continuing on in cusco and pisac

My experience the other night was harrowing but very important. A lot of work, but I´m glad I went through it, especially now that I´m getting less sore from all the movement and everything. My friend had a ceremony the other night and he was told I needed another ceremony to finish what I started. I agree, that makes sense. So tomorrow I will take a different medicine, San Pedro. I think it will be great. It makes you experience what you really are. But the spirit of ayuahuasca is still in mysystem, even if physically it´s all gone. So I´ll have the help of two plants.

There are some New Age Americans around here. They have very good hearts but the philosophy is so selfish and near-sighted. They were talking about gold and aliens (?!) and I said the mining process is inherently very destructive. If you find some gold, fine, but often minerals want to stay in the ground. Mining gold requires arsenic and mercury. Even ´greener´versions of mining just pollute rivers less. Of course it is easy for us to say that that´s fine, because we don´t go in there and do the mining, or live by the polluted river. They didn´t want to hear that though. This one guy said that my statement was very loaded, with a lot of assumptions. Yes, true, but my assumptions were intentional. Of course gold doesn´t ´want´to stay in the ground like a human does, but that´s just a way of describing things, making it relatable. A better example is uranium. The writer Derrick Jensen describecd how some indigenous people say uranium wants to stay in the ground. Deep in the earth, it doesn´t cause problems for anyone. It´s supposed to be there. Take it out, it gets upset and makes people very sick. It wants to be underground, in a matter of speaking. Anyway... their discussion was getting very abstract and losing all meaning, so I should have cut out earlier.
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The people here don´t have much money, but have everything they need. It´s not that they are poor, but that their lives are simple. Everyone is very fit, including old people. No one is useless, they all can help in the fields of with the animals. They have enough food and the children are free--since they can do what they want, and are treated with repsect (since they help out with everyone), they aren´t so defiant at home. They are also well dressed, in hand-knit sweaters.

One gross thing is that meat for sale is just left out--not very sanitary. All the organs and everything are just sitting there for hours.

Last night I wanted to buy brocolli. I looked at the scale and said, Ís that blood?¨. The lady said, oh, no problem, it´s dried. Well, I used to work with blood, taking hemoglobins for WIC. I don´t think it´s gross or scary, but it´s a great vector for disease, even dried. Everyone enjoyed the look of horror on my face. She could eventually see I wasn´t going to buy the brocolli if I had to put it on the scale, and didn´t make me weight it.