Dream Journal | February 7, 2020

Enormous fish, they were catching enormous fish and leaving them by their vehicles at the gas stations, the fish were choking without oxygen as the men filled their tanks, and the sea was swollen from an enormous storm, and it had brought in these giant creatures. 

End --

Listen to this voice with no head, though it is your own head:  

When the eucalyptus tree fell it breathed electric fire upon Pisac, and the mountains heard its cry. The mountains listened and responded with a mighty flood, one hundred buildings destroyed. I witnessed all of this in a dream, but there was nothing that I could have done to stop it. The people in the markets are solemn, many of them have lost to the river, and the gutters are clogged with the toxic mud even now, against the efforts of men and machines sent from Cusco. The lights returned within a few hours when the great tree fell on Pisac, distant hillside tambos once again glowing red in the petroleum that also filled the gas tanks for the indifferent motorists, and the angry souls of the suffocated river beasts --- "the waters have souls, I have no doubt," I had spoken in the entangled time surrounding Kinsa Cocha and the clawed valley beyond that heaven --- the souls of those captive fish with swords upon their beaks arrived in black mud upon this town, and I felt the anger and sorrow even before I woke. This was no time to speak with Pachamama or wachuma, and I am full of fire and embers all day. 

If the gods speak through me now, it is in warning: "Your gutters remain suffocated like the bodies that were taken by the opportunistic fishermen in that dream-sea. Look north: the cattle may be silent and the dogs are resigned, but I stand sentinel above Apu Linli as a black tempest prepared to come this time for your hopeful machines, the higher ground, or an unknowing child."

I sit with caution by the seething Vilcanota river, night has fallen and the rain has not returned, though I had felt the river's tears earlier in the evening. Even though the soil here is porous, this place remains as a home to the sea that once rested here, but now it speaks through rivers and ponds. I wonder as the orange street lights quietly come online whether humanity is breathing that sea back to its ancient life. It will come in the unassuming night, in the static fire of a million million street lights, swallowing the plastic alpacas that promise meager rewards to the vendors of Pisac. "Return to me," the ancient sea will command, "Return the black blood of my ancestry. Return what was so generously given, for our exchange was not reciprocated."

Did the people of Pisac deserve this to happen? And what will my own people deserve? Twisted in bed, lonely yet avoidant, I mock myself for questioning whether I deserve love when nature so violently responds to me and so to the world: "Learn to love me; you have not yet understood what it means to give yourself away"