Teacher on Two Wheels

Above: Something was alive in the skies that morning

Monday 9/22/08 Puno, Peru

Riding a bicycle through sacred places changes your physical being. Your breathing slows while your heart quickens. A calm sweeps over you that seeps into the deepest parts of your mind, muting all frenetic thoughts. Your eyes widen and your sense of alertness heightens.

Somehow, in these really special places, you become sewn into the world around you and pass through it not as an imposter but as a piece of itself, just as an iceberg moves through the sea. Noticing the connectivity of all things, the one-ness pulsing through all that exists in the universe, is unavoidable.

No matter how foreign your surroundings are in reality, despite how far you are from your hometown or your family, you could not feel more at home, more perfectly situated in time and space. Time slows and its passing becomes observable. It takes on a heaviness to it that is often absent during moments of things like check-book-balancing, newspaper-reading, and after-work-grocery-buying. Basically, in the quieting, sacred places, the world takes you in and stuns you.

For a few short hours in the early morning of Saturday September 20, 2008, I felt this way. The stretch of Earth that thrust me into such a state was about 50 miles of near-flat terrain between the pueblos of Santa Rosa and Pukara in southeastern Peru.

Above: Morning skies over a stunning blend of vibrant hues near Santa Rosa, Peru

Within the first few moments of riding, I could tell it was going to be a different type of morning. The sky glowed a brilliant blue and the white clouds that tattooed it looked crystalline, almost edible, like smeared icing on a massive blue sheet cake. The moon, like some ghostly white astral vampire, vanished into thin air as the morning sun took command of the day. For miles and miles around, dry tufts of golden grass blanketed the ground. Mountains spiked up through the earth and lined the horizon in all directions. The yellows of the grasses, the blues of the sky, the whites of the clouds, the blacks of the band of asphalt that shot straight out in front of me like a ray of black gray light—all blended together to create a scene of raw beauty. In the brisk chill of morning, the place had a cool heartiness to it, a feeling of harshness that made me feel vulnerable and cautious amidst it.

Above: YES!!! THIS is what it’s all about…

I wasn’t the only one populating the wide expanses of flat wilderness that morning. I passed barefoot sheep herders with whips in their hands, prodding along their flocks by the roadside. The soles of their feet, thick and creased, carried them unflinchingly over rocky paths. The homes of these people were mud-walled and grass-roofed.

I passed cyclists, morning commuters, on old bikes with wobbly wheels. With 20 miles or more between towns and a standard of meager incomes that makes car ownership an impossibility, people who live here in the open pampa have to travel if they hope to earn steady money.

Every once in a while, a cargo truck or a car would blow by me so quickly that I was sure its driver was ignorant of the sacredness of his surroundings. Sure, drivers would honk or wave, sometimes even scream out some message of encouragement, but never on that magical stretch of road did I feel (or could I feel) any sort of communion with people fueled by a mindset so drastically different than my own. They were late for jobs or breakfasts or deliveries or something or other; I, on the other hand, was neither late nor early for anything. My timing was just right. I was too present to be late or feel as if lateness was even a valid thing.

Above: A mixed herd of alpacas and sheep crossing the road

Above: Tilling the hard way

These types of mornings make all the hard days worth the sweat and exhaustion. They don’t come often, but when they do, they put me in my place and leave me feeling like the creature I am. Riding through cities or on terrain that lets the mind wander, I often feel like a man, like a cyclist traveling through a place with a mindful of human thoughts. But on the special stretches of road, the sacred stretches, I’m left feeling like a natural creature, a component of the universe.

These sacred stretches bring me home and anchor me. They give me precious glimpses of the under-light of existence that our routines often outshine.

Above: This is what living completely off the grid in Peru looks like

If I rode with believers of various religions that morning, they’d describe the energy around me using different names.   They might disagree on its origins or its reason for enveloping us at that place and time, but they’d all agree on its existence.  Its presence was obvious in the atmosphere of the scene.  The colors seemed brighter.  The air was fresher.  The sky just a bit wider.  Something extra was there that morning, and I feel grateful to have experienced it, even if it lasted but a few short hours.