Chasing Mountain Magic: Remembering My Time in Cusco

The llama on my left is named Pablo. I know because I asked the women, “Como te llama, de llama?” and though I butchered the grammar, the joke crossed language barriers and the women laughed out loud. Making a word pun in Spanish is one of my favorite memories of this trip.

Darkness had fallen, the sky draped around the Vilcabamba mountains like a mother wrapping her child in a blanket. The inhalation moved air to every cell of my body and as I glanced upward, the deepness of my breath surprised me — as though my lungs were being filled directly from the cosmos. I leaned into the feeling of fullness, allowing my eyes to consume as many stars as possible between blinks. Mesmerizing, brilliant, absorbing, the sheer amount of light pouring down from the night sky was like a fireworks display of astronomical proportions. I couldn’t tell what was moving in the sky and what was my corneas playing tricks.

A snow-capped mountain sloping down into hills and small valleys, filling lakes, and reflecting the spring moon back into the atmosphere. A row of rustic mountain huts. Horses tied to a post. Me, standing there feeling as though I’d been turned inside out — my soul swirling around my skin. Everything felt so magnificent and, instead of feeling small or inferior in comparison, my heart opened to a different reality: it’s all inside of me. The mountains, the galaxies full of dancing plasma, the sky and the moon and the howling echoing in the distance. All the separation I’d put between myself and Life melted away and I was left with only the truth of who I was.