who

I was born in the USA, 44 years old, my name is lechuza
My parents split up when I was an infant and I have no memory of my father until I tracked him down in Los Angeles when I was 19. He died when I was 23.
I spent my childhood in a protective cocoon woven by my mother. Bu there was poison in that cocoon. I had a stepfather who made it his goal to crush my Spirit as a way of hurting my mother, I didn’t tell her about this until his funeral. As I said, poison. It almost worked.
After early childhood in Peru, my mother’s country, and formative adolescent years (9 to 22) in Wales, my stepfather’s land, I forged my own path in the USA, where my father’s Mexican family had resettled. I backpacked around Latin America for 18 months starting in ’93. I’ve had a deep appreciation for nature for as long as I can remember. One experience that took that appreciation to another level was spending a month on a small island in the Caribbean, alone with the fish and the birds. Spirit soaring at times, but wounded. Mother Nature always there, waiting for me to declare my readiness to be healed.

Working for my people for a living, making little progress towards a teaching credential in California until I became a medical interpreter in Minnesota. Losing myself in transitory physical sensations. Only to find myself in the hearts and eyes of a lover, friends and kin who stood by me, and nigh on 100,000 miles deep into the American heartland on sometimes gentle and sometimes brutally demanding bicycle rides. The loving message of the beliefs of my indigenous ancestors echoing faintly, like the barely audible sound of a distant deerskin drum. I turned to heed it, and turned away. When I was 14 I had rejected the Catholicism my mother tried so hard to instill. Religion seemed empty, but Spirituality? My faith didn’t take shape until chancing upon a Sundance in July 2010. There I witnessed the drum I’d been hearing all my life in the depths of my soul, resounding through every dimension. Five months later I was diagnosed with leukemia and received chemotherapy. Three months after that I returned to the Tree of Life and made an offering to Ometeotl. Life is anew. I walk the Red Road, full of gratitude. At times I’ve believed I can reconcile the connection across generations, distant past and future, my mother and my daughter. Where is the antidote to the poison?
In all our hearts.
(Can I learn to embody it? Or can I simply flow into it?)

After recovering in Wales, being cared for by my mother, I decided to return to Peru. We both did. She’s reached 80 years of age and has no reason to stay in Wales any longer. After 33 years there she would have lived out her remaining years out of inertia in the relative safety of European life, seductively safe, but foreign to the end. I cannot make Peru safe for her, but I do what I can. We’ve chosen Arequipa because my grandmother grew up here. After six months in this mining boomtown on the arid western side of the Andes, I am still straining to hear the ancient drum. The Andes resonate deeply, rumbling like a tremor, still, where is the drum?
In all our hearts.
(and in the depths of the Misti volcano, Apu at whose foot I kneel)

Continuing to heal, but will I ever be able to restore my daughter’s faith?