By K. M. Huber, author of “Dance of the Owl Woman: Patya’s Journey”
“Work on the stuff of the soul by means of the things of life . . . Ordinary life is the means of entry into higher spiritual activity – or we could say that at the very moment we are hard at work on some worldly endeavor we are also working on a different plane. Perhaps without knowing it we are engaged in the labors of the soul.” Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul
Writing Dance of the Owl Woman: Patya’s Journey turned out to be as much a spiritual project as a literary one. The book and its predecessor, Call of the Owl Woman: A Novel of Ancient Peru, evolved over the course of twenty years of research while exploring the landscapes of my husband’s native Peru. That exploration process entered my internal landscapes as well. Walking in different worlds at the same time became a recuring motif in these books and in my life—through the play of time and place as well as through the enigmas of perception. What started with curiosity about history, culture, and geography led to an unexpected spiritual journey for myself as well as my characters. In the process, I was able to nurture my relationship with the earth and, in so doing, nourish my soul.
Our perceived realities have many layers. As a writer, it was important to me to build Patya’s world in a way that was faithful to the evidence in the archaeological record and would recreate a time that was plausible and felt real. Populating a world that had left no written language, however, meant taking many leaps of imagination and faith. The invented characters needed to make sense for their time, but be relatable to the present. They needed to have meaning and purpose for themselves, and for me. Through them, I hoped to answer some of my own questions.
The Inca Empire had consolidated its power over most of the South American continent only a couple centuries before the Spanish arrived. It had developed fascinating systems and amazing technologies, but I wasn’t interested in telling a story of conquest or control. I wanted to know about the people whose cultures had existed long before the Inca, societies whose own systems and technologies had been later adopted or adapted by the Inca. I was particularly fascinated by the Nasca culture which flourished between 100BC and 800AD. What had caused it to disappear after having thrived successfully for more almost a millennia in a precarious desert environment? What had changed to tip the balance? What had their lives been like right before it all collapsed?
There was no written language to leave a record, yet the dryness of the region helped preserve significant information about the Nasca for the future. Their culture still speaks to us through the art they left behind—their beautiful textiles, stunning ceramics, and mummified burial bundles, and through the landscape itself which was shaped, managed, and experienced in ways we do not fully understand. Fragments from their past offer information. Plants proliferate with abandon on their pottery. Sea, air, and land animals populate their plates and vessels. Anthropomorphic beings flourish in forms feathered and finned, feline and ferocious, serpentine and surreal.
One of the commonly repeated designs looks like a flower or a star inside a circle but is actually the image of a cross-section of a cactus known as San Pedro, that was used ritually in healing and divination ceremonies, and is still known as a sacred medicine plant that can open visionary portals. The cactus was also prominent in the earlier Chavin culture of in the Northern Andean highlands, and in the north-coastal Moche culture contemporary with the Nasca. When I discovered that there were contemporary healers utilizing a brew made from the same cactus, I sought out them out to learn more. What began as historical research transformed into new pathways of spiritual exploration.
I had the good fortune of working with don Oscar Miro-Quesada Solevo, carrier of the Andean shamanic lineage of don Celso Rojas Palomino of Salas and don Benito Corihuamán Vargas of Wasao, and an ancestral legacy that celebrates traditions of reciprocity and right relationship—with earth and with each other. Discovering Andean mesa traditions gave my previous experiences a new perspective that felt like “coming home.” During one ceremony, don Oscar pointed to the moon with a smile and sent me outside to talk with Grandmother Moon, Mama K’illa, and old friend whose voice I needed to hear.
In Peru’s Sacred Valley I had the privilege of spending time and working with Q’ero paqos like don Mariano Quispe y doña Agustina Ccapa Champi. I learned invaluable lessons from curanderas Ysabel Chinguel Machado and Olinda Pintado Sidia about the Moche traditions of Peru’s northern coast, as featured in The Gift of Life by anthropologist Bonnie Glass-Coffin, whose own journey continues to inspire my work. The inspiration for the sisterhood of the Owl Woman Tuku Warmi owes much to my time in the Moche region, where owls appear on ancient ceramics associated with female healers and shamans and where reed boats are still used to fish and surf.
While exploring Patya’s potential routes to Tiwanaku, I explored Lake Titicaca, the Peruvian altiplano, and the Aymara traditions of the region with a local woman who embraced Patya as more than a character in a book, but more like the return of a long-lost sister. She, too, sees the world’s current crisis as a turning. “People need to remember to honor and reciprocate the gifts of the earth.” It was Patya’s connection to the earth that inspired the passionate enthusiasm of my Peruvian publishers at Grupo Editorial Estación La Cultura, Enedina Veramendi, Diego Bardalez, and translator Lucho Zuñiga, who championed Patya’s first steps into the world in the first version of the book that came out in Peru in Spanish.
When I first set out to bring to life the sixth-century world of the Nasca, I did not realize that the process of trying to understand their culture would rekindle a flame within my own soul, and renew my connection with the moon. Mama K’illa has been a lifetime companion—steadily following me through car windows as a child, taking my adolescent breath away in midnight clearings, offering familiar company in big cities, checking in regularly like a panther’s eye, and guiding my way up Nasca’s sacred mountain Yuraq Orqo while hiking after sunset. Trees were my first playgrounds from the high-up views offered by sticky Pacific Northwest pines to the awesomeness of redwoods and dances with white oaks dwarfed by wind and time on star-filled mountaintops and sprawling seats in ancient serpentine guarangos. I’ve been taught by many plants, from visionary cacti to corn and potatoes and everything in between, and by water in all its presentations, from ocean to desert oasis to mountain spring, lifeblood of the earth. Our life-giving sun, the cosmos itself, and all the manifestations of creation are where the divine resides. I am grateful to have been able to weave those threads into my stories.
In April, I was answering questions via zoom at the Mindfulness Book Club meeting in Charlotte, NC, when someone mentioned feeling nostalgic for something she had never had but wanted deeply: a conscious daily relationship with the earth. We all need that.
“…the sacred understanding that we are not separate from the world around us, but in constant relationship with the land, the people, the spirits, and all living beings. Reading it felt like a remembrance of an ancient way of living in reciprocity and reverence. The story and its wisdom have so much healing power to offer to our world today.” David Viafora, author of Thriving Together: Nine Principles for Cocreating True Community