I’ve been living in Peru, specifically in Huancayo in the Central Andes of Peru, for over 10 years now, and I always tell my friends that it’s so worth visiting here if you want a taste of the real Peru that you wouldn’t get in Cusco because Huancayo is still relatively untouched by international tourism. These are the places I’d recommend seeing to get a feel for what it’s traditionally like living in Peru and in the Andes mountains.
Third time’s a charm, they say. And we may have actually found a winner with the third Peruvian president within a week – Francisco Sagasti Hochhauser.
“Our original guiding stars are struggle and hope. But there is no such thing as a lone struggle, no such thing as a lone hope. In every human being are combined the most distant epochs, passivity, mistakes, sufferings, the pressing urgencies of our own time, the pace of history.” – Pablo Neruda in his Nobel Lecture
“…not till we are completely lost, or turned round – for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost – do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as be awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden
“Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.” – John Muir
This past year has been a journey of connection for me – just as every cell in the body is separate and simultaneously part of a whole, so too are we as human beings individuals that are intimately interconnected. It’s what I come back to when I feel lost, and I believe it’s what underlies healing: the realization that everything we do (eat, breathe, say, etc.) and experience affects the whole, then harnessing this knowledge for growth in any area.
There has always been a certain magic about the Andes – it’s a world where the Incans achieved the impossible with their architecture, where tourists are moved speechless by the energy of Machu Picchu, where tradition, dreams, and rituals are revered, where sacred shamans and commoners alike communicate with spirits, and where people from all over the world come to be transformed by ancient healing drugs.
“There is a story within every illness and something to be learned from listening to it…Much of our pain is rooted in our deafness to spirit. We remain in an ongoing struggle to break free from the illusions of who we think we’re supposed to be so that we may live the life we are called to live and become the person we were born to be.” – Life Is Your Best Medicine, Dr. Tieraona Low Dog
It’s been 6 years, maybe 7, since I’ve been to the Philippines. The last time I arrived in Davao City, we used a staircase to exit the aircraft, suffocating in the dust and heat as we walked ourselves to the terminal, which was really just a simple box-like building. I would never have guessed that this time, I would walk into a renovated airport through the jet bridge that I’m used to and into maze-like hallways pristine in white that I associate with larger airports to ease our transition to a new world.
“It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.” — Walter Lippmann
Talented Canucks expert and Communications Director of Football BC, Daniel Fung, comments on how he lives out wisdom he received from a university professor. The heart of learning he describes is so relevant not only to my own career but to life as a whole.