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Connecting People with Nature PAGE LAMBERT Connecting Writers with Words
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Greetings!
On Day 7 of last year's Weaving Words & Women adventure, we visited the Ollantaytambo Ruins. The following day, we would board the VistaDome for the beautiful ride to Machu Picchu. Despite my excitement about visiting one of the Seven Wonders of the World, I didn't want to miss anything about Ollantaytambo, so I wrote this question in my journal: "What does it mean to be here in this place, at this time?" And then I began to try and answer it.
"We are sitting on a shady terrace facing the mountain from which the Incan people quarried the granite from which this place - a temple, a fortress, a place of gardens and worship and community - was built. There is snow on the high mountain peak to the northeast. And while our group of ten women sit writing in our journals, clouds move beneath the blue sky and above the valley of tilled crops where I see cows, vacas, grazing the old winter stalks."
 That day, our guide Huber spoke about the old man's face in the mountain where the food was stored and cooled by the swirling mountain winds of the three valleys. Below us, three sheep trotted across an empty plaza. "The ovejos are moving toward an opening in the plaza walls, a portal that leads to the green field beyond. They need no leader to help them find their way to this place where they spend each morning grazing in the sun."
And then I saw, behind them, running to catch up, a small Quechua boy. I watched until the sheep and then the boy passed through the opening out into the field.
 I thought about the openings we create in our stories, the ones that beckon to the reader, Come this way. Come this way.
But then I was drawn away from the scene below to look at the high mountain, to find the rock face of the old wise man. "He has been looking down upon this valley, and has felt the three winds swirling in this place, for thousands and thousands of years."
And where will we be in a thousand years? Will we know then what it is to pass from this world's portal into the next? Will we remember taking the VistaDome to a place so timeless that even the clouds forget to move on?
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