From Vision Quest, to Perú
My friend Tomas and I, in the Pisac town square, one day after my arrival in Perú last week.
“Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from god.”
Last month I enacted a Vision Quest in the Sonoran Desert. A Vision Quest, or Vision Fast, is a pan-cultural rite of passage that has largely been lost in modern times. For millennia, nature-based peoples across the world would send their young adults (after much preparation) out of the village, usually without food or water. Disconnecting from their familiar way of life enabled a deeper connection to oneself, and to nature. The reason for doing this? To bring back a vision of their life’s purpose—a glimpse of the truth at the center of their being, their soul, and the way they would embody that truth to serve their people and the Earth.
My Vision Quest was enacted with the help of the Animas Valley Institute (AVI), with whom I also completed a Soulcentric Dreamwork program in February. It was a four-day fast (water only), with three of those days spent completely alone, without a tent, in the wilderness of eastern Arizona.
While on the quest, you are not allowed to bring books, nor any entertainment. Our guides reminded us that we were not out there to go for hikes, or “wanders” as AVI calls them. No, I was there for one reason only: to pray to the Earth for a vision, a glimpse of my soul purpose, the truth at the core of my being.
The Lakota call this practice Hanbleceya—crying for a vision—a means for a person to “understand better his or her oneness with all things and gain knowledge of the Great Spirit.”
I am not, and may never be, ready to share the visions I received on my Quest.
At least not in words—my work now, I was told by my guides, is to embody these visions, to live them into the world, as honestly and courageously as I can.
However I do feel called to share the sequence of events that led me here, to where I sit typing this entry, in the Sacred Valley of Peru.
• • •
Embarking on my three-month wander
through the desert southwest in January, I consciously chose to unmoor myself from my former life, moving into my vehicle, and sleeping under the stars most nights (or less glamorously, in abandoned parking lots around Tucson). To stay out of the city, but still in community, I found myself doing work exchanges at various off-grid permaculture communes around Arizona.
Extricating myself from the luxuries of western civilization—flush toilets, hot showers, central heating and a/c, throwing things “away,” and eating food prepared by someone else—was challenging and eye-opening, and utterly freeing.
During this time I began to untether from my phone and social media. I bought a cheap digital watch at Goodwill to track time. I let text messages go unanswered. For the two-weeks that enfolded my Vision Quest, I turned my phone off completely.
Following my Quest
I was psychologically and emotionally raw—sensitized by a complete lack of artificial light, the warm sun kissing my forehead each morning, and the chorus of coyotes singing me to sleep each night. When the 12-day AVI program officially ended, I dreaded the prospect of switching on my phone and reconnecting to the “real world.”
The wilderness—the saguaro and mountains and the Milky Way dancing overhead—is the real world, not the pixels of light washing our psyches in irrelevant information, mindless memes, and incessant imagery, I argued with myself in my journal, the final morning of the program.
Still, I needed to let my family know I was alive. Fun fact—Arizona is the only U.S. state that is home to two species of big cats— Puma and Jaguar (I saw neither during my time there, at least not in the flesh).
Turning on my phone
a staccato of rectangles began to slowly populate the screen. The first two of these piqued my curiosity. Both were from individuals who lived in Perú.
The first one was a voice memo from a Q’ero priest I met briefly in the town of Pisac, in January of 2020. The Q’eros are a tribe who escaped the conquest of the Spaniards by retreating farther and higher into the mountains, to where they now reside, on steep Andean slopes above 4,000m (13,100 ft) in elevation.
I use the word “priest” reluctantly—the Q'ero do not practice any form of organized religion, although they are highly spiritual. Like the Incas and pre-Incan tribes of which they are descendants, the Q’ero embody an animist worldview and worship Pachamama (Mother Earth), Tayta Inti (Father Sun) as well as various Apus, the mountain spirits that dominate the landscape of Peru.
In his voice memo, Tomas referred to me as hermanito, “little brother.” My limited Spanish only allowed me to pick up about half of what he said, but I understood he was inviting me to Peru to meet him once again.
I played the voice message for a fellow vision quester in my program, a woman from Colombia. I asked for her interpretation – “This sounds important, and urgent. He is expecting you…” she said, her mood turning somber.
I felt a shift in my heart. To my rational mind, the idea of going to Peru was laughable. It was a chapter I had lived, and was now closed. My path now was to settle down, create a life for myself in the U.S. close to my family and friends. Right?
Perú, my heart whispered longingly.
The second message was from an American man living in Peru, whom I befriended during our yoga teacher training and subsequent quarantine at a yoga retreat center in 2020, when the Coronavirus emergency closed international borders and instituted a stay-at-home mandate across Peru. It too, was an invitation to come to Peru—to house-sit for him in the Sacred Valley while he traveled abroad for a month.
Within 24 hours I had booked a one-way ticket to Cusco. I could not ignore the synchronicity of these two messages—one mysterious, one functional and supportive—both of which I saw as signposts from the universe.
Precisely why I’m here, in Peru again, is the question I now get to live, or dance, into the world.
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