Las Turistas

I´ve been a bit of a tourist lately. A friend from Block Island has arrived in Pisac and we´ve been touring the Sacred Valley sites, which is good since I was getting in a bit of a rut here in Pisac. Paz y Luz is great, but it is hard for me to get in a creative flow living around people--my issue--I know that if I really want to create then I will raise my fear and move myself to a place where I can get in the flow that writing requires. I have been considering my willingness to live in this repressed state, wondering what it is inside me that is willing to tolerate the very uncomfortable feelings that arise when I don´t create. Is it that I don´t believe in myself enough? Could it be that I am scared of where my creativity will take me? The rut is safe. It is an easy place to be. Could it also be a message that a part of me is still willing to sacrifice myself for others by being too accomodating to their needs? Probably it is all of these things and definitely I should get out of my head and just be for awhile....

Which is why it is good to have Becky here, as she motivated me to change my scenery and shift my mood. We went to Cusco last week, in the car with Gray and Eva. There aren´t a lot of priate cars here, mostly buses and taxis, so it was fun to drive around in a big American SUV. Cusco is an international cultural tourism oasis, which means it can either be fun or horrible, depending on how you choose to see it. My first time in the city I was enchanted by the way it looked, but horrified by the hardsell to the tourists. Everything from fingerpuppets to massages. The second time, with three friends, I like the city more. We ran errands for Paz y Luz and bought cheap bootleg cds an ate Indian food and walked up to San Blas to eat dark chocolate--hard to find here as all the Peruvians seem to eat is milk chocolate.

A couple of days later Becky and I traveled down the valley to Ollayantaytambo, a very quaint town off the carretera that is still built on its Inka foundations. Becky toured the ruins which required a ticket, while I, who had alreay been there, walked around the quiet streets of the town, different from Pisac, which is all adobe or concrete and built by the Spanish as a grid. On the far side of the town, opposite the main ruins, I noticed a little sign pointing up to a path that ascened up toward another set of ruins, which I followed and had to myself high above the town. I sat on the ramparts and watched the people below and the waterfall pouring through the town towared the Rio Urabamba and felt quite content and impressed with myself for climbing up there, although I am finding the altitude much easier to handle.

Afterwards Becky and I met and had lunch at The Two Hearts Cafe, run by a 76 English woman who arrived in Peru with two suitcases and hasn´t left. She runs the cafe as a charity to help indigenous women and children in the area. She runs a kindergarten and a health program, which seems to be sorely needed. According to doctors who recently visited the school, all of the children were malnourished and all had parasites due to drinking infected water, and many of the women had severe gynecological problems. I have particularly felt the difficulty of the womens´s lives here. For all the talk about Pachamama here (mother earth), the women are treated like work animals and seem exhausted and from what I can see, not very happy, although this of course, is my perception and not necessarily true. The talk of Pachamama is definitely for the tourists sake and not embodied in the daily life of the people who I have seen, which is also evidenced in the lack of respect for the earth seen everywhere in the form of garbage in the rivers and sewage emptied into the sacred river. Becky witnessed a dead dog being thrown in the river the earth the other day.

I am aware that we from the ¨civilized¨nations have infected this culture with this disease, but this does not mean that we cannot all be held accountable for choosing a different way of relating to the earth. The infected and the spreader of the disease are in a relationship together, much the same as an alcoholic and a co-dependent. We all work together to create our individual realities an collective lives with every choice we make. Perhaps our task as the infector is to show(not tell) the infected how to live in harmony, thus spreading a new way to live, while at the same time learning from those we have infected, cocreating through the intellect and the heart, as the prophecy of the eagle and condor says we must do to reestablish harmony on earth.

The pain of the women was really brought home hard to us yesterday as we drove down from the Inka ruins of Moray, on the rolling mustard yellow plains above Urubamba. Once again in the giant SUV, we stopped to pick up an old Indian woman who flagged us down for a ride. In obvious pain, she was on her way to Urubamba below to have her last tooth pulled. She could barely speak Spanish, just Quechua, and when she showed us her tooth to explain what was wrong she started crying. Her pain and exhausting was overwhelming in the backseat with Becky and me. She was so tiny in her skirts and bowler hat, her face etched deep with wrinkles. Her whole presence just hurt so much. She kept wiping her eyes with the hem of her skirt an when Becky offered her a sip from her water bottle she very carefully wiped her mouth on her skirt first. We dropped her off halfway down with a Qyechua woman who said she would get her down to Urubamba as we were going on the salt mines at Salinas, but after that it was hard to enjoy anything, and I was having a hard time being in that big car with a bunch of chattering, well meaning people...I don´t know if it is that I am too sensitive, but I just kept sinking and sinking and not wanting to be anywhere, letting the past affect the present, but maybe I was being called so strongly to change my present reality that I could not, and should not have resisted this feelings-

Which sums up how I am feeling in general after being a self-indulgent tourist for a few days. If I am going to be here as a privileged person, at least materially, I have to work, to follow the call of my heart with discipline, whatever that call may be. I thought this meant I had to volunteer at an orphanage, or some such thing, but really when I feel my heart the call is to write, even if no one reads what I am writing. It is my call, the way to open my heart to be of greater service, and I feel such gratitue that I am in a position to be able to follow this calling, a feeling magnified by seeing how most of the women live in this country. Who knows what goes unexpressed in the lives of the women, and the men, in this country? I know from Peruko how hard it is to be different, how hard it was for him to follow the call of his soul to be an artist in a survival culture, and I admire him even more seeing where he came from.

So there are mountains to climb and rivers to praise, and there is work to do on the physical and spiritual planes. Both are vital if we want to live in harmony.