To know a people, British writer Lawrence Durrell once said, you need only a little patience, a quiet moment, and a place where you might listen to the whispered messages of their land. Landscape, he thought held the key to character. He wrote that you could depopulate France, resettle it with Tartars, and within a few generations find, to your astonishment, that the national characteristics had reemerged: the restless, metaphysical curiosity, the passionate individualism, the affection for good living. Is is what he called the invisible constant of a place...Just as landscape defines a people, culture springs from a spirit of place.
Wade Davis, extract from Breaking Trail essay.
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But the essential act of faith is physical movement through space, a walk across landscape, pilgrimage that brings the supplicant from the realm of human society to the bleak reaches of the puna, and the endless possibilities for redemption or madness inherent in every encounter with the wild.
...
The effort is the sacrifice, a term that does not mean to give, but rather to make sacred. This is the key to the maestros' art of healing. It is not enough just to identify a symptom and eliminate it, with either medicinal plants or the intervention of positive magic. To heal the body one has to seek realignment, not only with the supernatural realm, but with the earth itself, the source of all life. It is the movement through sacred geography that makes atonement possible. This is the true meaning of healing. To make whole. To be holy. To give of oneself to the earth, and thus rediscover balance, the foundation and essence of well-being. As much as any aspect of the contemporary cult, it was this pursuit of equilibrium that linked the maestro to the ancient traditions of the Andes.
Pg. 189-190, Shadows in the Sun, Wade Davis
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But the essential act of faith is physical movement through space, a walk across landscape, pilgrimage that brings the supplicant from the realm of human society to the bleak reaches of the puna, and the endless possibilities for redemption or madness inherent in every encounter with the wild.
...
The effort is the sacrifice, a term that does not mean to give, but rather to make sacred. This is the key to the maestros' art of healing. It is not enough just to identify a symptom and eliminate it, with either medicinal plants or the intervention of positive magic. To heal the body one has to seek realignment, not only with the supernatural realm, but with the earth itself, the source of all life. It is the movement through sacred geography that makes atonement possible. This is the true meaning of healing. To make whole. To be holy. To give of oneself to the earth, and thus rediscover balance, the foundation and essence of well-being. As much as any aspect of the contemporary cult, it was this pursuit of equilibrium that linked the maestro to the ancient traditions of the Andes.
Pg. 189-190, Shadows in the Sun, Wade Davis
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