"Quenacho" Erik The Flutemaker

It's Official.

I booked the tour today. 7 days. Ollantaytambo Ruins, Huaca Pucllana, Sacred Valley, Sacsayhuman Ruins, Kenko and Tambomachay, Machu Picchu and more. This will feel similar to my Pilgrimage to Guatemala, where I communed with the Indigenous People of Chichipate and learned of a Guatemalan genocide that took place there (Maya Genocide). I have a fascination for how populations or even civilizations disappear-- I explored Poland and Germany to experience the most heinous death camps of all time. I visited the place of Christ's birth, torture and crucifiction. And now, the Spanish conquest of MP.

I was re-baptised in the River Jordan. I rode a camel within feet of the pyramids. I rappelled into a cave of water in the Yucatan. It's the Year of the Fire Horse and I am feeling it!

I took some excerpts from one of my favorite Chiliean poets, Pablo Neruda, from his Ode to Machu Picchu here:

VI

Then up the ladder of the earth I climbed through the barbed jungle’s thickets until I reached you Macchu Picchu. Tall city of stepped stone, home at long last of whatever earth had never hidden in her sleeping clothes. In you two lineages that had run parallel met where the cradle both of man and light rocked in a wind of thorns. Mother of stone and sperm of condors. High reef of the human dawn.

This was the habitation, this is the site: here the fat grains of maize grew high to fall again like red hail. The fleece of the vicufia was carded here to clothe men’s loves in gold, their tombs and mothers, the king, the prayers, the warriors. Up here men’s feet found rest at night near eagles’ talons in the high meat-stuffed eyries. And in the dawn with thunder steps they trod the thinning mists, touching the earth and stones that they might recognize that touch come night, come death.

VII

And yet a permanence of stone and language upheld the city raised like a chalice in all those hands: live, dead and stilled, aloft with so much death, a wall, with so much life, struck with flint petals: the everlasting rose, our home, this reef on Andes, its glacial territories.

VIII

Come up with me, American love. Kiss these secret stones with me. The torrential silver of the Urubamba makes the pollen fly to its golden cup. The hollow of the bindweed’s maze, the petrified plant, the inflexible garland, soar above the silence of these mountain coffers.

IX

In this steep zone of flint and forest, green stardust, jungle-clarified, Mantur, the valley, cracks like a living lake or a new level of silence. Come to my very being, to my own dawn, into crowned solitudes. The fallen kingdom survives us all this while, And on this dial the condor’s shadow cruises as ravenous as would a pirate ship.

X

I question you, salt of the highways, show me the trowel; allow me, architecture, to fret stone stamens with a little stick, climb all the steps of air into the emptiness, scrape the intestine until I touch mankind. Macchu Picchu did you lift stone above stone on a groundwork of rags? coal upon coal and, at the bottom, tears? fire-crested gold, and in that gold, the bloat dispenser of this blood?