Letters to Pachamama

A few days ago my beloved and I had the opportunity to visit Amantani, the highest island within Lake Titicaca. Atop Amantani are twin mountains with ceremonial sanctuaries built for Pachamama and Pachatata. The locals told us each new year there is a dance-race down from these sites. If Pachamama wins, there will be a good agricultural yield that year. Conversely, if Pachatata´s representatives win, the yield will be poor. Hehe. It´s good to see Matriarchal leanings this day in age as the scales find balance in a world long dominated by Patriarchy.

Ini and I dowsed to decide where to take our travel this year. We wanted to go to India, as both of us had felt drawn there for years. We each have spent time meditating and yoga-ing, and, truly, I have felt a draw toward India and it´s pèople, inexplicably, mysteriously. Yet when we dowsed, including South America, we heard: go to Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador. Oddly enough, it´s been 3 months and we haven´t made it out of Peru! It´s offered us PLENTY and it´s just turned out this way. Upon reflection, I pieced together the dots and intuit that we are drawn now to Peru to integrate PACHAMAMA, the andean concept of the maternal principle of the cosmos and all life. (For a good reading on Pachamama, check this site.) Many westerners have traveled India-ward to receive and bring back the gifts of its people, it´s meditation, etc. Now is the time to heal the earth-human split, and Pachamama has just the medicine…

It felt like a final leg of our pilgrimage climbing the stone cobbled pathway from the bottom streets and terraces of Amantani, a thousand or more feet to the top of one mountain where the round stone sanctuary of Pachamama stands. The door was locked and ceremonial accoutrement scattered throughout the insides of the sanctuary, as if just left out. I sat on the edge of the rock structure, looked out over Lake Titicaca, and these letters poured from my heart:

Pachamama, you give us everything. It is your nature. We couldn’t live without you. My heart is completely open to you because your heart is completely open to me.

When I am up here I hear, Wren, this is the end of your trip. You have come here to Peru to amalgamate me into your being because a complete understanding of me was missing before. And now you have seen my people, you have witnessed their chacras (farming fields), their terraces new and old. You have seen their ways of selling in the markets, their abundance of food on the street, their diversity and also their poverty and hungering after western things. You, who have a western voice and western podium, speak these things. Embody me, embody pachamama and spread this love throughout the earth. Your tutelage, your lesson is complete. Go in peace.

And I say, pachamama I love you. I thank you for your peoples. For their hearts and ways toward you. For seeing this relationship, tasting its fruits, for witnessing the firstfruits of the land. For being so blessed. I carry back this worship. I carry you back. I am now a carrier of pachamama. And I thank you.

My trip here is done now. I have witnessed so much, been given so much. I carry it with me now and can carry this earth-based, ancient, integral wisdom to my peoples. I am a pachamama medicine carrier. Healing the human earth split. We are now free to suck the teet of momma. Amen.

Blessed be,

Wren

Pachamama,

I have clamored toward you since I was a child. You seized me in the jungle and shared with me my true identity. You have humble me on your mountains and blessed me in your valleys. I sing your praises the earth wide. Truly, I am nothing without you. I am your child and I spread this knowledge to the ends of the earth.

In gratitude,

Wren

Pachamama,

Thank you.

And then she replies,

And thank you, my child, for your willingness to see. Carry me with you, in your heart. Your hands are my hands. Show the people my love for them in my abundance. Dance. Smile. Laugh. You are my child. You have made it. Thank you.

 

And then I know, intimately, inexplicably, that the trip has come full circle and it is now time to wrap up loose threads and go home. We have come here to feel Pachamama, to embody her in order to bring her back to our peoples, to have her within ourselves, to make ourselves whole by remembering our union with the earth. And, now, this is finished.

Gracias Pachamama.