Sometime in September

The mala I've been waiting for are skulls wrapped around my wrist, and I watch them circle bone and wonder why Cusco sometimes seems to chew me up like no place ever has.

I sit most of the day on the cold stairs outside my bedroom wrapped in the wisdom blanket, learning new words from an ancient tongue. Here strange meteors are embedded with geometric patterns of molten rock, begging you to think outside the confines of this earth. At night I sprint home from Plaza de Armas, through the only city I've ever truly lived in. Under the balcony of the devil I dry my ankles, where the staggering cold has lapped up against my calves.

Time and again, though with wide spaces in between, I sink hips into frog squat: malasana, and pull hands into heart center, plug the thumbs into the chest and feel the ruddy, rounded red woman I sometimes can be, the soft give of the pelvic floor and the roots and the raw and the real.

There is still so much I care to release, to make way for the things and the people I crave to learn about, for the things I will one day tell only them, and no one else.

On Sundays I think about dinner for the first time all week and cook for the travelers who have become part of my home. Each of them an offering on my Sadhana. We play Rising Appalachia and shuck Choclo, like cartoon corn, and pick through wilted offerings of basil. Sweet potatoes rounded in the palm to hold you here, cabbage curling upward, and small, bright hot peppers that long to be dropped from the tree outside the kitchen. With pestle and mortar I crack peppercorn that beg boldly, bay leaves that chant crisply, and tender shoots of garlic. We are rounded and well women and here we sway with spices.

On Mancora

In Mancora I am soft about the shoulders, lilted in my speech. Here I tell them all about anchoring the tailbone in a language that is not my own, in words that I use to construct a semblance of what fully occupying the body means to me.  Instructing a bound twist in Spanish becomes a yoga of it's own, and I'm finding potency in my fingerpads- to use the spread of collarbones or the grounding of ankles in a correspondence that floats far above didactic. I've become laconic. I'm the intimate stranger sprinting spans of beach between each cue. Together we move away from the clench behind the jawline through an unspoken release of hips. In just one day, I've generated more cooling in the space below the navel than I've felt in the deep lakes of the past three lifetimes I skip stones across.

There's an eloquence unspoken of my sentiment towards the red sarong; it's become the scarf to keep ropy hair, brushed only by wind's fingers, in tow. The makeshift dress I wrap around the crease of hips and float across a sunken terrace. Should I ever decide to shower again, it will be my towel (but this is unlikely). Tying coins to the corners an
d slinging it across a sand speckled shoulder it becomes my knapsack. It's the yoga strap I weave across the the crook of elbows to spread open the back ridges and rounded pleats of heart. At night when I fling open the window to welcome in the waves, the sarong becomes my bedspread. In a world where everything is so new in it's presence and persistence, it has become my home.

Someone here told me he couldn't remember where he had left his shoes, and how happy that made him. We haven't felt anything but sand and waxed wood beneath our feet for days.

And what of coconuts? I consider any other form of prayer, save for the yearning and fulfillment of this most precious fruit, sacrilege. My most meditative experiences in the past week have been on the present moment awareness felt by savoring the curled flesh of a coconut, raised to my lips on a cold silver spoon that reminds me of tasting someone else. Alone, I laugh out loud because I don't believe I've ever felt such gratitude towards nourishment before; never knew something to be so whole in it's offering.

 I've said it several times, and think it even more, I count coconuts and blessings to be of one and the same. My time here has been the most blessed I can remember, both from this lifetime and the ones that came before it.

proper prosperous

My bones are cobblestone and I drip red wine. I think nothing of it when I take the stairs two at a time, I breach worlds between each step and I count the lifetimes it's taken me to get right here, I am right now. Here the indigenous place clay figurines on their rooftops to welcome in prosperity. I sleep across a mirror I never noticed until now that reflects the rounded humbros, the painted white, the silhouette of abundance. We attract what we convey. Red clay sculpted and stacked underneath me, tasks mount high and souls bridge across and on the top rung of the ladder I glide my fingers across the wooden beams and think, remember when this defined my ceiling? 

What does it mean to be limitless, I asked in all the languages I can express myself in.

On Familiarity

Call it continuity; recognizing that the meaning of a place will continue to deepen for you. That's what it feels like here. Every time I light the sage, or pass that corner, or the way I felt the angle of the high sun on my breastbone. You know the feeling when you come to an understanding with the path that's been underneath your feet, and all of a sudden it rises to meet you. And for a glimpse of 4:00 when you take your first bite of solid food all day, because you're running strong and haven't had the time to be weighted down, or the dawn that breaks overs your skylight because lonesome mornings excite you now, or knowing exactly which key to use and pushing the heavy door open against a dark and pulsing night. For a moment a slice of your life is extracted from the stream of consciousness and you get to hold it in your hands, and turn it over and sigh and say, oh yes- this is a fragment of the flow.... this is when that stone deepens significance in the stairway, and now that door, this key, the stick of sage, is even more a part of me, and this story, than it ever was before-
and the world turns slightly so the kitchen never really was facing east, we've always been bound westward it may suddenly seem, and you're never quite the same again.

Each glance of this city's story adds another layer of what I will someday recall.
I can't describe it more directly than this.

I was sitting on the stone in the courtyard at my first weekly Wednesday potluck when I thought, oh yes, this will continue, and I'll sit here again someday soon, and the stone will look even more familiar. And one loose fray curled around the outside of my understanding will now be cut away, a clarity seeps in, and I'll remember how I felt the first time, and I may even know when the next time will be.

Each room we occupy, and each thought that contains us, and each person we are retained within, we leave a part of ourselves there waiting for us, only to swing by unexpectedly at some point near or far down the line (that is inconsequential), and oh yes, here I was, and pick ourselves up from the schoolyard, to be more richly defined by the places we once were, and the places we are, and the places we will be again....

on airport chapels, throat chakra, and coming home again

Back to the Lima airport chapel; I can't tell you how many chapels and corners and cafes in how many different airports I've been to in the past nine months. I always find such serenity in these nexus points- maybe all the travelers that have invested their energy, taking a pause between transit, have infused these spaces with so much potential energy, so much charge, it's like I can sit in lotus in freezeframe and watch the electronic pulse, the comings and the goings, the salient journeys.

Peru has always done something so right to my energy body; the breath is round- not two dimensional but a sensual and voluptuous being, and she is soft and deep and wants to play.

In this particular airport chapel meditation, in which there have been many, I lifted my chin and felt my neck open wide. At once I could see these charged ripples being released from underneath my chin, and I've never been this sense-aware of the throat chakra- she is lovely energy and open and heightened and alert- she sent these charged ripples out from her center like geometric waves, like tendrils, that I could feel were sending themselves out in front of me, making the connections with the language  and the people and the sensations that await me.

as I touch down in Cusco

I felt breath like i haven't even remembered as soon as I touched down in Cusco. Like I had forgotten all this time what it was like to be at ease,to breathe. Like when you realize you had been tensing a muscle only because you release it. Suddenly a lot more is joy. I can feel acutely the spaces in my body where I had been holding on to tension, and all the muscle memory of stress patterns peels off in layers. My feet are so much happier here, the edges curl towards the floor to pick up more earth energy and pull it in from the soles each time I inhale. 

I guess subconsciously I knew from the space in the back of my heart that this is the place and the time, but I definitely never would have imagined it would happen so immediately.

Buenos, dulces noches. I have arrived. 

en route to Peru

If I hold my breath in my chest I can just barely brush up against the life which will be mine tomorrow. It's a faint outline of a brick wall I'll run my fingers against as I pass by. It's a faded coverup I can feel hanging from my elbows, but I'm not exactly sure how it will warm me, nor how my body shall inhabit it. I can see the joys of a language unfolding, of students bent and breathing, of a window that sings to me, of a tea mug that sings to me, of a hallway that calls me home. I hope to succumb to a routine of and for solely my Self. New fruit and new words.

But like de Botton claims so starkly in The Art of Travel, we bring ourselves with when we escape. Do not forget this is the most precious life you've been granted yet- and this is your era to Be. Yes the lumber in your belly with be there sometimes, and the tremor in your temples, and the tense in your jaw. Live the glimmer you watch along the edges of the stories you tell yourself when you feel proud.

The wall is ancient and sturdy, and many fingers brush the lining. The coat your brought fits your frame. You won't be cold, you are the very embodiment of the heat initiated upon action, before passion settles, when the mat has not fully been unrolled and you claim your spot on the floor.

Again, AKASHA, how wide does the toes stretch apart today? And the space between the thoughts and the universe between the eyebrows? Your seat of intuition.

Do not forget they are waiting to hear from you, they sit on stone, it's story time and knees knock together to form a circle around you. It's your love thats your knowledge, watch the ripples you cause and feel tickled by the way it feels on your skin when it's sent back to meet you.
It's the energy body, it's one cycle, we try to tell her over lunch. Giving is the same as receiving, dear, so just take a breath and put your palm out in front of you, only to feel it brush the nape of your neck, where old dreams curl up and whisper for you to recall them.
We are joyous in communion, merely expression.
Even the back side of the pond ripples when you throw your one stone in, and you will never know the impact you have had.

Akasha

What is she? The ether, the unknown that snags the breath, the slack between the ribs. The space I lay out on my mat between the ground and the sky, the layer of horizontal earth, a slab of sacred, that ripples and unfurls across bare threads. The length between my tail and crown. She dwindles with the backbends, baring down. Her presence lacking when I lift my sternum and open fully and feel the top vertebrae meet the base of my skull. The channel between my heart and throat, the pulled and prompted space between my toes, the difference in length between my mama's fingers and my own. Akasha, the unknown, unmeasured. My hips speak this desire, they tell me we are settled in this place, let's breathe easy here. No agenda. Do not fill the space. Akasha chooses solitude. Here in the hips invite spaciousness, pubic bone draws away from the spine, building caverns with the rounded points of the illiac crest. The orbs of woman beg expansion. Let us spread! I make the space in the morning, asana helps me widen the breath and lengthen the pause. Akasha; the space between my thoughts, throughout my day, across my hips, around my heart. Unknown, unbridled, infinite.

Four Corners

I've gathered together like four corners to a

Tapestry such beautiful remnants of a life and brought them gracefully in the middle where each end meets - one corner the woven green and ambient yellow and wooden masks and stew and laughing at yourself and making them proud- my family my

Home my pride. Another corner the arms of Ganesha rubbing a belly and twisting the spine and barefeet on the earth and iguana grounding cord and green pastured heart. My yoga my practice.

Another corner the woman of the world gather the smoke clears and Spanish is tangled in the long black hair of peru and the cobblestone and the workbooks and the journey- Visionaria my work my path.

Another corner the dark of lonely and water in the ears and the dreams of strangers. Here things are too tight around the neck and every bite blooms in bruise. My darkness.

I fold them together in the center and what a beautiful bounty I am. 

Altar

One of the powerful lessons I've gotten on this journey. Be selfish and ask the universe for exactly what you need to be your highest Self. Set your table as an altar, pile it with what really feeds your soul, and dig in with your fingers. Eat it raw. Taste it on your tongue. Gulp down what fills you. Spit out the rest. Don't apologize for nourishing your Self. CLAIM YOUR SACRED SPACE. 

Offering

A snake fruit to honor my serpant goddess and animal spirit 

Green grass to honor my constitution which is earth mama kapha

Purple flower to bring in higher feminine spirit and a guru

Yellow flower to keep my heart open and give it all away no matter who tells me not to

Pink flower for my sister this is her color

Surrounded by a white layer of protection 

a waterfall envelope

She never felt bonded to the ocean, not in the way some people do. On the beach the other day someone asked her what her element is. "Not the water," she shook her head, shrugged...."the Earth? The rocks...". She wanted to hike, wanted to feel anchored by hiking boots that made each step a walking meditation. Now I am picking up my heel, now I am setting it down. She would go wandering often. She got lost sometimes, in the forests behind her house. Once in Thailand she lost the trail leading back from a waterfall. She had liked that water, then, after three hours on the path she had heard the waterfall before she ever saw it. Rushing. With an urgency that doesn't necessitate hurry. Just immediacy. She had peeled off her swimsuit top because in those days she felt it was a statement more than anything. But she also liked the air under her breasts. Cool water on the nipple. She climbed up the rocks that lead her to the pool before the great falls. Jumped into cool water and was refreshed, yes, but it wasnt soul quenching  the way some people dream in dolphin and think in sand. Slow rubble. The great pounding falls did beckon her, though. and as she walked towards it the earth under her shook and gave way to the water that demanded presence. To stand underneath the falls was a task, and she had to back in slowly and keep her head above her spine, "don't tuck your chin" a German boy told her who had just tried it himself. And she backed in, breasts bared and gaze ahead solemnly, and felt the way a letter feels once it has been sealed inside its envelope- destined in its home there, tucked away and wrapped inside of the essence of itself, really, more paper- to be sent onwards. to feel a journey around the edges that it wouldn't witness from inside it's paper shell, no- these journeys one never can see, but can feel  it as one makes its way, stamped and drawn with the wisdom and courage it takes to become ones full self, and licked and sent off abroad. Not to be sure where. But knowing fully you are taking the route that necessitates delivery.

No, she wasn't a water person, not in the way some people are. But she knew that it had reached around her and drew her in. sealed by the top to be sent, she was sure, ahead. 

The Unruliness of Strange

In my travels I have found all the laws we think we are governed by do not hold water in my cupped palms. They are tiny silver chains that slip through fingers. The law of reason stumbles drunk in the street. That of phase change bends solid at the waist and vaporizes. To say it simply (which I rarely do): everything moves differently abroad. 

Time is a circuitous slipstream. Yesterday is a photo where I passed a distant night in a hammock on the Rio Amazona and tomorrow already came and went on an overnight train to Bangkok. I can see a month away but not next week. I prefer it this way, though it must not be the same for the smoldering one who just now drove past me on a motorbike because she took off yesterday and is long gone. We are all here to measure the comings and the goings as we please.

Language is a thick kneed stranger sitting next to you on an airplane. The jaw hangs heavy against trials of proper grammar. Worlds of words do intertwine here where elbows crook as dance partners in a square. The graceful tumble of Spanish or the thick pita bread dough of Israeli accent, and the daring snoring French men and the gracious inflections on a Thai tongue that darts like a quicksilver fish. Can I be fed, will you walk with me, remember how it was and leave me alone here. We are all trying to say the same thing. 

Habits fall away, along with the swagger of familiarity. Home is the last place you recognized a semblance of your past life. Economy is measured in the lightness of your backpack. I fill long spaces of the day without words and without silence. Perhaps you can not understand this. Perhaps you already do the same. The law of gravity is hanging from the rafters asking you to climb. Heat from the pungency of papaya to stop the sweat cold. You must walk farther to stop the swell in the false structure of your ankle joints; your skeleton is a story. We are all here to witness.

Lose yourself and the laws you once thought governed your being. Find the world and find the truth: the only law is limitless.

healers

I am nursing myself back to health, being tender in the way I set myself down and lovingly spread tiger balm across the parts of me so shaken and torn. I stamped with a bamboo stick out of the jungle, determined by pain, trampling through the undertow of a darkening river, and saw the slipping of sunset on my way to the hospital. I have found so many healers since then on my unlikely path. A man whose eyes lit up to watch me, who held my ankle and gave it three days. What beautiful optimism lies in the healing power of words and brief time lapses. The powdered tea for inflammation that fills my being. The arnica gel from a friend who clutched my face in his hands and breathed, "you are the toughest girl I know". The strangers who hold my bags, who clutch my arm, who send me secret gifts of health. I know this because I do the same to you. 

Another unknown healer; a woman who became my mother in a shop where I never thought I would see such textured colors, such brilliance lining the walls and the shelves. There are no dressing rooms from what I have come to see here so I am stepping out of my white linen tucked into a back corner when she comes to watch me try her tiny leather skirts. She buttons it around my waist and finds it hanging from my hips, turns me around to see me bruised and shaken (bent but not broken!) She gasps and runs away, comes back to rub me with a healing balm across my backside. Lifted my arms to assess the scrapes. Sent me hope with a bag of treasures.

I seek out the heat when I feel cold under a stark sky. In a sauna a woman watches me pick across the wooden planks and set myself down like a secret. She passes me hot water that hinted coconut on the back of my tongue. I sweat and bent over the flame and thanked my breath. Listened to the backs of my knees purr thanks. 

There is so much doing in the passive action of healing. Everyone is your secret healer.

Original Eve's Note to Self

Forgive yourself when you back away from this connection because there is never regression only growth and then decay. That which is fleeting you will no longer need on your journey, it's only extra weight in your hips. Recall how constructive it is to destruct.

You're moving inward, and your past awakening was just the blissful entry before the real work began, like the gate to Eden. And now you're kneeling in the garden pulling weeds out on the full moon and watering on the new moon and tending the corners and drying velvet herbs and watching it all grow; and the onion bulbs roll and wink and the green shoots do shoot and the spices sing in your cauldron.

Now women give birth to red apples and bake them in the clay. They bleed on the rock and wear the mud proud.

slipstream from a fast

I think about the spaces between my vertebrae the same way I think about you. I'm on my back and under mosquito netting when this dawns on me. I breathe you, we all do one another.

People's energies get passed from person to person in the slipstream as we pass by, so you are always being recreated and represented elsewhere.

Guard your Self, but share what you do feel is worth protecting. It's the only way to keep it alive.

Our Body is the First Layer of Our Soul

I thought this with my legs up and ankles crossed over the seat in front of me, glancing out a pink frayed curtain like an old western playing with the light from a new eastern sun. There is new inherent knowledge here about honoring this body, and I imagine bringing it to some place I will learn to call home, in a new bathtub in a new city where I can be alone with my heart and lay it down to soak in bubbles hot and frothy. And my feet will keep me there. And my lips stained a crushed country curtain. I watch the unfolding and the re-creasing of anothe year in the skin off my elbows, in the dip below my throat. I can shape the way I intend to feed and the way I will absorb. I recognize all my sisters, one with a long curved foot like a silver fish, there in a smile I watch age in my minds eye. They are sitting nearby on a bus also heading inland, maybe westward. They float by, they pass on. Nobody ever really leaves, not really.

You know, the feeling of knowing you are falling asleep is the same as the feeling of knowing you're becoming awakened.

Breathe is the work but the body is the office. I'll cross my ankles under a new oak desk and with my palms bring cooling blue behind my eyes if a screen is too much and take out a pen that excites me in more ways than one, from there I set out to continue my task.  I have found meditation when I am locked on the side of a wind whipping boat and I can lick sea salt off myself or whomever I please. I will never regress there is only ever growth. Oh and what of decay? "I've died before," I told a friend today on a double-decker bus heading inland, "I can do it again".

We Ride

I started thinking about all the road trips we had taken, and the ones we never will. How that sentence alone could mean so much something to others who cannot, will not understand that it could only ever be meant for one. I've driven solo through those sanddunes, black bandana across the ridge of my nose, tan topless wind sting. There have been drunk drives and thrilling trips and endless interstates where I forget to keep you on my mind. I've cruised and cambered and rode shotgun in someone elses dream. Rode into sunsets that don't even feel symbolic. Sometimes the sun and I are just passing time. And that alone has been a satisfaction; there have been countless rolled down windows and locked doors and socks drying on the dash and ankles browning in the glare. I lean my temple on the glass and ride it all out. Sometimes over the foothills, or down Colfax Avenue I am at the steering wheel or huddled in the backseat ducking smoke, and the wind whips my hair into ropes or I'm sucking air out the sunroof, often it's dawn and I'm gnawing at the bones the morning throws for me, at me. 

And on all these drives, I am always dj. I pick the music from his or her front seat. And they all listen so intently. I think then that I am teaching them through tones and sing louder at the bridge as a clue. I lean on the console, drum on the glove apartment, I chant. I am never yours (she never was).

The offramp appears and there has only ever been one who I let sit right next to my soul, on an interstate, through a snowstorm in the flatlands. Westward. I even let you pick the music. 

There have been many drives, my love, and many routes and rest stops and roadgames too. But only once did I buckle up and take the trip that counts. 

el idioma

I see Spanish as a wrapped and woven gift I am giving to myself. It's like a shawl I drape aroud my shoulders, not only to warm but to contain an essence I thought I had somehow gotten away from. But here it is hanging from my elbows, dripping in texture. A parcel for my person. This notion of the language being a present I bestow upon myself makes me as giddy as it does to curl my tongue, desarrollo. I slide the past tense across my teeth like a worn lover, string wishes from another world. A sentence glides like longing, spilling sand through my fingers. I speak methodically and this changes the candor and timber of my being. Comprehension is like purring, I hum with a strangers words and when I respond I can stand strong like a bolsa tree. This gift will only grow.

Cusco is an old woman, both in the books and in my bones. There are etches of snakes and moons and hogars in her ancient bricks, the wrinkles in her cheeks, the mud of antiquity. Her streets, to me, are not the jutted angles of newly sprouted hipbones and the spry flick of wrist, but more like mi abuela with rudded curves- the scent I know collects in the teardrop of her throat, how lines of skin give and gather. I've taken the flight of stairs up her rounded vertebrae, always I wear different shoes or pockets of breath but still time and again I've met her at height. We sit together her and I, her soft rounded belly and shoulders that slope. En el tarde she tells me celebration stories and how these eucalyptus trees stand for lifetimes. They shift their weight and open doors that creak; the wind pulls them closed again. The feet of this weathered woman Cusco shows signs of aging the way only moss and softened wood can. I can wander in her palm for hours and never feel it cup, follow the tap of her finger to the drumbeat that calls me home. Old and easy, mi abuelito. Tranquila, she whispers when she rubs my back. You know how long we've been here.

And yet... peek under her folded skirts and see how her shoes tap with youth? Also her eyes glint hungry. There is a new layer of skin that runs taught across her thighs. We share our days with newfound vigor, heads bent together slurping two straws from the same jugo mixto. Nothing ever tastes the same, and an evening unfolds with question mark curve of breast. Old woman? She is young and free these days; reinvented in rigor and venture. Mi amiga, she drums on my breastbone. Let's begin.

Knotted knucle roots crack to open supple skin. And I? Rip in.

27/1/15

The rain cuts cross angles against rounded edges of fog and here is the place  I am most meticulous in my wakened being. I watch myself from red tiled rooftops; the manner in which I pat my face and note the glow of rose; how I pick placidly across the wells that settle like a secret between quaint cobblestone- here puddles become pleasures. Curled in the corner of the kitchen I observe the careful method I use with the morning bread, how it flakes and gives itself, like a selfless lover, to a spoon of jam.

With soft hands I carry the parcel of my day, losing count at 320 stairs I round the top of this ancient city and nod with humility to each matted dog that so proudly owns this corner, that square. There is always one at the top who watches, he is gruff and were it not for the cracker offering I may not have passed in good favor.

I tie notes together neatly and hang them from my wrist, or place them on the rug: the pungence of that papaya, a rounded bolsa of chia seeds, the gentleness of the painter with suenos in yellow, and the last drops of water in a drying vase. In the morning with the fireworks I simply roll like dough to the far side of the bed, I count sprigs of lavender and patiently recall my dreams.

Wrapped up in the height of this place I breathe deeply to gaurd myself from thin air and hold my elbows to round the severe angles of our hills. With a golden cloak I still shimmer when the power goes out.

All this to say, it is from within the hills of Cusco where I have learned, time and again, to care for myself.