Pretty Gentle

There are many worse ways to spend an afternoon than wobbling around the ancient walls of pretty Cusco while the sun lazes along its old cobble roads with you. Inca stonework fits together in perfect patchwork shapes—chunky, thick boulders sculpted precisely to match each other and snuggle together tightly enough to withstand earthquakes. It's amazing how they did it without hard metal tools, let alone moving the blocks without wheels.

This was very a soothing little time at the end of my trip, after all the heavy stories and long, exhausting bus rides. I found all the shapes and lines quite satisfying the way they lined up, although still a bit wonky in places. As I was feeling, maybe?

Here, the light seems to feel its way long the alleyways. I suppose in England our homes and offices are made of different materials, and the streets are wide, and interrupted by gardens, so the light does not bounce back and forth in the same way. Our weak light is diffused very easily. Here in the little roads of Cusco, the sun is quite strong even in winter, and there are reflections coming off all sorts of surfaces – polished cobbles, adobe plaster, windows, even from under eaves of houses by late afternoon.

If you ever find yourself in Peru, after other hectic or wild adventures, enjoy pretty Cusco. It is a very lovely, easy place to be and breathe in and out for a while. A gentle foot voyage along its roads can help you find a way through all the stirrings that travel in far off lands tends to do to a person.

Pretty, and gentle.

{Today's Soundtrack: Fanfarlo - If It Is Growing}

Revolutions

Revolving. 

It is really helpful to know what it is you revolve around.

• What do you revolve around?

It is possible to define certain axes – family, friends, people who are at the heart of things; beliefs which move you to action in the first place; dreams that stretch your heart out to horizon places. Revolve around the thoughts that you always have when you walk in a certain place; a prayer you say every day. Revolve around what you know of yourself, in the space you create so as to be yourself. Revolve around patience and kindness for yourself and your slowness to settle, and around love for the gentle others that give you shelter to wrestle whatever has come up on the journey. Revolve around a routine.

Necessary axes stop the wheel working itself off the cart. Revolving around these, you recall why you agreed to an adventure in the first place.

And there are also revolutions. 

• What revolves around you, cropping up time and again?

As you revolve, what things in your life come around with some frequency? A wise old chap once described the spiritual journey for me not as a straight line, but as an upwards curling spiral. You can expect to arrive at familiar points in life where the same issues or themes seem to crop up, but you have grown in the meantime so you have new perspective. Pay attention to these themes while they roll around with you. They exist to shape you up in a unique way and build your particular character, as you were made to be. That's what the wise old man suggested anyway.

And then there is breakthrough revolution. This is all about life appearing where there seemed to be none. 

• Where do you see breakthrough?

These children playing and smiling – knowing where they have come from, this is good breakthrough. In Peru, revolution looks like happy kids. They are safe, and get to revolve around loving people, steady routines of meals, singing lessons and playtimes. Those smiles are what keep the loving people going in their tough work. 

Home again after a huge and beautiful adventure, these stories are amongst the things I revolve around too. And of course, because the whole thing has sent my head and heart into a spin, I'm going around the revolutions with nearest and dearest who were there when the wheel started moving in the first place.

What are your revolutions all about?

{Today's Soundtrack: Me, slightly in love - My Funny Valentine}

Perspectives

Another heart, at my feet when I get home to England.

A mark at point A, and a mark at point B. Another heart-shaped mark, connecting to a long line of others.

Point A exists, implicitly different from its counterpoint; B as it is, imbued with the fragrances of everything growing on the path towards it. The journey takes time, and in time things grow and flower. Many things are expressed, and poured out - water on seeds and saplings, life where there was none. It is a sacrificial journey and the seed of A dies to give life to B, bloom and bower.

Perpetually moving on.

A wonderful transformation from a nothing to a something; a great, precious, shiny treasure of a thing.

"Mi precioso."

This 'welcome home' heart reflects something not in the picture, and as much as I move from point A to point B, on return from this amazing Peruvian adventure I rest with one conclusion - B is not the end, but it is a beautiful resting point. There is more to come, but right here B glimmers with a poor, yet delightfully romantic, reflection of whatever that turns out to be.

I am so glad of this adventure, even though it has turned many things upside-down (how jesus of it). I went to Peru knowing nothing and come back bursting with thoughts and ideas. One thing's for sure - being on home turf (or tarmac) amongst familiar people and places is the best place to be, and I feel sure these are the best companions with whom to chart the next leg. That's home, and this is where perspective comes.


{Today's Soundtrack: The Cinematic Orchestra - To Build a Home}

My Heart in the Hills

So, some days of living in the mountians - what shall I tell you?

Maybe I could tell you about these Inca roads and their relentless steep ascents to 4000m through wilderness trails and gurgling jungle streams; subtle colour spectrum which seems simple but in fact leaves out no hue and changes with every cloud or gust. I could muse over reflected light from snow-capped mountains, rivers tumbling and washing away concerns far down the mountain. And I could talk about arriving at Machu Picchu's Sun Gate in time to watch a beautiful sunrise over the ancient city, spoilt by grating noisy tourists taking ages to make good their touristic vision in endless group photographs. (A place to engage in mystical serenity that was not.) Further, the ruins and their incomrehensible age against precision like a child's lego construction, all the while sun streaming hot through hazy atmosphere.

There would be loads of stories, our suffering limbs, lovely trek leader Poncho, Jacob and Jenny getting engaged, llamas, coca tea, incredible porters who made our sleeping and eating totally smooth by running with enormous loads all the way - they make us look so lightweight. And some of them run in sandals made out of tyres.

But apart from all of these wonderful experiences, for me the most pressing discovery was how much heart there is in the wilderness of those truly high up places. There is a perfect soundlessness in those breathless heights, where no wheels or wires exist and the only audible movement when you stop walking is air against rough mountain grass. Choosing to be apart from our so-called life lines, a new space for other, deeper life emerges. In the right company, we all found a better attention to life even if in solitude, just yourself.

Gentleness, kindness, patience, peace, endurance for the body to climb, mind to commit and the soul to encounter proper Creator love.

Space, and serenity.

At the top of each peak sits a cairn. We don't put our stones on top, but add them to the side - not conquering, but contributing. How can we conquer the hills when they hold our hearts so lovingly whilst we clamber hard, scrambling further than we've ever been? And how do we even dare to conquer? We are invited into the story, bravely offer whatever we can and discover this effort is worthy and welcome after all. It's difficult to explain, but it felt like things made more sense in a deep down way than normal. And it did not feel complicated.

Not sure if I left my heart in the hills, or discovered that's where it's been all along, safe and sound.


{Today's Soundtrack: William Fitzsimmons - Beautiful Girl}

The Mystery Machine

We have spent almost as much time on this bus as off it in the last few days. The american team arrived on Sunday and we came to a town called Anduhuaylas to work with Paz y Esperanza there. They chose this machine as our chariot.

(August 5th)
5am call. Bus for 5 hours to who knows where. We pass through a town, and headlights reveal men pissing openly in the streets and rats strung up from telegraph wires. Depressingly filthy.

8am. Trundling upwards through yellow ochre landscape as sun rises; reminds me of the moors except those don't have enormous, beautiful eucalyptus trees, and we just keep going higher, and higher, and higher. The road is rough, and the bus rattles like constant percussion.

9am. For an age we are under the cloud, then in it, and then breaking through. Little moments of sun happen on my face and it feels happy.

10am. Arrive in a village called Chaccarampa, which is so high up and draped over the top of a mountain, and does feel like a roof of some sort. We are so high up now, slightly breathless. The sky is deep blue again, with pure white clumps of cloud. After us and the bus have been rattled to pieces on rough roads, this village offers wild tranquility.



The Venture Expeditions team was helping build a wall in the village, and organise a small library that's been put in for the education of the kids. They also showed us a nursery they're pulling together on the side of the hill where previously there was nothing, while we gathered round amongst the kids to listen about the work, eat potatoes and drink agualita - a sugary herbal tea they cook up in big pots with whatever's available. The buildings are made of mud bricks, earth floors, corrugated tin roofing. It is basic.

The people here live a very simple life, but maybe because of that they notice something else that the rest of us don't. They have a sheen to their faces and a gleam in their eyes that I haven't seen anywhere before.



El Pastor of The Church at High Altitude (actually, I don't think that's its real name) looks like a campesino, but he spends so much time in prayer he is permanently smiling with shiny cheeks and tell tale crows feet, eyes always half closed ready to go.

"Gracias Papa."

Taking photographs of these people and the work Paz does with them I am feeling overwhelmed, and feel very far from home, not because of anything bad but because I've never seen a shine like it and it has thrown me. Completely inspiring, yet hard to digest because it's so raw.

I have nothing familar to cling on to whilst figuring it out, but as El Pastor may say, 'my soul finds rest in God alone'. Living simply in the most remote of places, able to see something we don't.

After our journeys in the big green bus, this shall forever be my Mystery Machine motto:

The more we learn, the less we know.

Bubbles

Living life in bubbles. We all live in our bubbles, to an extent. I've been a little outside mine on this trip, but its an adventure, and my choice.

Most of us create some kind of space around us where the edges are very defined and familiar. We make patterns in home and work and relationships which are cyclicle - routines we like, that mostly we have chosen and developed. Even when a thing occurs that upsets the apple cart, enough stability exists elsewhere in the bubble to help us recover. Although we give them a bad name, bubbles can be helpful.

La Casa Del Buen Trato is a brilliant, necessary bubble. I visited on Friday and Saturday (that horrible night bus over the Andes with vomiting children and a giant snoring man) to make some photographs for them, and here my photography work really began.

La Casa del Buen Trato - The Home of Good Treatment - sits peacefully in the mountains, away over the peaks of the Andes north east of Lima. A huge contrast from the dusty, hectic streets of town, it really is a place of peace and rest, and safety. This is a shelter where women come to flee domestic violence, seeking solace with their kids. There are teenage mums who fell pregnant through rape and incest who need support raising their kids and also space to be kids. And there are a number of kids of all ages who have been abused and need protection. It is the only shelter of its kind in Peru.

There are a few female staff whom the children call 'mamita' - an affectionate term for mother. They are strong women, no joke. There is a great tenderness between the women and girls, comfort in identifying with each other, sometimes in hushed conversation but often silently and with no need for explanation.

The staff say that despite the robbing of life that has happened to these people, when they see the children laugh and play, that is the glint of life they are fighting for and it gives them strength to carry on their work.

This is a safe, necessary bubble.

I saw a couple of times a mamita sitting quietly with a girl in the garden, struck with the openness and gentleness of the place that these talks are able to happen so freely. No one interrupts, no one points, everyone understands. Everyone needs this.

At one point, I stood in the fierce altitude sun listening to the eerie noise the warm wind made rushing through pine trees high up there. All is being blown clean, a powerful force at work up there in a spectacular location with rich blue skys and pumped up white clouds.

This is a righteous bubble - the home of good treat - sitting on a high hillside, quietly and privately revolutionary. And it shines too, as all good bubbles do.


{Today's Soundtrack: Scott Matthews - Myself Again}

First Movement

[Later that evening, a walk with Fiorella and Neri]

Turns out Megaphone Man was not harking independence after all, but revving up for 'Festival de Danzas' in the huge yet empty town square. Panpipes a-go go!

We stood in a tight, jigsaw fit of bodies around a makeshift arena while kids of all shapes, sizes and rhythm contributed traditional, regional peruvian equivalents of jazz hands. What do we have? Glee, or country dancing, and I felt sad as I always do that our own traditional song and dance is so lifeless by contrast to most other places I've travelled. The stiff geography teacher saw to that, ensuring this dance was not, and never would be, a party, and spoiled many a wedding for me since. This, however was pure joy: colour, glisten, ruffles and weaves, drums and strings and pipes, and I watched the little faces of these kids as they proudly danced in beautiful dresses, jumped and tapped and wiggled the stories and folklore of their country region by region.

Freddo the 'Inca Fotografica' dipped around with his beat up old Pentax 35mm film camera; stewards held back the pressing crown, 'por favor, por favor', and in our comfortable, cosy fit we all swayed along with infectious rhythms, beaming - luminoso. We left, but the man with the megaphone was still going when I woke in our hotel room at 4.30am.

The overture turned out to be its prophetic self.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

Overtures

[Pisco, 4 hrs drive S of Lima, in a garden]

Cacophony of birdsong in late afternoon, quick fluttering of their little beating wings - like an overly surprised heart - as they fly back and forth over this garden. A soft rustle - plastic bag caught in pale pink geraniums, then a cockerel experimenting with unusual (for him) times of day.

Loud radio amplified off bare brick and plaster, one man's enthusiastic spanish commentary, echoing so he is heard one, two, three times slightly out of sync; the sandy slice and slop of a builder making a wall on buildings that never seem to be finished. A child's hooting toy, nearer, then further, and a man talking on the phone in spanish, leaning out over his balcony because presumably the TV is too loud in his hotel room. Another radio, and another, one playing music rather like a caberet show on a cruise liner and their echoing sounds all coagulate; careful shuffle of a man in flip flops carrying a bag of potatoes. Band saw, car alarm, pigeon, plastering. That man's commentary went, now returns, perhaps not a radio after all but someone driving around leaning out of his car window with a megaphone.

The dusty walls play tricks with sound.

One of the birds is wolf-whistling, and maybe this connects beating wings to beating hearts again; 'Alright my bird?' as we say in Bristol. Yes, alright thanks.

It will be a long wait for enough hush to hear the cactii grow, but someone did think to leave this chair. Finally, I hear my own long sigh through my nose, resting, wondering how this overture will play out in coming days, intrigued that so much noise could be relaxing.


{Today's Soundtrack: yours}

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

Peru01 : Funny Vinaigrette

[Yesterday - In Transit]

Here in New York it is around 3pm, though my body thinks it nearly 8. I've so far eaten two very bad meals, watched a terrible film (Paul) and an amazing film (Jane Eyre), sat next to a sweet helpful person, a weird self-help person, a french couple joined at the tongue, and several cute peruvians. Waiting on tarmac to take off for Lima, a baby two rows back is beginning to forget how much it wants to ball all the way to Peru and I'm trying to remember my original motives for making this trip.

*

Waiting at border control in NY I was accosted twice by officials. New Yorkers in uniform always look like they're from CSI, so I then felt like an extra on their film. 'May I see you passport, ma'am?' I think the border staff were bored, and playing games with the girl in the pink scarf.

My flight connection was ridiculously tight - reclaiming baggage and hurling it back at a quiet soul by a hole in the wall, any hole, sprinting with elbows hard at work, humourless security officials scowled more than usual when in panic I reached into the x-ray machine to get my bag out. No dawdling here, not least because as I crashed through check in, a round woman looked up and drawled, "hm, someone's musty." Oh help, I am sorry. That'll be your east coast humidity.

I wonder how it looked, a curly girl pounding marble floors, flying in flip flops with backpack straps fluttering like streamers, but I made it to the gate with time to spare, then the smell of fear sloped off and found someone else to play with.

The whole thing makes me eager to get to Lima, but entertained by this journey, terribly glad I have a small pack of wet wipes to hand.

*

[Today - Hostel in Lima]

Breakfast, in a cellar café that has forgotten how mood lighting can enhance eating pleasure, we work out universal communications that equal coffee and eggs. Trying to remember not to lisp my S's here. Grathias. The few moments before you really get going, you are - frustratingly - your only jet-lagged frame of reference, and then a boy quietly leaves a vinagrette bottle in front of me and walks away. Dipping my finger in and tasting it is the only way to work out that's the coffee, and that tips into there, and those words mean this, and thankfully the sounds up there imply Fiorella's arriving and she will ease me out of this disorientation.

These are the moments before you go out and start discovering, loaded with anticipation, apprehension, wonders and curiousity.

I don't feel at all brave, and yet sitting here with my funny vinaigrette my adventure has tentatively, quietly, already begun.


{Today's Soundtrack: Great Lake Swimmers - Where in the World Are You Now}

Endurance Loving

This summer, I'm travelling to Peru with US charity Venture Expeditions, to work with vulnerable, poverty-stricken communities all over Peru. The plan is to hook up with a project in Lima called Paz Y Esperanza, and I will work with them to document their fantastic work. I'm also running photography workshops with some local kids so as to give them a voice, and hopefully a small foot up out of the desperate injustice that holds them in poverty, able to communicate on another level so they may have their basic needs met.

So far, I have funded the trip myself, but it is an awful lot of money. I still have another £1000 to raise and am looking for sponsorship, and so have committed to doing something totally out of my comfort zone to raise these funds.

(At this point, if you need to read no further, please click this link to Venture Expeditions, select 'Lizzie Everard - Maccu Picchu' from the 'sponsor a participant' drop down list, and follow the prompts to donate. And DO leave a comment so I can thank you!)

However, if you're curious to know more, do read on.

So, outside my comfort zone behaviour, that will be the Endurance Life 'Classic Quarter', just three little weeks away now on June 25th.

"What do you mean, Classic Quarter?" they chorus. 

The Classic Quarter is a brilliant race along a stunning part of the Cornish coastline organised by Endurance Life. 44 miles of cliff-top trail link the UK's most southerly point to the most westerly – Lizard Point to Land's End. It is utterly beautiful, but to run it you have to have rock hard nerves and a screw loose.

My friends James (pictured below) and Andrew (above), built like greyhounds, are running the entire length solo. That will be 44 miles each, up and down near vertical scrambles in places, across white sand on perfect surf beaches, then miles more boggy trail. Convention says will be one of the hottest days of the year. They appear to have more than one screw loose, but they have been practising. JJ here is smiling, yes, but I think he may also be hallucinating at this point of the race:

I—who have also been practising but am not built like a greyhound, rather a well-ripened pear—also appear to have a screw loose because I am running a leg of the race, although in relay, and with excellent team mates Fran and Sonja. For the non-greyhounds among us, running 11 miles (17.5km) on the final leg, the most gruelling stretch, will be  . . . h a r d. This leg has the highest total elevation, steep up and down most of the way. Setting off from Lamorna Cove around 2pm, round past Porthcurno and the Minack Theatre, I hope to finish at Lands End sometime around 4.30pm, give or take. Here's where you come in...

Please, sponsor me for running 11 miles like a dehydrated loon bag on impossible terrain?

I have run a half marathon before, very generously sponsored in aid of Street Children in South Africa. I cannot tell you how much, at times, putting one foot in front of the other relied completely on knowing good money was going to people who needed it. It was one of the most difficult things I have ever done. Now we are ramping it up. Please, dig deep and give generously to this project! 

To sponsor my Classic Quarter run and make the Peru trip happen, please click this link to Venture Expeditions, select 'Lizzie Everard - Maccu Picchu' from the 'sponsor a participant' drop down list, and follow the prompts to donate. And DO leave a comment here so I can follow up and thank you! Venture can itemise who has given what, so I will be able to acknowledge receipt. 

As I have already paid for the flight, if you would like to contribute towards that specifically or to some of the camera equipment I will need, please contact me here. Thank you.

This is going to be the toughest run I've ever done.

On the day itself, please do come and cheer, it is a beautiful part of the world, and if you have an ambulance, bring that too. Land's End is dead easy by car.

{Today's Soundtrack: Golpfrapp - A&E}