We owe everything to the natural world

Continuing from my last post, the heavy energy known as hucha is created in any setting where humans have been.  Including a field of flowers or by the shore of a wide sea, or the ridge of a mountain.

In DC, condos grow like bamboo, each crane feeding on the human-scaled architecture that I fell in love with when I first moved there in the mid-1980s.  Here, the pecking order is as clear in the structures  rising on the sides of hills.

Land invasions leave no trees, just steep hills that turn to mud with the rain.

There is greatness here, often in surprising places.

The beach in La Punta, Callao

I give thanks to the artists and healers, for always elevating the importance of creating beauty in otherwise somber backgrounds.

A woman draws hot water, which she’ll mix with healing herbs; I’ll soak in this mixture for 20 minutes, then lie still, wrapped in a warm sheet and sweat for another 20.

Guinea pigs who live in the same ground as the spa. When fattened up, they’ll be roasted underground, or used in ceremonies, where their manner of deaths portend how to heal the humans. Here too, nature is generous beyond reason.

The more we allow ourselves to play in the world of living energy — testing out what feels right and good to us — the more we’ll naturally be in the flow of things, and when we’re in that place, we naturally release denser energy, and begin to accumulate more lighter energy.

The older parts of Lima display a beautiful sense of balance with the elements

The flow is part of the secret to growing into who you’re supposed to be,  You have to know what helps you get to that flow place.  Sometimes, it’s hard to find.  Other times, as easy as breathing in an ion-rich breeze or appreciating a mural you can only see in the rear-view mirror.

Pamela, demonstrating cobra.  (Yoga doesn’t help everything, but done right, it usually doesn’t hurt.)

Earlier this week, from the bus I spotted a large spray-painted sign that read  “Eres el beso que jamas salio de mis labios” (You are the kiss that never left my lips). It was simply signed “Accion Poetica de Lima” (Poetic Action of Lima).  It felt like a direct message, not for its saccharine quality so much as the reminder of how possible — and powerful — it is for us to create brief moments of unexpected beauty for those we love, and for those we’ll never personally meet.

With any luck, we’ll be able to travel up north this week, so that we can spend the Jewish New Year in a quieter place along the Pacific.  Before long,we’ll head home, back to our normal schedule of moving through the world.  I hope that I can carry with me the profound way of being in the world, that beneath the long rivers of ever-moving cars and mountains of concrete residences, the energy is as alive and flowing as anywhere else.  I’ll try to remember to keep searching for beauty in unexpected places.