It´s time to move on from the hope of transmitting everything that´s happened in the past few weeks… For now I´ll do it through a backlog of pictures and a few words (it should likely be noted that I have to hike down a very small mountain to reach internet, which only occasionally wants to process my photos/posts. There´s another internet place in the back room of a tiendita across a field and through a marsh, but it tends to be filled with teenage boys uninterested in moving on).  Listening to the song ¨Waterbound¨ in this Cusco internet café (through the blessing of Angie´s iPod!), the old familiar music pulling me back to a longing for the home I know, though I´m not quite sure on which side of the States that´s located anymore… But I´m thriving in the mountains. In my next 4 days off I´ll likely be moving through Pisac and Lares, climbing up into vertical ruins and seeking space to write and reflect. The group dynamic has sometimes been difficult for me, but there is good magic in it when we´re all attentive, and always pockets of recognition between individuals- time away will re-center me, I think.

So.

Before leaving Chincha we performed for both women´s shelters, the one with 20 girls who are mothers as a result of their abuse and one with 80 girls just down the road in a walled-off compound. As with a few of the recent places where we´ve done one-time workshops and performances, performing for the latter shelter was a real challenge- in the goodbye throng after the show I wondered if we were just another disappearing force in their lives. Perhaps I have to believe in the power of creative transmission and connection even when the interaction cannot be long-term. Our work with the first shelter felt far more profound, given our that the girls had entrusted us with their painful stories and dreams for the future throughout our repeated visits.

What next… We performed the impossible task of leaving Mayten and her kids behind- I had to turn off something in myself to say goodbye to Xiomara, Jenny, Paloma… I found myself promising to return and know that that must be the case, to see all of them again and especially to work with Mayten´s girls at the shelter through creative movement that fosters self-esteem. We talked briefly about choreographing a fire dance along those lines… I think a lot about where I want to bring this work, this weaving together of my desires to move and see and work with young women and build community…

Before we left, Mayten asked us, ¨Walk this dusty road with me.¨ Her work is about walking together in the path towards progress, seeing each other as valuable individuals no matter our stories. Happiness to her is sharing what she can with her loved ones: the gift of her other loved ones. I am so honored to have walked on that dusty road, though the road changes.

Now that we´re in Cusco (skip over the 20-hour bus ride) it´s more like, ¨Walk this muddy road with me…¨ The mud echoes the current fate of Huarcarpay, a flood-devastated village Mayten sent us to work with- the texture of the soil means something when it links me to the children we´ve worked with, their homes washed away, disintegrating in the river valley, replaced by blue tarps and a concrete place to play. A school built with pride over 8 years flattened by the river´s afterthought. Do you remember the news coverage of the floods stranding tourists from getting into Machu Picchu? Huarcapay is the other side of the ¨tragedy¨ of travelers having to pay double for a bottle of water. Now that the railroad has been repaired, PeruRail is only allocating 20 or so seats a day to Aguas Calientes locals, pushing for a restoration of the tourist boom.  We´re skipping full-on circus work in the area (buying into the tourist racket didn´t sit well with our mission) in favor of walking the tracks with whatever workshop supplies and fire toys we can carry on our backs.

Did I mention how our last workshop with the Huacarpay kids was cut off by a gringo-led mass in the tent next door? Not sure what the politics are of a gringa pointing the ¨gringo¨ finger… On Easter Sunday we arrived in the afternoon, our freaky circus full of pagan tricks and fire dancing closing out the day of Resurrection. Rocks from the Catholic kids´altar may or may not have been moved to hold down our PVC backdrop… Beyond our basic setup, we improv our way through what we find- in the Huanda community of Pisac there´s a clowning workshop in the burning sun and a pulsera/faldita-making workshop in the tiny classroom (the boys are easily convinced that wrist tutus are required for any clown worth his salt). Photos forthcoming of one of the boys still wearing his pulsera (pulcera?) on the pickup truck we all hopped onto for a ride into town. Yesterday we winged it through a session at a local orphanage after 3 of our troupe fell ill- throw together 3 hats, some bubble solution, facepaints, juggling clubs, fire toys, and a Limeño sound system, and no one will notice you´re not performing the show you worked on for 3 weeks straight.

I´m dancing with fire much more now, choreographing a real torch dance with Mumu, practicing the fans in the goddess trio number, stepping in to hold the fire swords I have my eye on mastering. And then there´s the rope dart… Through a serendipitous series of events we found ourselves living in a casita maybe 100 yards from the Temple of the Moon, an Incan ruin you can reach via Incan road… Thankfully we´re far removed from the tourist-heavy melee of central Cusco. For me a backyard of rising land rather than travel agencies spells out freedom. We spun fire just below the temple on the night of the full moon… What can I say? There´s vast power here.

I climb up out of the marshy soil near the stream, past the laundry drying on rocks, up into the hills wrapped in small-scale crops that echo the shape of the land and are interspersed with wild flowers and dozens of types of mint. No geometric monocultures here in the mountains. Up and up, past the sacred sites demarcated only by my intake of breath when I walk them, past the vast carved-out basin that´s become my spot for sitting quietly, up past jagged rock outcroppings and eucalyptus groves, orchards woven into the half-wild land, the caves where owls fly out of rocks in the night, up and up and up to the circular rock ruin that feels like a crown set down gently by the constellations. The sky whirls around and there are storm systems flung towards every end, and when the sun is out it hits you fiercely, and when the clouds cover it the helados nick the heat from your skin and leave you very human and held and alone and part of the animate landscape that opens out and out… The Sacred Valley behind and the South Valley before, the light playing crazy slow tricks across the sky and when the clouds are gone there are the Andes piercing up so much higher and so far away. When the clouds clear completely I see that one peak is twice as high as I´d thought, and I suddenly understand why people make pilgrimages until their knees are bloody.

Speaking of which, it´s time to get off this computer and into the hills. More recent Cusco photos will likely surface after I take my days away.

Much love.