Edward Rimachi Yanqui emerged from under the stone archway wearing his hat and leather gaiters. A rock perch aided me in mounting Ollu, or First Star Of The Morning. My abdomen wasn't as strong as it would be within days, but already I imagined myself slinging my leg across that curl of Ollu's back in one clean vault from ground to saddle. Departing the square where Edward and I initially met, we rode up the pitted path behind a mule-drawn cart carrying hay and children. Rain meant the earth was green, and sweet-smelling silence was broken only by the intermittent whinnying of our animals as they warmed into the trail.
Huayqui is blisteringly depressed. Buildings hold an ancient dignity crumbled almost into dust. Pulling away by automobile, I thought never to return. But in those moments looking back at the small settlement cradled in the cup of a benevolent hand of God, I wanted to turn around.
It was incumbent upon me to mirror the quiet of the ranges accommodating myself to Edward's conventions. Dissolving into the mountains with each tread of our Peruvian Pasos, we shed the vulgar expectations of the world.
The daily destination that my guide mapped was less important than the pathways getting us there. Edward mostly floated ahead of me, I followed his every direction. Like Beethoven, he heard only his own music, turning just occasionally to ask if everything was OK. His was the liminal space dividing nature and freedom. He seemed to be in a state of perpetual flow and perfect equilibrium, like a shaman, transitioning continually between real and magical, surrendering to the deities of the high peaks and loosing all consciousness of his commonplace self.
On that beginning afternoon, we reached pre-Incan Yanampampa. Like the site of the 1066 A.D. Battle of Hastings, where two great armies fought for the throne of England, there is not a lot to see here. Yet my eyes salted with tears. I had come from another country to experience the very literal presence of humans in places beyond time such as this. Here was an enchanted garden with real toads in it. Pristine civilizations such as the Wari, Tiwanaku, Moche, Chimu, Paracas, Chavin and Nasca, to name but a few, had arisen independently from influences of other cultures and fallen millennia before the Inca Empire. Their people were artisans, farmers and fishermen. They built elaborate cities which were astrological sites embodying their political ideologies and religious beliefs.
When the moon dropped over the horizon, an alpaca or two would materialized out of the phuyu, a mysterious, “low-altitude” mist that the Runasimi believe holds spirit-power, keeping their land fertile and crops hydrated. At Julia's house, where I'd slept in a loft overlooking the Huascar Valley, it was women and men who appeared in the fields from I knew not where, like phantoms glowing in the predawn light, perhaps on their way down from a high-elevation shepherd's cottage where they had spent the night with their sheep.
Edward and I would eat together in the morning, he more formal if familiar company was in the dining room. Edward is gracious and kind, giving me the better suite at the inn, checking whether the sheets are freshly-laundered and bathroom clean. Once, he treated me to a beer. We sat at dusk overlooking a shimmering, grey-blue lake that exactly reflected the silver-lined escarpment above, neither pool nor palisade aware of their beauty.
When spoken to, Edward answers, even telling me that he sometimes likes to dance and had long ago been in love. But he is relieved to close the door behind himself when all is said and done, no matter how much he knows I want him to linger.
“Time does not exist – we invented it. Time is what the clock says,” wrote Albert Einstein. Phuyu, like steam, swallowed what was ahead, enveloping beast and body in ambiguity. Edges softened, then disappeared. Waqra Pukará was a shipwreck whose twin towers became beacons in a watery world where shoreline and sky merged and time was cast into the sea.
But horses know the answer. “Vamos?,” my guide would ask after saddling up, “Shall we go?” Then every day became a universe, with mountains, ravines and rivers as ancient as Inti, the sun, reciprocating our love for Pachamama, Mother Earth.
Edward wore the same jeans repeatedly. Like the American poet and novelist, Jim Harrison, all that Edward really wanted was nothing between his and his horse's hide – “because we were never meant to get off.” All his years had been immersed in the high sierras, an education as awakening as any there could be.
We hoped for sight of a condor overhead – to hear the sound of its beating wings. Shifting shoals of wild vicuña, mammals similar to alpacas, surfaced over undulating hills. Orchids bloomed among the weeds. Insects swirled for purposes of food and sex, a refreshed mindset persuading me they were not interested in biting.
Sometimes, Edward loosened his feet from the stirrups, dropping his reigns as we summited steep embankments. His confidence exuded a connected feeling, like amour, where nothing could possibly go wrong. He had made it his art to experience the blade of grass from the blade of grass, the sky from the sky, knowing that the purpose of life is life.
As we rounded the bend of a last mountain, he on foot with our pack animal following, I mounted on First Star of the Morning, “Waqra Pukará,” Edward exclaimed!
I knew that together we had accomplished something grand.
Equines, mountains and those individuals with enigmatic connections to tall peaks call to me. Edward is building a simple cabin where I'll be able to stay. Returning to Huaqui, I’ll be able to live on his land for months at a time, immersing myself in a forgotten place. I'll have the opportunity to work with a trainer who can teach me all I wish to know about horses, as well as involve myself deeply in pueblo life, meeting villagers on their terms.
It has been said there is no doubt that I can write, that write I will and write I must. All things speak. When I feel separated from the energy of solid ground that fuels my creative force, I will listen to the song of the wind.
Janice Jada Griffin is a graduate of Sotheby’s Institute Of Art in London, a designer and an internationally-sold painter who owned her own art gallery in Portland, Oregon, for a decade. Jada lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she is a broker at Windsor Betts Art Brokerage and Gallery. She is currently writing a book based on her ongoing experiences in Peru. For more information visit www.avant-garde-art.com or email her at soul@avant-garde-art.com.
