, life dependent on what yields the seasons fancy, years measured by the movement of my earth among the stars. No I can’t imagine. But I can intuitively understand. I understand that when the earth is your god, its elements and inhabitants are its messengers. And it makes sense to me that the people of Quelqanqa spend endless hours embedding the intricate outlines of suns, moons, pumas, condors, eagles, humming birds, serpents and jaguars into their shawls, scarves and skirts.

They say that even the language, Quechua, derives from the sounds of nature. And my ears attuned, finally, to the silence in which all mountains whisper, I too hear the voice of the river scouting the fastest route south, the wind blindly winding its way through the passes, the odd beeping talk of llamas and alpacas shouting warnings to each other, and the Andean condors silently swooping while the finches bounce their calls of mountain walls.

For me, it is this devotion to pachamama that distinguishes the people that populate this continent as special from the rest. While I highly respect that spirituality is so well researched, studied, explored, termed and given such specific method, form and expression in the East, I am equally awed by the simplicity of understanding your relationship to the world, not in terms of what you are not, but as a function of exactly your physical interdependence and relationship with all that IS. The Earth is clearly respected here as the provider, the nourisher, the sustainer – and also the destructive – but always equally fertile – Mother of all life. And to Her, all respects are paid.

In the Incan cosmic vision, kaypacha is the world we live in, hananpacha, the higher world of spiritual beings, and ukhupacha, the interior and bridge between worlds. Yes. I am a romantic, and while it’s perhaps unfair for me to romanticize others’ lives, I’m entitled to my personal, even if rosy, experience of my own. And here in this little lost valley in the Andes, this is what I experience: the height of the mountains humbling me, the brightness of the sun blinding me, the extremities of the weather sensitizing me, the constant physical connection to the earth grounding me, and the immensity of open space shrinking me. This pummeling, of my ego and senses, back into the Earth and my place of interdependence within her, is what I experience whenever I find myself surrounded by, and surrendered to, the Earth’s elements. And if I have ever come close, it’s only been under these conditions that I’ve found myself on the bank of the ukhupacha — the bridge between worlds.

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*sol bows her “namaste” and gratitude to World Nomads Travel Insurance, ThinkHost and Merc for their ever-supporting roles in the realization of her dream.

Our first mistake is thinking that we’ve come to organize and/or manage; our first lesson is realizing that the locals coordinating this project are professionally skilled and competent, and that the most valuable things we really have to offer are our servitude and sweat.

Having felt heavily burdened by the kindnesses and services that our porters heaped upon us while on the trek, I am greatly relieved by the opportunity to work side-by-side, and ultimately FOR, those that woke us every morning serving tea and morning greetings.

Our group’s tasks consist of two projects: creating a new reservoir and digging the trenches to supply the village with water and building a bridge over one of the rivers so that, during the rain season, people will still be able to travel to and from town and fewer animals will be lost to the swift currents that normally take such annual sacrifices. The bridge project is explained to us as a project needing less brain and more labor and I rush to the side of the party designated to this project mostly because, being a visual person, I want to see something complete and concrete when we finish.

We all file down to the river and ponder the heaps of boulders and stones collected for our purpose. It’s hard for me to envision just how we are going to elevate piles of stones into a traversable arch and I’m busy trying to sort out where to begin when one of the villagers on our work crew walks over to one of the piles of stones, picks one up, walks over to the site of the bridge, and puts it down. Ah. Brilliant. So that’s where we start…

One stone at a time.

And so that is what we do. We form chains to move them more efficiently. And we organize crews to search for specifically sized stones. Some people dedicate themselves to laying stones, while others to carrying or sorting. But the theme is consistently simple: one stone at a time. And that is the best way I can describe how our bridge begins and continues its slow construction.

Since Incan times, it has been a tradition of Andean peoples to organize communal work parties to harvest crops or build irrigation canals and terraces. These parties are called faenas and I find this community spirit especially well-illustrated by the picture of an 80-year old man and his 4-year old grandson, both, with equal vigor and enthusiasm, hauling rocks and handing them to us. In fact, if there is any one memory that captures my time in Peru in a single snapshot, it is the sight of these two people, and the multiple generations between them, united without hesitation in this timeless tradition of what Andeans call, llank’ay, or “the spirit of ceremonial work.”

And even for me, an extranjera, there is a certain amount of tetris-like finesse and ceremony to the work. I assume responsibility as one of the stone layers and so it’s my job to decide on the flattest side of the rock and then determine the best fit of its angles so that it snaps into a pretty place within its neighbors. I find it a delightful task and wonder, even, if perhaps others think I am taking too much time to express my creativity and delicate design work with the stones.
Not as delicate or delightful, and certainly less pretty, however, is the chunk of bloody skin dangling from my right ring finger when, in an overextended reach to take a heavy rock from the arms of the 80-year old, I drop the stone — with my finger still under it. Luckily I have two pairs of gloves to buffer the cut and bitter coldness to numb it.

After attending to the bandaging of my throbbing finger I take a step back and sit on the river bank to watch the work progress. It’s clumsy work, and even more awkward is the mix of dark-skinned locals in traditional striped costume and pale-skinned foreigners in odd and unnatural block colors. I decide that we, like the cluttered pile of odd-sized stones, are a funny bunch to envision functioning efficiently together. But somehow, something seems to be forming. Slowly but cohesively, as a group, we begin taking on a solid shape together — one stone at a time.

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*sol bows her “namaste” and gratitude to World Nomads Travel Insurance, ThinkHost and Merc for their ever-supporting roles in the realization of her dream.

“Oh! It’s just so beautiful! To live in this amazing valley, pulling your meals from your garden, surrounded by your extended family, breathing fresh Andes air with views of glaciated peaks out your windows, all while living so close to the ground and sky at the same time!” I sigh wistfully with this exclamation to which Javier responds plainly….

“Stop romanticizing.”

In fact I do have a tendency to taste things sweeter and see things rosier – so I appreciate being called out on my naïve fancying of my own imagination.

Javier and I are slowly climbing a hill to scout the water reservoir that is our group’s task to restore. While by no means an old man or needing it, Javier is walking with a wooden cane – and the added tap that slowly counts our steps imparts an essence of added wisdom to his words….

“Yes, it’s beautiful and easy to romanticize, but life here is not easy. Not at all. Life can be simple and healthy and good like you’ve described it, but it’s also very susceptible. A simple illness can fester into something terminal quickly. And just imagine what any, even small, natural disaster would do to this village. In the case of any emergency, there is no back up, no support, no reserves. And things get very serious, very fast.”

I remember that 54% of Peru lives below the, “poverty line.” But I still don’t understand how a poverty line was designated by dollars when the same majority harvests most of its meals from their own fields and trades, from the same, for many of their other needed provisions. And I wonder how one measures “wealth” without taking into consideration the value of mental stability, a strong sense of community, and a fostered connection with nature. Not from any statistics, but only from my personal experience in rural villages in places like Fiji, India, Guatemala and Peru, I have found in these modest little one-room homes – more warmth, love, respect, support and mental health, than I’ve ever witnessed in an insured and pantry-stocked, six-bedroom house on my block, back home, in upper-class America.

But I also agree with Javier, because I too have seen the quickly cascading effects of minor or major emergencies. I’ve seen monsoons leave families homeless, and epidemics leave children parentless, and droughts leave families childless. And I’ve seen these refugees, of both catastrophes and wars, left with no other option, but to migrate to the squatter communities outskirting major cities. And it is these communities, cities of the displaced, that I fear – where the “poverty line” is calculable and defined. Where those who have been removed from their land, culture, family, community and everything that they know, are left to struggle on the fringe of a foreign city-culture that is measured in currencies, and exchanged in languages, they don’t understand. It’s this “urban third world” to which thousands migrate from their small villages every single day in Africa, Asia and Latin America, chased by one or another natural disaster, political turf squabble or war-related violence. It’s in these places, where 600,000 million people have been left and live right now, unprotected and prone to extreme pollution in their environment, gangs and organized crime to define their sense of community, and no one to represent or respect their rights as human beings. As Javier has indicated, it’s a fine line to walk and not romanticize. This village, as most its size and population, is only an epidemic, mudslide or earthquake away from evacuation or extermination – the two often, in the end, being the same.

The sound of Javier’s cane slowly and soundly tapping the ground brings me back from the spiral of hope and fear in which I just spun out. I feel for the earth below my feet again and scout the horizon in order to ease my mind back into a malleable form.

As we climb the hill, we see that the digging has already begun in preparation for the new water piping system. Our group will pick up this work, and I begin to get very excited for the manual labor; digging and moving stones has never sounded like such a blissful exercise. Lacking other steps to take, and even though they are small, they are footsteps in the right direction of buffering the “fine line” in order to protect this village from the emergencies that constantly endanger.

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*sol bows her “namaste” and gratitude to World Nomads Travel Insurance, ThinkHost and Merc for their ever-supporting roles in the realization of her dream.

As we descend into the valley, I can’t help but feel like I’m strolling through a doctor Seuss picture book; it’s an awkward but fanciful arrangement of skinny trees with knobby tops, boulders sprinkled like bread crumbs from an earth-sized muffin, curlicue streams poured on the land like molasses, sheep and llamas dressed in perfectly color-coordinated camouflage, and little dashes of bright red, visible from infinite distances — climbing a hill, chasing a goat, tending to a field or trailing a cluster of other dashing red dots.

I don’t know what I expected of the Andes, but it is not until my descent into the valley that I realize my imagination would have been aptly challenged with the task of a preconceived vision as colorful, dimensional and whimsical as the one I’m witnessing. In between long sighs trailed off with adjectives whispered only to myself, Reality takes a full box of crayons and colors in the black and white image with which I came.

We arrive at the bottom of the valley where a particularly large cluster of small red dots has been pulling hair, investigating insects and poking at old body wounds in the boredom of our long-awaited arrival. Teachers quickly smarten the little bodies and limbs into erect and organized lines and set the step for a march towards our group. Each child is dressed, from hat to toe, in rainbows of home-woven clothing and accessories. Though each shawl took months of detailed attention by tremendously patient and skilled hands to create, the children are not dressed up for this occasion; this is their traditional dress, the same as what they wore yesterday and will wear, again, tomorrow.

I am immediately shocked by the familiarity of the rosy mountain-pass-chapped cheeks and earth-toned and tough skin; apparent adaptations for those accustomed to living in close(r) quarters with the sun. I recognize many of their faces as fraternal twins to those I’ve encountered in the Himalayas of India, Nepal and Tibet and realize that they must be siblings in the family of those who have made for themselves the same home, on different continents, of great mountains.

Each child in the procession carries a white flower. The flowers were brought from the lowlands and their drooping faces, which evidence their exhaust from the distance they traveled, are a comic contrast to those of the children whose heads are upturned with expressions widened in excitement and unabashed curiosity.

The teachers urge the children forward and, with this encouragement, one of the young girls approaches me. When I kneel down to her eye level, she hands me the flower with one hand, pours confetti on my head with the other, grins, gives me a quick hug and runs, giggling all the way, back to her group. Low to the ground, I approach her group and whisper the question as to if anyone speaks Spanish. They all just bat their huge black lashes and giggle. I’m sad that I’ve forgotten my Quechua phrasebook at home, but will learn later that while these girls don’t speak Spanish, their older sisters do; Spanish being reserved for late primary school.

As the children continue with the rituals of their reception, and our initiation, to their village, I decide it to be the sweetest gesture of the Quelqanqa community; sending in the most precious of their possessions in life, to make offerings of welcome and greet us as their guests.

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*sol bows her “namaste” and gratitude to World Nomads Travel Insurance, ThinkHost and Merc for their ever-supporting roles in the realization of her dream.

In my defense, I have to point out that it really should have been the responsibility of Javier and Jairo to inquire as to my personal definition of “favorable weather” before asking me to make the offering to the Apus. In consideration of their logistical roles as mountain guides, I suppose, for them, “favorable” meant something more to the effect of, “sunny and fair.” But as they quickly found out the next morning, upon hearing the unzipping of my tent and sequential shrieks of joy, was that the wish for weather that I had subconsciously raised to and requested of the Apus, had successfully been answered in the form of a snowstorm.

Javier begins to use the word, “blizzard” which I think is a bit of an exaggeration. Nonetheless, an earth- and heat-hugging layer of ice that formed overnight allows a lacy blanket of white to be thrown over every vista. The weather suits the mountains and mood well as not just me, but the whole group, is as giddy as if Santa himself were about to ride into our valley on a sleigh of a dozen llamas.

Our morning trek is delayed by the, “blizzard” and being well aware of which is the warmest tent in our party, I flap open the door of the kitchen tent, feign distress with bitter coldness and accept Enir’s insistence to sit on the stool next to him by the fire.

I adore Enir; there in nothing not to love about this man. And his smile and presence always warm me as much as the fire. I have already learned a little of his story: that he lives in a mountain village outside of Ollantaytambo, that he has three children but that his wife died years ago, that he speaks Quechua (the language of the Peruvian indigenous majority) and that he’s the best head chef in the Andes. I feel quite comfortable with him and finally ask him the question that is really on my mind…

“Enir. No one else is here. So now tell me the truth. What do you really think of tourists and the people that come to your country on these trips? Aren’t they arrogant with presumed superiority of their culture? And ignorant of the complexity of yours? And they come in these terrible hordes and leave messes and take millions of pictures and truly understand so little of what they are seeing and hearing! And then they invade your natural resources and are such ungracious guests. Don’t you think that we’re terrible? Tell me the truth.”

But Enir hardly flinches. He just casually stirs a pot of boiling vegetables and says, “Yes. They take a lot of pictures, but what harm is that? I enjoy my work very much. I love to be able to travel our country, and make people happy with our food, and share some of the most beautiful parts of my land, history and culture with others. In the off-season, when the foreigners do not come, that is when it’s hard and I work in the fields and find odd jobs to support my family. But this is very nice. I love living in these mountains and I am very happy to host those that visit my country.”

It makes so much sense that I’m bothered by the reply. I squint my eyes and try to discern if he’s telling me a story that he thinks will make me happy. But I look through him and find only transparency to uncluttered honesty. And so I turn the eye on myself instead and wonder how, why and when I became such a cynic.

But just in case, I decide to ask Jairo the same question. Nonchalantly, he responds in like, “Oh no. It’s not like that at all. We really appreciate that tourism is our main industry. I’ve learned English and soon I’ll be studying Chinese and it’s wonderful to be able to learn about other peoples’ countries and share with them what I love about mine. Machu Picchu was just named one of the seven wonders of the natural world, so we are very excited for all the people and business it will bring. What’s wrong with a photograph if someone takes it back to their country and shows it to their friends and family and tells them how beautiful our country, history and people are? Tourism is hardly the worst of occupations to dedicate yourself to.”

And isn’t he just exactly right? Are not his reasons the same as mine for why I work as a guide in the same industry? Do I not love opening doors to new worlds and escorting people through? And sharing in their enlightenment of the mysteries suddenly unlocked by the clash of foreign and home cultures? Is it not an equal exchange? Who is the ignorant and arrogant one to point her finger and claim exploitation when she knows nothing of it?

The lesson is a healthy humbling.

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*sol bows her “namaste” and gratitude to World Nomads Travel Insurance, ThinkHost and Merc for their ever-supporting roles in the realization of her dream.