Puppies, Peru, and Faces of Braga (David Whyte) and Two Countries (Naomi Shihab Nye)

I am several posts behind, and sometimes I feel a bit overwhelmed by what I haven’t written.  But here I sit with our new 15-week old puppy out cold in my lap, while I watch the first Lord of the Rings (The Fellowship of the Ring) for the 75,000^th time….it is soooo good.  But that niggling feeling I get when I haven’t written for awhile is now manifesting as crushing chest pain, so I’ll write, I'll write. 

I have been saved lately; isn’t that something?  I’ve been saved by a puppy and a remarkable trip to sacred, energy-filled Peru for 10 glorious, fellowship-filled, mountain-spirit-embodied, open-hearted, chakra-gardened days.  Oh, and did I mention the incredible, energetic orgy of color that hit our retinas everywhere we turned, and the most delicious, organic, vegetarian food in abundance waiting for us at every meal...it was heaven, I tell you. 

So recently, life had turned a bit less than joyous.  We’d lost an incredible character who loved us in my mother-in-law, Nancy, awhile back, but her absence has become truly palpable for all of us.  We’d lost our dear, dear doggie, we’d had to say goodbye again to our lovely college boy after a wonderful summer home, we had begun anticipating that our youngest would be flying the coop too as we head into the maelstrom of college searching, and finally I’ve been a bit sad that my last chemo treatment “didn’t do all we hoped it would.” After 6 months of slowly losing energy and the ability to bend my fingers without pain due to this drug, I seem not to have benefitted much from all the drama.  Oh well…. I am now able to flex all my fingers and my energy level has improved on a non-chemo, 6-month hormone shot regimen.  Let me just make this aside here, as this new treatment makes me want to kiss the nurses who stand on either side of my backside and drive large needles full of viscous fluid into both buttock cheeks simultaneously.  They just don’t seem to understand that they really can’t hurt me with this stuff.  In fact, stick the needles in my eyeballs; I won’t flinch.  Not having my hands and feet in ice as the darn chemo infuses has been a miracle….and I can take a bath again without being coated in an itchy rash.  Joy!  Ah, the little things are so important.

All in all though, we have all felt a bit broken-hearted.  So what do we do?  We rescue a puppy, completely forgetting the possibility of enjoying the new freedom we might have gained from not having a dog.  Oh no, the kids and I needed a puppy, so we found one.  In our excitement, we had all forgotten the enormous amount of work required to care for one.  But she is sooooooo adorable, and she is trying so hard to please us, and I get to nurture another small creature.

So, to Peru.  I knew the group I have often travelled with was going to Peru, but I had no intention of going….too far away, too much hassle.  But when an opening occurred, and with it an opportunity (and easy use of frequent flyer miles), I jumped at the chance, and I’m so glad I did.  Peru was an amazing success.  Our group bonded easily and with support and energy enough for everyone.  Our altitude medications worked, along with the coca leaves, leaving most of us feeling well enough to acclimatize on the streets of Cuzco where we found color, a cathedral with a painting of the last supper featuring guinea pigs as the dinner entree, alpaca everything you ever thought you wanted, and smiles and warmth and vendors with names like Jimmie Carter and Mercedes Benz (maybe next time!).  We met our wonderful guide, Gabriella, whose sense of spirituality and sacred space in addition to her deep knowledge of the region made the week a joy.  We made our way to the Sacred Valley and our eco-lodge, the Willka T’ika, and found a place that changed something in all of us, I think.  We spent a week deep in chakra gardens built around an 800 year old Licuma tree.  We had incredible vegetarian food grown on the premises and served beautifully and with such love.  Every night it got quite cold as the sun vanished behind the mountains, and every night we found a hot-water bottle in our beds and every morning a basket of fresh herbs to make tea with……and so much more.  I took two evening baths under the Southern Hemispheric wash of stars while I soaked in every herb and flower on the premises and thanked my lucky stars for being alive and being right where I was. 

One day we wound our way up to a school that the Willka T’ika and Carol’s foundation support, what a highlight for us all.  We were greeted by children in a cacophony of colors holding flowers for us.  They sang, we sang, and we all laughed.  There is a word, ayni, that means open-hearted in the native language, and almost everyone we met exuded it.  There was joy, joy in being alive, joy in loving the world (the world of three levels--spirit, here and now, ancestors), and joy in giving of what you have.  What a world this word creates, and we all felt its pull.  The next day we were off to Machu Picchu.  We had to awake at the crack of dawn, get on a bus into Urubamba, get on a train, and as we watched, the scenery changed into wilder vegetation, snow-capped peaks and the Urubamba river cascading by the train-tracks….amazing.  And then we were there, and what a place there was.  I hadn’t really known what to expect, but I didn’t expect to feel quite so much.  As you finally get up to the ruins of MP on a scary, switch-back-laden bus ride, you round a corner, and there, bursting out of the mountains is that picture of MP that everyone has seen, but it is so breath-taking to be there.  Not only that, there is some sort of subtle, humming energy thrumming around the place that is hard to miss, especially with Gabriella around to help us feel and understand it.  The level of sophistication of the builders (no mortar, just perfect, interlacing stones), the positioning of windows, doors, and temples (everything lining up with celestial occurrences or directions or mountains, etc), and the sacredness of many places within the ruins is quite overwhelming.  We were lucky enough to have another day to explore and climb and experience the ruins in the early morning with very few people around.  There is a place in the women’s temple where a stone condor sits on the ground with her wings of stone suspended behind her.  Something about this particular place really felt sacred to me, here was a sacred space where something important occurred, some rite of passage, or birthing or who knows, but something happened here; you can feel it.  In fact, this place made me want to run off the cliff flapping my wings and soar my condor-self off into the clouds.  Good thing I didn’t; it was pretty scary way up there.

So I have talked too much, but I am fiercely holding onto a bit of that Peruvian energy here in rainy Cleveland.  Bella is by my side, requiring a lot of us, but giving a lot too.  I am going to work very hard at remembering and embodying “ayni”.  I want my world, my tribe, my place to be full of it!  How about some poetry?

for everyone and you wonderful Peru fellow-travelers, here's the David Whyte poem written out, and another by another  favorite poet, Naomi Nye:

The Faces of Braga  (David Whyte)

In monastery darkness
by the light of one flashlight
the old shrine room waits in silence.

While above the door
we see the terrible figure,
fierce eyes demanding, “Will you step through?”

And the old monk leads us,
bent back nudging blackness
prayer beads in the hand that beckons. 

We light the butter lamps
and bow, eyes blinking in the
pungent smoke, look up without a word, 

See faces in meditation,
a hundred faces carved above,
eye lines wrinkled in the hand held light. 

Such love in solid wood!
Taken from the hillsides and carved in silence
they have the vibrant stillness of those who made them. 

Engulfed by the past
they have been neglected, but through
smoke and darkness they are like the flowers 

We have seen growing
through the dust of eroded slopes,
their slowly opening faces turned toward the mountains. 

Cared in devotion
their eyes have softened through age
and their mouths curve throught delight of the carver’s hand. 

If only our own faces
would allow the invisible carver’s hand
to bring the deep grain of love to the surface. 

If only we knew
as the carver knew, how the flaws
in the wood led his searching chisel to the very core. 

We would smile too
and not need faces immobilized
by fear and the weight of things undone. 

When we fight with our failing
we ignore the entrance to the shrine itself
and wrestle with the guardian, fierce figure on the side of good. 

And as we fight
our eyes are hooded with grief
and our mouths are dry with pain. 

If only we could give ourselves
to the blows of the carvers hands,
the lines in our faces would be the trace lines of rivers 

Feeding the sea
where voices meet, praising the features
of the mountain and the cloud and the sky. 

Our faces would fall away
until we, growing younger toward death
every day, would gather all our flaws in celebration 

To merge with them perfectly,
impossibly, wedded to our essence,
full of silence from the carver’s hands.

Two Countries (Naomi Shihab Nye)

Skin remembers how long the years grow
when skin is not touched, a gray tunnel
of singleness, feather lost from the tail
of a bird, swirling onto a step,
swept away by someone who never saw
it was a feather. Skin ate, walked,
slept by itself, knew how to raise a
see-you-later hand. But skin felt
it was never seen, never known as
a land on the map, nose like a city,
hip like a city, gleaming dome of the mosque
and the hundred corridors of cinnamon and rope.

Skin had hope, that's what skin does.
Heals over the scarred place, makes a road.
Love means you breathe in two countries.
And skin remembers--silk, spiny grass,
deep in the pocket that is skin's secret own.
Even now, when skin is not alone,
it remembers being alone and thanks something larger
that there are travelers, that people go places
larger than themselves.