I awoke this morning to the unexpected sound of pigs grunting outside my van. Unexpected because I thought that I was miles from any human dwellings. The day previous I had left the stimulating city of Cochabamba in search of the little known and seldom visited ruins of Inkallajta. I had some rough directions to the site, by a writer who I do not think ever visited the place, and these proved more a hindrance than a help.

Around one in the afternoon I turned off the paved road and began what I thought might be two hours in second gear along a dusty and bumpy path. But there were no signs giving directions to the ruins and the few locals along the road spoke no Spanish (only Aymara, the local dialect). Or perhaps they were shocked into silence by the sight of a foreigner and his strange yellow van. I was forced to try several possible routes. Some of these were dead-ends and others simply turned into goat trails. Turning around to retrace my way was especially time consuming and dangerous because the roads were quite narrow at their ends and had crumbling sides that dropped off to sheer cliffs. One wrong move and I might fall hundreds of feet.

The expected two hours turned into five. With the setting of the sun, the skies slowly darkened and it seemed I would not make it to the ruins that evening. The roads had worsened, being cut by several running streams, and driving was becoming more a hazard than an adventure. But I kept going, pulled along perhaps by the spirits of the place I was seeking. And at last, I was rewarded. In the distance, silhouetted against the final glow of the waning sky, loomed Inkallajta. Crumbling towers and broken walls jutted starkly upward like the fingers of some giant’s hand. The last few miles, the darkness fully deepened and a thousand stars sparkled across the heavens. Too late to do any exploring, I sipped a warm bottle of beer while preparing sandwiches of avocado, tomato, and garlic. Later, reading Zen poetry by candle light, I fell asleep in my warm and nurturing sleeping bag.

The pigs (quite an efficient alarm clock they were!) belong to a local peasant farmer whose son has been wandering around staring at the van for the past hour. Certainly the boy has never seen anything like it before. Nor, I imagine, does he have much opportunity to talk with nutty foreigners like myself. Striking up a conversation, I asked him to give me a short tour of the ruins. I did this, not in hopes of hearing any gems of archaeological insight, but because he must know the paths through the undergrowth and it would be fun to scramble around the ruins with him. Most every chance I get during my years of traveling in forested and mountainous regions, I ask local boys to play and climb with me. If one is willing to get scratched, sweaty, and dirty, and has the courage to follow these fleet-footed semi-animals, it is amazing the hidden wonders that may be discovered. But today my young friend was too busy with his pigs and so I went exploring on my own.

There is something magical about Inkallajta and wandering around I was visited with memories of my youth. When I was twelve to sixteen years old and living in India, there was a ruined city on the far outskirts of Delhi that greatly enchanted me. Tuqluqabad was its name and it was a vast place of dark tunnels, towering walls, and stupendous views. Many a day I spent clambering upon its crumbling buildings, my head filled with dreams of archaeology, exploration, and photography. Thirty-two years have passed since that time and still I find myself deeply in love with ancient places, still playing and climbing and dreaming at them. Reflecting on this continuity of delightful activity in my life, I am once again overcome with powerful feelings of gratitude and a yearning to use my life’s actions as an expression of that gratitude.

The early morning air is cool and stunningly clear. The atmosphere of Inkallajta strongly motivates me to move around, to get physical, to explore. It is often like this at sacred sites. Yes, I definitely spend time sitting in meditation and, just as important, I am sensitive to what the spirit of the place wants me to do. And very often that is movement. The place itself requests me to move around it. Why, you might ask? Well, the answer to this question is the story of another sacred place and the things I learned there.

In the mid 1980’s, for the third year in a row, I went on a month-long pilgrimage to a particular set of four sacred mountains in the southwestern United States. They range in height between 11,000 and 14,000 feet and I was living in their high forests for weeks on end. On one mountain I did a vision quest using a combination of three intense experiences in order to deeply connect with the spirits of the sacred mountains. I fasted for a week on nothing but herbal teas, then took a significant amount of psylocyben mushrooms, and then climbed unroped on nearly sheer cliffs for eight hours. It was a truly extraordinary experience and the teachings I received were profound. (Working with these sort of plant substances - and remember that coffee, tobacco, and hops are just other examples of God-given plant substances - is like putting STP gas treatment in your car, they supercharge the system. And according to many of the world’s archaic shamanic traditions, this can be a very good thing to do now and then.) Well, the teaching that I received from that particular journey concerned the value of using physical movement as a method of attaining higher states of mental and spiritual consciousness. Let me briefly explain.

The movements that we do with each of our four limbs are linked to specific regions of our brains. Practicing a full range of movement for each limb therefore assists us in accessing that limb’s corresponding sections in the different regions of the brain. Conversely, under-developed movement capacities in the human organism are often mirrored by corresponding incapacities in mental and spiritual areas. I learned that it is beneficial for those who are seeking higher consciousness and greater mental powers to exercise the four limbs through a full range of movement. In other words, move the body in order to turn on and energize multiple parts of the brain. How this became so vitally clear to me is evident when you visualize how a person’s body moves when it’s climbing up and around rocks. The body is being constantly stretched into positions that in normal life it never experiences. While climbing (trees are even better for this than mountains) the body is automatically contorted and, thereby, normally unused parts of the brain are stimulated. (Teaching young children full-body movements like mat gymnastics, African dancing, or wrestling, is therefore a great way to activate multiple regions of their minds.)

The ruins of Inkallajta motivated me to move in this full-body way. The site is surrounded by steep hills and trisected by two mountain streams. To explore and photograph the ruins it is necessary to climb around like a billy-goat. Bordering one side of the site, a lovely waterfall, long and thin, leaps from a rocky crevice and plunges into space. I wanted to climb to its source in hopes of finding a small pool to swim in. Difficult it was scrambling to the crevice, but a great deal of fun. So good it was to be moving again! I had been too long stuck in the van and in city environments. My mind came alive, my consciousness blazed, and inspiration soared within me. Soaking in the refreshing pools atop the waterfall, I considered the years that are before me and how I wish to live them.

Then, climbing down, heading back to the van, the spirit of the place pulled me off my path and to the base of the waterfall. What a magical place this was; a small amphitheater with soaring cliffs on three sides and thick jungle hiding the entrance. Cascading waters splashed gaily on glistening rocks and the air was filled with a cooling mist. A wild profusion of green ferns and soft mosses clung to the cliff and myriad birds chattered and sang. And I was humbled. I felt the smallness of my life and all the great things that moments ago I had been planning to do. I was not made less by the grandness of the towering rock and its ageless waterfall, but I saw my tiny place in the larger scheme of things.

Transcending for a few moments the drama of my life and plans, I knew a spiritual realm where nothing needed to be done. Where all was as it should be. There were no mistakes, no environmental problems, no warring nations, no thing out of place or at the wrong time. Everything was fine. All existence was ever-so-slowly happening according to some absolutely perfect - but completely mysterious - design. I am unable to communicate the presence and power of this transcendental awareness with written words. Yet, sitting in that primordial place of rock and fern, I connected with this awareness so fully that it left a lasting impression in my heart and mind.

Certainly this peace, this transcendental knowing is something I had experienced before. Over the years of my sacred site travels I have often been granted entrance to this sublime state of wisdom and serenity. But I am a hard nut to crack, it seems. Confronted everyday by the suffering of the world, by poverty and pollution and a hundred human ills, I am often sad. So sad that I forget the unspeakable perfection that is the foundation of all existence. Loosing sight of this perfection, I lose hope. Those few moments meditating by the Inkallajta waterfall brought a return of knowing and a sweet ease into my heart and mind for which I am most grateful. Sacred sites do that for me. That is one of the main reasons I keep coming back to them.

Later, driving out of Inkallajta along thirty miles of rough and rocky roads, the thought crossed my mind that it would be a most inconvenient place for a breakdown. The van had been running perfectly since its strange troubles six months earlier in Costa Rica and I had wondered if I would be graced with good mechanical luck for the remainder of my travels.

It must have been some sort of intuition speaking to me. Soon after, just as I pulled off the dirt road and onto the highway I felt an ominous weakness in the engine. Situations like these are highly disconcerting. All you can do is drive on in the hopes that you will find a mechanic before the engine falters and dies.

Because my detailed Bolivian maps had been stolen some months before, I was unable to determine how distant was the next town. There was certainly nothing suitable on the way back to Cochabamba, so I headed into the unknown. The motor felt weaker as the miles passed and my trepidation increased. But then, rounding a bend in the road, I saw a station in the distance. Slowly climbing the last hill, and just as I pulled into the station, the engine sputtered and stopped. I tried to jump start the engine by rolling the van down the hill. Nothing happened. The engine was mysteriously dead.

A short walk brought me to a rough sort garage and soon four guys were squeezed beneath the van chattering in a rapid mix of Spanish and Aymara. I am sitting inside typing these notes while they are tinkering below. But after an hour of trying this and that, they have made no progress. They say I need a specialized VW mechanic. Where to find one of these? I can either have the van taken back to Cochabamba on the back of a truck or go to Cochabamba and return with a mechanic. It is clearly more intelligent - but also more expensive - to haul the van back to the big city. If I brought a mechanic here he might not have the tools he needed and so we would both have to return to the big city. Better to just go there straight away. The mechanics say they will help me find a truck. They feel reasonable certain that one will appear in the next two or three days and that it should cost no more than fifty dollars for the hauling job. Tonight, and maybe for a few more, I will sleep in the van while its parked in the mechanic’s lot.

An hour later, while making some sandwiches for dinner, one of the mechanics came by and suggested I try the ignition again. Amazingly, it worked! But will it start tomorrow morning? Now I am thinking that, even if it does, it might be a good idea to make a detour back to Cochabamba anyway. It certainly seemed I was being watched over with the precise timing of the motor stopping just as I arrived in the small town. Maybe I am still being given a hint, a little intuition about avoiding future difficulties. And, anyway, I don’t mind going back to Cochabamba. The city is one of the nicer places I have recently visited and there is also a great grocery store stocked with granola, peanut butter, and other tasty things rarely found in South America.