Peruvian Mountains- my pacha mama experience

When I was 18 going on 19 years old, my family went to Peru together in June before my birthday. Coming home after my first year of college was awful and trying, but the vacation was supposed to save us all from each other. And it did. It was the mountains, for five days, trekking to see Machu Pichu, with the sky and the time to look at the world around us. People would come and go on the trail, but you have to keep walking, just like life. The air was cleaner, the time was there, and we all separated and rejoined as felt natural. There were trees I had never seen before, but my mom, a landscape architect and artist, knew all of their latin names. Birds flew over us that the guide could identify, and monkeys turned up along our path up past the peaks of Salkantay mountain. I walked alongside my father and my sister for as long as we wanted. The whole trip healed me. After a year of the social trials and errors at university, I think I had really lost touch with the reasons I should care about the rest of the world because I had gotten lost in my own head and my own issues. The room for introspection that the 5 days hiking afforded me, and the motion of walking, tirelessly for days, and the very kind Peruvians who hosted us through the trip, just making it so easy to get lost in yourself, while physically guided by them. Peruvian mountains renewed my heart in a way that kept me physically dedicated to a world I had only had implicit faith in before.

Places like Machu Pichu exist because people like the Quechua in Peru felt a spiritual connection to the mountains and specifically sought to live on them instead of under them. Pacha Mama is the name of the benevolent goddess of the mountains' spirit. The Virgin Mary, when brought by Spanish conquistadors to Peru, was depicted as a Blue Triangle figure, another version of the Pacha Mama. Spirituality is not something I usually appreciate, but I have never felt as close to the rest of humanity as when I have been in mountains, with enough space to my self that I can appreciate the world. That connection has to exist for a reason. People need space. People need clean air, open sky, water to swim in, to drink, to spray. People need need need beyond their capacities to provide, "succeeding ourselves to death." Donella Meadows wrote an article celebrating this need for nature as a spiritually fulfilling thing too, however, no matter how you phrase it, if you tell the right person, emotional ties to the world around us, the natural world, will sound trite. It is important to save nature because we essentially all go back to that happy place in our heads. If we lost the battle to save nature, we have lost the battle to save our own sanity. Even when I say it, it sounds trite! But it is true. Put that on your environmentally-friendly Hallmark card.