Cajamarca, Peru

today i am faced with a decision, and trying to come to an answer through a balance of logic and intuition overwhelms me to the point where i am wishing i were not a person in this moment. to make a decision completely based on my intuition would be ideal of course, but this is something that might take time and time before it comes natural to me. if i could have it my way, this day, i would be, just a body of senses. i could just spend all day sensing things. just recieving things. i would be moved by the current around me, introducing me to new colors to explore, scents to savor. this is perhaps in fact the reality of the moment, but it is difficult to let go of my rationalizing aspect of mind. i also feel very low on energy, and i am searching for the cause. this also is affecting my decision. and i´m not feeling very articulate, so this entry might unfold in kind of messy icing job of cake.
lets see, also my sense of time is out of whack, and i have to concentrate to know where and what i´ve been doing in the past 2 days. i awoke at 5 oclock to catch my bus to cajamarca. i arrived at 130 the following morning...which was yesterday? or..im not sure.
the road was stunning, absolutely stunning, winding and curving through the mountains with a steep deadly drop inches away from the wheels. but the conditions were bad, as is typical of all unpaved roads at this time. it was supposed to be a 13-14 hour trip. and it ended up taking us about 18? there were several landslides that had to be cleared for passage, and so at one point we were stuck for about 4 hours. at least the sun was shining.
we stopped for a breakfast at a basic village community restaurant. i watched a little boy gutting a guinea pig in a big blue basin under a tap of running water. they eat guinea pigs here. yes, it is actually quite popular. i will never. i could not. would not eat a guinea pig. to me, these are cute little animals that live in little cages in homes and get fed by little children who love them and pet them and have named them. actually, i am finding it increasingly difficult to eat any meat at all, perhaps this is becuase of the way it´s prepared, just barely so. when i ask for a dish with chicken, there it is. i can see it. i see the chicken, i dont see food. the dimply skin, a wing, it´s neck, it´s spine even. the other day it was like, i had this little baby chicken on my plate. the whole thing without it´s head. and perhaps also there is another reason that is tied to something deeper which i cannot really explain at this moment, but it is a shifting that i am feeling all chocies and reasons being affected by.
everyone eating greedily sloppily and quickly shovelling spoonfulls of rice and beans and licking chicken grease off fingers. i just asked for a soup. chicken noodle. i recieved a bowl of broth with a good hearty serving of spaghetti and a big, fat leg of chicken, yellow and pink and dimply. i sat at a table with the boy with a thick wavy head of hair and deep slanting eyes. his head was down in his plate but i felt that we ought to talk to each other. for the first time ever i spoke the first word to someone. this sounds so obvious and simple, but i am discovering how awesomely good it feels to just do or say something when i get that little impulse to, instead of saying no to myself. and when he noticed me struggling to separate a little piece of meat from the bone with my spoon, he said, in english. ¨it is better you use your hand.¨ and i just laughed and said yeah. and just left it alone. i wondered if the ladies would put it back in the pot.
we continued to talk on the bus, he asked me permission to sit next to me, and he, boy, he was not so shy as i had thought! he just went right into life, his perspective.
something funny that seems to happen all the time is, when i´m in conversation with a native spanish speaker who is able to speak english, well, he wants to speak in english for me, and i of course feel i ought to be speaking spanish, because how else will i ever learn? it just happens, and so the conversation goes like that, both sides speaking in a language which is not their own. and i think, perhaps it is better this way because this way we are more on the same level, and equal in ability to express things. although i have to admit his english was better than my spanish. well anyway, we got into talking about ayahuasca and his experiences with it, what he has learned about univeral love. he showed me a rock that he kept in his pocket. it was in a roughly shape of a cross, with a spiral sort of fossil looking imprint something in the centre. he traced his finger over the spiral.¨this is the birth of the universe¨he said. ¨and sometimes i play my guitar to these rocks, and i sing. it is worship. in these rocks are the spirit of our ancestors, in the mountains are our ancestors. very powerful.¨
my voice became soft as i listened and responded with my physical body. and i felt, as it is very rare for me not to, that i had been pulled away from my centre, and i was floating, somewhere in between myself and himself. and as positive as the interaction was, i felt drained of energy, and i wondered, and maybe sensed, that eventually he felt this also. i have yet, ever in my life, to recieve any sort of clarity on the way i experience other people. i have experienced moments where i remained connected to myself while totally engaged in someone else, i know this is possibe. but i cannot figure out what happens to my world when it must open to another, and i have only ever created metaphors to express this to myself or others.
while we waited for an enormous piece of rock to get cleared off the road, bus stalled behind a build up line of other vehicles, we got out and stretched our bodies. sat at the edge of the cliff, gazing out into the valley, and the on and on, and i only have a limited repetoire of words to describe nature, it is not that easy for me, and i have probaby used them all up already in this entry, so all i can say is. magnificent.
he was crouched next to me, we watched two yellow butterflys playing with each other down in the tall swaying grasses of the slope, chasing connecting then separating, flittering fluttering beautifully and real. ¨it´s love¨he said. and i knew exactly what he meant, because i saw it too, and i wondered, if maybe i saw even more. i also, am learning about univeral love, i told him. and maybe, the way i phrased it, it sounded more like, i also, am learning how to love the universe. but it´s okay, because the meaning is the same.
i fell asleep on the bus and was jostled awake hours later when finally the bus´s engine started up and we slowly inched and bumped our way forward. raul was back in his own seat, and the rest of the ride was quiet, as the sky darkened the air got cooler. the moon was bright, oh the joy, when it is not hidden by nighttime clouds in the infinite sky, it shone irridescent finger nail clipping, mysteryjoy of the sky. the bus halted at a roadside something, i dont know, some kind of fruit factory where women and children were yelling and screaming out names of fruit holding bags bulging with round ripe limes and oranges and mangos and apples and cheapcheap cheap and everyone rising from their seats, hungry since breakfast, and sliding open bus windows with heads popped out yelling out names of fruit with bills and change in hand, ready for the exchange, me laughing, a bursting moment full of noise, raul asks me excitedly, you want anything? an orange! i cry. naranja! naranja! he shouts out the window, and moments later a pink plastic bag fat and full with oranges comes to the window and into my hands, and i put one sole into his hand. thats all it cost me, 5 oragnes for one sole. thats like, a third of a dollar. and then everyone energized as the bus moved onward into the night, conversations all around me trading fruits as sweet juices oozed and got hands sticky, fingers peeling, and the guy a few seats back yells out to me if i need a knife, proud with his big shimmering blade, me, alright, carving away the tough green peel with my little red pocket knife. raul, still up on his knees in his seat, passes to me a piece of fruit ive never tried before, never heard of, i forget the name. it was delicious like a thick red watermelonmango, and i worked my tongue around the big long strange seeds and flicked them out the window.
i fell back asleep, into those kind of moving car dreams where you´re so barely asleep yet dreaming, and slipping back and forth in a confusing way that you dont know what you´ve dreamt and what really happened, and i was startled and my heart jumped when i became aware of raul bent towards me in the seat next to mine, shhh, he says. ¨if you like, you can stay with my family, there will be a spare room for you, and then you can look for a hotel tomorrow, because at this time, trying to find a hotel...¨ in the moment i could find no reason to protest, and so there i go, shacking up with strange boy i met on a bus, but i knew his intentions were not harmful and that his heart was kind. and so i tied up my shoes which had migrated all the way up under the seats in front of me which i had to awkwardly fetch because the seats were almost fully reclined backwards into me and i pulled on my poncho and followed him down the aisle as he spoke to the driver, telling him where to let us off.
the home of his aunt and uncle was quite nice, and i could see they were a family well off. there actually did not happen to be a spare room for me but i gratefully accepted the couch anyhow, this his sleepy cousin prepared for me. i closed my eyes and i could hear the scrubscrubbing of teeth being brushed in the bathroom down the hall after raul said goodnight to me and disappeared.
for breakfast, sat at a little table with his aunt who had the same slanting eyes and those sparkling of his lighthearted uncle. there was a thick warm drink that tasted sort of like a rice pudding which apparenty was made of the same thing that beer comes from, he said..hmm. wheat? it was very tasty and filling and i also gobbled up lots of little white buns, slopping spoonfulls of jam into the crumbling space torn through with knife. and i thanked her very much, and oh what a sweet boy he was, truly honest and kind. and i took a nice warm shower there in the blue tiled bathroom while he scrubbed his dirty clothes outside in the washing station in the yard, and soon afterwards, he accompanied me in a taxi to the centre of the city where i paid for a room and where i spent the night and today i do not feel like laying out this decision i have to make which contains things like carnaval, an ayahuasca ceremony, geographical route, and time, going and returning. and possibly twice to here and it doesnt make any logical sense and i feel like i need to choose between the ceremony next saturday with raul´s shaman, or carnaval towards the end of the month, which is the very best here in this city than in the whole country, and i think i would choose that, but also i wonder if this is even something i actually have to decide and will it not just work itself out without my scrambling mind?
well, thats all for now.