The Sea of Humanity
Cusco, Peru
Every day in South America I see something that more or less breaks my heart. This was also true during my two years in Central America but I never took the time to write about it.
Every day I walk the streets of Cusco, often for miles around the historic city. It is there that I directly experience the full spectrum of humanity, from pure authentic joy to the depths of human suffering.
I think of so many souls I have met along the way, too many to count. One beautiful soul that comes to mind is the single mother who sat down next to me while I was peacefully enjoying my breakfast one morning at the nearby soda. She told me her sad story of her husband leaving many years ago, abandoning her to raise her son. She cleaned houses to survive and taught a few Spanish lessons, but both had dried up during the pandemic. My heart went out to her situation and the only small thing I could do was to secretly pay for both of our breakfasts as I quietly snuck out for the day.
These stories happen daily, however in Peru it is much more prominent. There is something unexplainably spiritual and magical about Cusco, and yet amidst all of the tourist activity and beauty there is a level of poverty and suffering I have never directly experienced before that are a part of my everyday experience and interaction.
On any given day I will be directly approached and desperately pleaded with for money, often by and artist peddling a beautiful painting, a creative work of art in exchange for 1 sole or 26 cents. Some days I am approached by as many as 20 young women offering massages for the cost of $13. Some of them barely teenagers. Others have been doing this for 20 years.
It is a part of my daily experience to have beautiful handmade clothing made from alpaca or other textiles of rich quality and texture desperately peddled to me for just a few American dollars. I can have my shoes shined by a master of his profession who has been perfecting his craft for decades and it costs me only a few dollars.
And then there are the many who have nothing to offer, not even their eyesight. They simply hold out a hat or hand and beg. Usually their hat is empty as endless tourists walk by without noticing.
For me, one who has always lived life fully from the heart, and less often the logic of the head, I am torn every day with compassion. In Cusco, I had to learn early on that I would quickly go broke myself if I gave what I had to every soul who approached me or if I bought every painting that I was desperately offered. I have had to learn to maintain my heart of compassion while living in such an environment of the full spectrum of suffering.
It may seem difficult to understand, but I have come to find a beauty amidst the paradox of such an environment. It is an immersion into the sea of humanity. I have somehow found a peace in it. If I were living in the culture of modern America, I would likely spend most of my days lamenting my modest income and creating my own suffering, engaging my daily experience through the lens of “not enough.”
Instead, living in Peru, I live on only a portion of what I earn and my days overflow with appreciation and awareness that I am very fortunate to have it infinitely better than most of the people around me.
Field Notes
Kindness
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.
Naomi Shihab Nye, 1952
View From the Road
Scenes from the streets of Cusco, 2024
Archives
Enjoy four years of past articles from the Zen and Ink Journals journey in the archives.
Enjoy published articles from my last four years of travel.
Subscribe. Donate. Share the Journey.
Zen and Ink Journals represents hundreds of hours of writing over the past decade, sometimes from a train in remote China or a coffee shop in Kyoto, a hammock in Costa Rica or a simple cabin on a mountaintop in Boquete, Panama or Ciudad Colón.
On these pages, I share my observations of kindness and beauty from my adventures in the world and invite you to listen quietly for the call within you to explore the places that beckon your soul.
If you would like to become a regular subscriber, please consider foregoing the cost of one cup of coffee and a pastry each month ($8) and becoming a monthly subscriber.
If you would like to stop receiving emails from Zen and Ink Journals simply click the unsubscribe button at the bottom of this email.
Share