Just outside Cusco proper, above the shallow valley of the city center sits The Temple of the Moon. Raj, Jamol, Mo, Isa, and I made a plan to drink Wachuma, a grandfather cactus medicine, in a place that radiated ceremony. The low plateau was covered with yellow winter grass, small trees, and massive rocky outcrops. In the distance, orange mountains lifted themselves up into blue skies, painted with the shadows of wandering clouds. Tourists and locals alike meandered through well-paved walkways, all admiring relics of the Inca. I imagine all who were there were uplifted by the same emotional swell of enchantment. How and why these ancient people built such a world for themselves, a world of monuments, temples, and portals built like small mountains is beyond us.
But, our little band of yogis knew or thought we knew. Our ancestors lived in a time when spirit was still strong, gods still breathed, and humans were still humble. Devotion to Gods, spirit, and earth is a delightful space to occupy but the way into that world demands a toll, a certain caliber of sincerity, a willingness to renounce much of our modern rationality, and, most of all, an education.
Peru is a land of stone and ceremony. Its people, past and present, groom that devotional branch of the human condition where spirit instead of ego flower. It is a bonsai now, small and less prevalent than what it was, but no less mesmerizing. If anything, because of its reduced size it is only more precious when encountered.
Raj, like a migrating bird following the magnetism of the poles, found a small grove of green grass. He turned, and Isa asked if this was it. He smiled. I knew. Walled by boulders, there was a shallow cave scorched black by countless fires. Inside we found deconstructed fire pits and massive bundles of week-old flowers. This was an active ceremonial space. Despite the no-fire rule plastered on the park entrance, we set off to collect wood and eucalyptus. We arranged our small shrine; a decorative rug, crystals, fruit, bread, instruments, and medicines.
As I rearranged the old firepits, I lifted a stone to find a score of music taped to the bottom. Again, this land is a land of ceremony, driven forward in time because of its people and their willingness to continue the practice. The fire was built, eucalyptus leaves sacrificed, and songs sung.
Jamol, with wide deep eyes, grinned as he invited us to take a second cup of Wachuma. It comes as a powder disguised as Aloe Vera. You stir a tablespoon or two into water, simple. The high is very subtle at the doses we took, 15 grams. The plant lifts spirits and makes it easier to be happier. But, most of all, it seems to open the heart. Those walls of apathy that we tend to carry can be stubborn or, strangely, invisible. These walls that a good movie, an honest moment, or, even, a difficult circumstance bring down, are effortlessly eroded by this medicine.
After we all took our cups, we continued our devotion. I managed the fire and sang Hindu mantras while drumming on my Pacay, a dried 14-inch pod of seeds. Curved like an Arabian sword and textured like desert sand, in my eyes it is serpentine and rattles like a snake made for music. Raj was in front of me, singing the mantras we had learned during the earlier months of this Peruvian adventure. Isa, always smiling, learned to build the fire and organize the wood. She carved out the air-channel, led it to the embers, and built a pagoda of measured branches. The thicker branches formed the foundation, thinner branches made the roof. Mo, a man of seemingly endless positivity, Isa’s partner, and Jamol’s cousin, would blow up the airway, excite the embers, and ignite the flames. Jamol, a medicine man in the making, sat on the other side of the small shrine, inviting each of us to a round of rapé. He is a man doing his best to be genuinely good. His practice, as he states, is dignity. There is a well-cultivated kindness to his nature. Must run in the famili’s blood.
What was remarkable was what happened next. One, two, three, four heads peaked into the entrance of the cave. Our heads all turned like coyotes in a den. We smiled without pausing our games, waving them into a space that was not ours. I stayed with the fire and song, Raj held on to his rhythms and sang, Mo and Isa were in the midst of their rapé trip with Jamol. It was an orchestra of ceremony, an ensemble of different methods of spirituality, and, with our new guests, it was about to become more layered.
One woman, Peruvian, tall with dark hair and fair skin, came as the obvious leader of the group. She walked around us and laid her hands on an enormous shelf in the cave where hundreds of coca leaves lay. She touched a white streak, where rainwater would fall and clean away the ash of centuries-old fires. She took red and white candles and laid them on the ground like the spokes of a wheel and lit them on the dirt. Then, in a clay bowl, she burned a sort of incense, blessing the space with smoke. She came to each of us and danced this bowl of smoke around our heads, while we continued our own games of god. No words were exchanged. It was a beautiful silent, improvizational collaboration. Hindu prayers mixed with Amazonian plants and Incan rituals. We all knew, despite the differences in our methods, that each effort was aiming at the same target; the undifferentiated truth of soul and soul's unbreakable bond to life. Nothing worthier to celebrate!
The Wachuma was assisting me like rainwater on the shell of a buried seed. The husk cracks when the conditions are right. I am reminded of a shloka (Yogic scriptural phrase) from some text I cannot recount; Yoga is to remove the pith from the reed. My reed, my husk, can be cold. I can be stoic. I practice to soften but my practice is not soft. Despite how rigid or power-centered my techniques are, I push my breath and dig into stillness to shatter my own walls because it takes a certain level of force to break certain stones. That is Hatha Yoga. Unite through force. Like the center of a star, through its unimaginable power and pressure, it collapses atoms into new elements. But, the wisdom of this grandfather's medicine is softness. Perhaps, we are not as dense as we believe. Less like stone, more like water.
The Peruvian mystic took her group individually to the shelf of coca leaves. They all wept. Then, I wept. My voice cracked as I sang. Endless sincerity. Few words were spoken between any of us, because words were not needed.
This went on for a few hours and then the sky changed as the Sun started to set. In the end, fire dwindling, each of us fulfilled with what we gave and what we received, I stood up to sit with Jamol and rapé. He blew the dust of tobacco, mint, and other plants into my nose. The familiar burn of it pulled me into my body. Mo massaged my temples and rubbed my shoulders, while Isa rattled a small maraca around my head drowning out most sound, and Raj continued the songs next to embers.
I was moved. I felt a loving instability sprinting through my nerves. It’s good to consider, if our comfort zone is apathy, for example, the introduction of emotion comes as a foreign force. Despite it’s inherent goodness, from the perspective of what we know, often what is new, regardless of its goodness or malevolence, is encountered as a shock. Healing and growth can be felt as violent.
My face snarled as this shockwave of appreciation ripped through my walls. My posture collapsed, face in hands, I wept because I was surrounded by genuine love. I wept because of the magic of this moment. Sniffling with gratitude for whatever force had pulled me here, a point in time 37 years after my birth, among friends who support the ceremony of being human, who are courageous enough to build on the forgotten foundations of spirit, soul, and heart.
What's the takeaway? You are not alone. We all collect callouses as we push through the frictions of life. We become too hard in certain places and then forget the tenderness that got covered up. We become defensive, isolated, and prideful. But, that's not who we are. The human being is a vessel of great compassion, intelligence, and faith. The human being is a temple unlike any other. We worked, in that cave, to touch our own concepts of divinity. We reached into a non-physical plane to make contact with an idea that we knew and know is a reality. Ceremony is about touching the divine, embracing it, and being together with it, not as a concept, not as words in a book, not as a thing to do tomorrow, but through present action. That is good karma.
As a teacher, I am sensitive to advice that comes as generalities and aware of the limitation of their utility. Specifics are gold. Details are diamonds. What moved me to tears during this ceremony in Cusco was the coming together of friends and strangers. We were a braid of sweetgrass, entwined through both our own choices and chance. We burned up our walls in the fire of sincerity and the smoke that come from us was heaven.
The lesson I gathered is, to entwine yourself with the ones you love. Invest the energy to make a regular phone call. Commit to being the one who makes the plans to rendezvous, after so long. Be the gravity, the reaching hand, the living invitation to connect. Be the sacred cave that welcomes all into your walls. Who better than your friends and family represent the divine? When you see them, revere them, hold them, honor them. Just like a fire must be kept, flowers must be given, and songs must be sung for a sacred space to avoid becoming a relic, our relationships need our energy, flowers, and songs as well.
Even more specific; think of two people you love who you haven't spoken to in a while. Make the call. Perform the ritual. Be that Hatha force that demands unity from a world that, while ever-united, seems to drift apart.