Breathing Silence

Were you asleep? Your breath was even, your hand held mine very tightly. I closed my eyes. And then I saw him. An old man, wrapped in a garment of bark and leather, his silver hair artfully braided and adorned with condor feathers. Leaning on a staff, he stood on a rocky outcrop above the dizzying abyss of the Colca Canyon.

“You are standing at the edge of the Fourth World,” the shaman proclaimed. “This is not a dream. This is remembrance.”

He led me into a circle of spiral patterns drawn in the sand.

“The worlds change when human beings lose the right measure.”

He touched the center of the spiral with his staff.

“You have come to remember. You are welcome.”

Behind him appeared a stag with seven tines to its antlers, followed by a serpent with copper eyes.

“These are your witnesses.”

The old man gestured toward my heart.

“You have forgotten what you knew before you could speak. But the canyon remembers your path through the worlds.”

I wanted to ask whether this was a trial, but the old man shook his head before I could speak. And then I was lying in your arms again beneath the stars. In the first light of morning, a farmer appeared with his mule. He said:

“The place has recognized you again.”

From a pouch he drew a bundle, wrapped in bark and tied with grass, and placed it before us.

“For the way back. You will need it.”

Sacred Topography

The morning wind stirred up dust. The sun scorched jagged rock noses that rose like moai above the Colca River. Barely a meter wide, a tongue of rock pushed out over a sheer drop—a narrow, unsecured platform above the abyss. One false step, one moment of inattention, and our adventure would have been over. For a long time I had believed that nothing could move me more deeply than the songlines of the Anangu and the breathing silence of the Australian desert. I imagined myself on the trail of my own Dreaming, traveling in the spirit of the Walkabout. Perhaps that was presumptuous, or merely smug—but I was in my early twenties, and no one spoke of illegitimate cultural appropriation. The Latin American canyon revealed to both of us a sacred topography.

“We’re on a transcontinental walkabout,” I announced. You nodded. That knowledge lived in you too. I had merely spoken our shared thought aloud.

You were simply there—hyper-present, like all the natural dolmens around us.

The Colca Canyon did not seem merely shaped; it seemed to have breathed, over millions of years, with a patience beyond imagination. The earth yawned open, as if a karate god had split the rock with the edge of his hand to reveal the innermost core of the world.

*

The water of a seasonal tributary shimmered like liquid turquoise, unreal in its beauty. Someone had poured the sky into the canyon.

The meltwater stream meandered in a bed between walls glowing like the moon. The water was unexpectedly cold, milky with dissolved limestone. Tiny eddies played around my ankles. Like Adam and Eve, hand in hand, we crossed the barrier of cold. The current developed a powerful pull; we could not surrender ourselves to the river without care.

A waterfall shot over a natural cascade with moss-covered edges into an elemental basin. We sat there on a flat stone and enjoyed a fierce shower. I smelled oregano, thyme, and mint.

Even then, I had known for a long while that you truly saw me. Your perception went far beyond my outward effect; it grasped my inner movements. You knew the erogenous zone of my soul.

“I think I want to tell you something here and now,” I whispered above the roar of the water, “something that will forever be bound to this shower.”

You merely nodded. Had you pressed me, I would have recoiled. But you never pushed. And precisely because of that, it was possible.

“I have—” I faltered, searching for words that didn’t sound kitschy, and certainly not wrong. “I feel it so strongly that I can trust you. Even with things I’ve never told anyone.”

You looked at me. There was absolutely nothing in your gaze that warned me to be cautious. I saw only your wild openness and that quiet knowing I never fully understood.

“I trust you so much that I…”

You answered in the language of your tenderness. You pulled me off the stone; at once we were caught by the current, torn apart, forced through a course of whirlpools that guided us roughly along. We were playthings. Elemental force bore down on us and threatened to swallow us whole.

I wasn’t afraid for a second. Somewhere in that raging wildness, you were there—and then we were together again. We kissed passionately before deliberately, theatrically stranding ourselves on a rock separated from the shore by a narrow channel.

“You don’t have to explain anything to me,” you said. I leaned into you. You held me gently, the way one holds something precious. I wanted to go on. Every time I opened my mouth, only half a sentence emerged. A disguised turn of phrase. An arabesque of shyness.

For days we had been discussing the measure of love. Why not continue the conversation on a rock rising out of the Río Colca?

The stone was warm, almost hot. Had we not been chilled, we would scarcely have borne the charge. I loved seeing how quickly you slipped back into our favorite game. Our bodies dried in an instant. I watched glittering lines form on your skin and mine. Everything in me pressed toward touch. The measure of our love could no longer be determined in that moment. It was no longer you and I—it was what became entwined and went beyond us both.