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Reclaiming Sacred Waters/ Re-membering Sacred Life:
Opening to, Embodying, & Manifesting a Vision of Planetary Healing

Very recently, I had the immense pleasure of serving as part of an informal “welcome committee” as a group from the THOTH community de-planed in Chiclayo in order to begin a pilgrimage to Chachapoyas and Puerto Maldonado.  It was the first time that Oscar and I actually embraced on Peruvian soil, although I feel we have shared a deep connection with this country and her people through many lifetimes.  I myself had just come from sharing in an exhausting and exhilarating adventure to a very remote region in southern Ecuador and northern Peru, one intended to manifest a vision of planetary healing that I had been holding for awhile. The vision was one of a “coming together” of many worlds and many levels.  On one level, I saw this trip as a meeting of the forces of the Hanan Pacha and the Ukhu Pacha, the world beyond with the world we hold within. 

One manifestation of this vision was gifted me as my Continental flight from Atlanta to Peru lurched sideways through extremely high winds on the first of March. I felt myself propelled downward towards the earth, carried by the power of Hanan Pacha’s sacred wind that oxygenates and penetrates, infuses, and recharges. As I prayed for calm nerves amid the rising panic of passengers whose exclamations reached ever higher with each jolt of our flying chariot, I was the wind, but also the heat and light of sun and lightning bolt. Simultaneously, as I surrendered to whatever fate lay before us in the skies, I felt myself emerge from the stillness of the paqarinas. I was the water originating deep within our Mother that bubbles upward and outward to quench the thirst of all who live upon the planet as this liquid life springs forth.  As winds and water met on the surface, in a flash of visions that flooded over me, these forces of movement and stillness, raw power and deep nurture collided and created new life that spread outward across the surface of our planet, flowing in channels from north to south, carving on the land a path for the return of Creator/Wiracocha.  At that moment, I began to see our upcoming pilgrimage to the highland lagoons not only as a mission  to reclaim as sacred all the waters that sustain us but also as a type of tinku—a collision and restructuring of elemental forces to create new possibilities for exchange, communication, and connection between worlds that are too often viewed as “dichotomous” or “opposite.”

At different moments in our pilgrimage, I was to experience these “opposites” in multiple levels and manifestations.  At once male and female, seed and substrate, heaven and earth, wind and water, North and South, ego and inspiration, Shadow and Self, fear and love, frustration and exhilaration, destruction and creation, clarity and blindness. We journeyed together from Chiclayo through Piura and into Ecuador—Macará, Loja, Vilcabamba, Amaluza—bumping along rural roadways, hiking into the hills, offering ceremony, celebrating our gifts, honoring the waters. Our medicine walks took us through cloud and rain forests, over windswept pampas and green mountain pastures, to baptize and renew and facilitate individual and planetary healing as we embodied this “tinku” on many levels. In a tributary of the Rio Yambala, at a beautiful lodge called “Cabañas del Rio Yambala,” which is owned and operated by Sarah Wyatt and her family, we commemorated the twenty-fifth anniversary of my teacher Ysabel's Chinguel's healing mesa, La Novata. 

The ceremony that she held for us that night was exquisite, connecting us to the deep re-memberings of our individual callings in this incarnation as well as inviting us to connect to the power and majesty of her own calling and her own mesa. At one point during the ceremony, she invited us to name our own mesas, just as she had named hers “Novata,” twenty-five years ago. It was an invitation to take ownership of our own futures and a means for “stepping into our own power” as we move forward on our earthly journeys. Knowing that our highest call to service had been embodied by each of us in the imaginal maps that our own mesas hold for us, the next day Ysabel invited us to baptize our mesas, and to “seed” our sacred calling as healers, teachers, ceremonialists, wisdom-keepers, and dreamers of a new world, based on love and belonging, in the sacred waters that flow out of las lagunas de las banderillas, high above the tributary of the Rio Yambala where we had begun our work with her the night before.

By the time we approached Laguna Negra, the wind had become so intense that it took great concentration to keep our balance, to stay on the path. Placing one foot after another, in heartfelt determination, we followed the trail that would lead us to the sacred waters and the deep, tranformative energy of the lagoon. 

For me, this pilgrimage to the north had served to bring together a variety of forces so that those opposites could be rethought as complementary and whole… so that new channels incorporating all these seemingly disparate forces could be integrated in service to the All.  When I later found myself approaching Oscar at the aiport, I was still tired from the many miles of travel and so many very long days and nights.  I was thinking of all the complexities that our trip had revealed and of all the levels through which our encounters had reverberated and was wondering how best to sum up our experience.  We hugged and then as our gaze met he said simply, “Sister, we are in a new time, you know, and some of those old patterns just have to fall away to make room for the change that is coming.” 

Indeed.

So simply put yet so profound the message.  The time for separation has passed.  The time for judgment is done. The time has come to embrace and welcome the tinku in our individual and collective lives and to realize the power that will be released as a result of this re-encounter as necessary to a new way of Being.  As we welcome and prepare, may we focus our attention on Love rather than on Fear, on Creation rather than Destruction, and on an inclusive vision of planetary wholeness rather than of individual need. 

And as I move forward on the path of my own initiation into the mysteries of these prophesies, may I continue to follow what Oscar has coined as “the recipe for enlightened living”: surrendering to Spirit, opening my heart to love, channeling my energies into right action characterized by acceptance, forgiveness, thankfulness and compassion, deeply connecting with others in sacred relationship, and walking forward on a path of enlightened living in order to release transformative power into the universe in service to the All. 

As I walk this path of Grace, may I remember always to thank our Loving Creator, our Beloved Mother, all my teachers… all my relations for every Blessing, every Lesson, every Gift.  This is my fervent prayer.  Gracias, gracias, gracias, sulpayki, sulpayki, sulpayki, for all my relations…

Bonnie Glass-Coffin, July 2007
Adapted from the opening Keynote Address
 2007 International Gathering in Pisac, Peru

Bonnie Glass-Coffin, Managing Editor of the journal Anthropology of Consciousness, is a Professor of Anthropology at Utah State University where she was awarded the title of "Professor of the Year for the State of Utah" by the CASE/Carnegie foundation in 2004. She has been working with female shamans in Peru since 1988 and has written about these experiences in her first book, The Gift of Life: Female Spirituality and Healing in Northern Peru, (1998, University of New Mexico Press). Her association with don Oscar Miro-Quesada and her participation in workshops and THOTH-sponsored gatherings has been profoundly positive and has helped catalyze transformations in consciousness that continue to impact her life as a scholar, as a mother, and as a responsible citizen of Mother Earth. She can be contacted at bglasscoffin@gmail.com or on the web at www.tribe.net where she maintains an active presence and frequently posts updates about her work and life.