The Space Between Heaven and Earth

We were stranded on the first night. The boat to the island wasn't running, so the three of us — Larissa, the Shaman running the retreat, another woman on the trip, and me — spent the night in a small shack by the side of Lake Titicaca. Freezing. I hadn't brought the right clothes. But there were children playing nearby, and it was, somehow, wonderful. Just the middle of nowhere, and nothing wrong with that.

The next morning we found a rickety wooden jetty and boarded a boat so small it barely deserved the word. The lake was completely still. Larissa told us: when we board this boat, this is when our silence begins.

I'd read, in a guidebook the night before, that Lake Titicaca is considered the space between heaven and earth. Sitting in that tiny boat, with a man rowing us across water so still it looked painted on, I understood exactly what the guidebook meant. There was so much to say and nowhere to say it. The crossing took thirty-five, forty minutes. Nobody spoke a single word.

We landed on Amantani with nobody there to meet us. We found our own way to the hostel, smiling at each other, gesturing, saying nothing.

From my bedroom window I could see a group of islanders building an Adobe brick house from nothing. By the end of the first day, they'd finished the ground floor. By the second day, the floor above it. Every time I looked away and looked back, more of it existed than before. Men working the structure, women feeding the children and prepping food from the land, community tables laid out below — the whole thing rising out of pure collective effort, with nothing for miles around to suggest it was even possible.

I didn't leave to explore the island. I stayed and watched the house instead. There was so much peace in it — hours of walking meditation during the day, barefoot in the courtyard, observing my own breath and thoughts, and then coming back to watch this house appear floor by floor, as if it were growing rather than being built.

On our last night, a storm broke. Real thunder, real lightning, and me lying awake worrying about a house I had no right to be worrying about, built by people I'd never spoken to, on an island I was only visiting for a handful of days.

By morning, the sky was cloudless. No damage. And everyone was back at the house before I'd even properly woken up.

That was our final day. We sat for the closing ceremony, palo santo drifting through the room — the first time I'd ever smelled it, and now a scent I light often, because it takes me straight back to that room, that island, that silence. Larissa asked us to think about what our first words would be, coming out of three days of not speaking. How we wanted to be heard, having only ever been seen.

I meant to think about it properly. I really did. 

What actually came out of me. 

"Have you seen how fast they built that fucking house?"

Three days of silence, walking meditation, palo santo, and the space between heaven and earth — and that's what was waiting right at the front of my mind the whole time. I don't think Larissa was expecting that particular sentence. I wasn't expecting it either. 

But it was somewhere my body and mind felt completely safe. Safe enough, apparently, to say exactly what I was actually thinking, the second I was finally allowed to.