It doesn't matter so much. Thanks to Andrea, who trekked with me in Guatemala, I've determined to go first to Huaraz, north of Lima, for a couple of short treks. I don't want to pack much, just enough to fill a small backpack that Spirit Airlines will allow on board without charges.
That bare bones airline is the reason I am going to Peru at all. I was working in Honduras with a medical mission team in March when I got the email telling me of the sale. A $192 round trip, Chicago to Lima, fare, which had to be purchased on the day it was announced, is responsible for the impulse buy.
I still consider money. I don't understand it, but I have to respect it.
The impulse, though, leaves me without a specific purpose in the travel, other than indulgence. I do not like to travel without something in mind, someone to visit, some work to do, some tangible goal. I am fairly confident that meaning will arise.
I could do an ayahuasca ceremony or go to Machu Picchu, but both those things have become tourism and I no longer feel much inclination to psychedelics. Their effect has become incorporated into the current collective consciousness. We know it already.
In the meantime, I continue to purse the idea that fleeing is a form of resistance. Leaving is a kind of salvation and antidote to an America currently governed and dominated by the very worst of human impulses, fears, hatreds, and ignorance.
My escape itself is strategic. My withdrawal from engagement is a test, an upheaval of the dualism of Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
Bob Dylan stopped singing protest songs and went electric. Did he make a difference? Why did he do it?
If nothing else, I currently have this freedom to seek another pathway. I flatter myself to think this is not unlike the explorers of old, who set out to find both the ancient and unknown ways.
For the past 45 years, I have practiced a specific form of Eastern meditation twice daily. Without making the least claim to any mystical knowledge, I do draw and accept the following premises, which may be solely of interest and value for myself. But I have always been willing and prepared to accept ridicule.
1) Eternity is now. If eternity is real, and time but a trick of the human mind, then this very moment is as it has always been and always will be. You think you are going to heaven when you die? Think that if it helps you. To my mind, it's all literally now.
2) The afterlife is now as well. (This is somewhat the premise behind the Tibetan philosophy that the Grateful Dead borrowed for their name.) It is hard for the human mind to comprehend the idea of infinity. People have wondered if there is life after death. In eternity, we would have to be living the same, now as in the afterlife. Consider that there is no difference between life and the afterlife. They are just two terms for the same thing.
3) We are free. I don't believe the existentialists accomplished much, but they did unburden the idea of freedom. They mostly thought it was a curse, because it implied responsibility. But evangelical Christians love to proclaim that they are set free by Jesus. They are, but they seem to have a lot of regulation to enforce the idea. Free means free.
4) Speaking of Jesus, he already came again.
I may only take a single pair of pants. Still undecided on that point. Maybe just two t-shirts, too. It gets cold up in the mountains. The altitude of Huaraz is 10,000 feet. That's 2000 feet higher than Machu Picchu and almost twice as high as Denver.
Coca leaves.
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