Ode to Sachaqa

In my dream I was speaking with plants under a sea of stars. Sleeping in the belly button of The Mother, clouds were making stories and dancing rainbow clothes in a bluebird sky. Butterflies came twirling smiling white stones next to a holy river where I found my heart. The children were angels, dressed in brown and black, wide-eyed and pure like transparent crystals. A pregnant woman was waiting there strong and beautiful, cooking new life. Insects in camouflage and armor moved all around with wings of dust and prisms. A chrysalis was golden and dreaming in an upside-down world. Over orange and beige earth a spirit was calling in the twilight, a bird or a ghost of a forgotten memory. Green mountains held me and I slid on rusted clay and collected seeds in my hair. A woman showed me nothing is everything inside a simple pot.  My body moved like a heavy horse, trodding roads and fields. I woke before roosters and watched with awe the miraculous and difficult labor of coffee, plantains, peanuts, and plants for walls and roofs. The people moved through the mountains like agile panthers and gave me polite greetings. Over coffee and liquid sunlight I was bathed in words of wisdom distilled in a greenhouse of life. Stripped to my bones of modern life and looking eye to eye with the contents of my being, I entered through a crevice inside a mountain next to a pristine creek with white shiny sand. I became one with Her, who was the Jungle, the Mountain, the Water, the Living Earth. She was my Mother and I was also Her. A deep and wondrous mystery was all around and wakened in me through breathing mud walls and thatched roofs. Someone sang me my song and with a rustle of leaves and a shot of smoke, I was alive in The Dreaming. There were secret talks of secret things never to be told, but available to anyone with a clean heart. Sweet sacred spaces were revealed to me as the Selva took me in and filled my breath with photons and chlorophyll. I was in a foreign place that felt like home.  Enthralled: every stone, mushroom, tree, animal, bird, bug and person was a new totem, a new teacher, a new messenger.  My Elders stood tall and strong and their words and hearts sung out like magic echoes reminding and remembering me back. I fell in love with a whole family and a whole village. Every challenge was a joy. Every tear of good-bye was a prayer.