Sacred Openings

The Spanish “conquerors” called it the Gran Cañón. They understood nothing. Their successors may have surpassed them in ignorance and exploitation. Colonial land surveys, expropriations, and irrigation projects did not merely cut through the landscape; they also severed the timelines of the Indigenous peoples. The Río Colca, once wild and unregulated, was tamed, channeled, controlled—and with it the spaces of memory of the Collagua and Cabana.

We lay together on the warm earth, shaped by tectonic tension and erosion. In doing so, we joined a community of believers for whom everything here was sacred.

Twilight blue veiled the glowing red cliffs. The shadows of ravens traced circling patterns over our campsite. That, too, was a system of signs.

The air still shimmered with the day’s heat, yet the cool of night was already stirring in the valley. Wind moved through your hair as if the canyon itself had reached out to touch it.

“Time,” you said, “is not a line. It is sedimentary. It trickles.”

Everything felt like grace and good fortune. I loved the sense of belonging to something primordial.

“Do you hear that?” you whispered.

“Pukaqay.”

The Collagua word for sacred openings in their agricultural terraces and irrigation systems—passages to the underworld, points of emergence for humanity.

The Collagua believe that we originate from an ancient layer of the earth and at the same time from an order that is constantly changing. The Colca Canyon is their Pukaqay. Where the Río Colca cuts deepest lies the rupture between past, present, and future.

You spoke of Ayni, the principle of reciprocal giving and receiving that holds the world together—people, mountains, rivers, ancestors, and deities bound in inescapable relation.

In the ancient Andean cosmology there are three worlds: Hanan Pacha, the upper world of sky and gods; Kay Pacha, our world of the here and now; and Ukhu Pacha, the lower world, source of life, water, and ancestors. In the Colca Canyon, the boundaries between these realms lose their impermeability.

Even though I had not yet found the courage to sing to you the song of my most secret expectations, I nevertheless knew that with you I would go further than with those who came before you.

The Havasupai in Arizona tell of a people who once lived in harmony with the blue water. The river was a being—a divine presence. In this cosmology, the world came into being through a union of water, wind, and stone. Humanity joined as spirit. Thus emerged a duality of nature and mind. Those who honored this pact could hear the language of stones.

Every layer was an epoch. A world age. An abandoned attempt. A relinquished order. Our shared moments evoked a time before everything had been separated—before bodies were distinct from earth, water from spirit, humans from their ancestors.

“When we care without claiming, when we listen without taking, wisdom opens within us,” you said.

Thus our silent dialogue became a ritual—an extension of a transcontinental walkabout. You were not случайly in my life. We were tasks for one another. I asked you to attend gently to my center. Gratitude rose to my lips, cosmic in scale. I felt supported and grounded in your presence, as if anchored within a larger whole. What moved between us no longer felt personal, but elemental—like breath, like rhythm, like a current older than language.

We received each other. Later, as we lay silently side by side, I felt, for the first time in my life, truly seen and understood.