Kuraka of Coca

Of all the experiences I had hoped to have while walking the Inca road, this was the one I had been waiting for. It was my final evening before beginning the journey home, and somehow it felt right that these last weeks would end here, surrounded by people, ceremony, and a landscape I had come to know in ways I never expected.

It started with a handful of coca leaves.

Someone beside me opened their palm and offered them to me. By then, I recognized the leaves immediately. I had seen them growing and watched a young Yachakuq learning to gather his first harvest. I had picked fallen leaves from the road beside a Chaski whose baskets were overflowing, and later watched a Kamayoq carefully sort and prepare what had arrived. Now I was holding them in my own hand.

I looked around at the people gathered with me and felt an unexpected rush of emotion. I was no longer encountering coca somewhere along the road. I was participating in the final part of its journey.

I watched the Kuraka among the community as people talked, shared coca, and settled into the evening. There was an ease to it that made me realize I was witnessing something I had only seen in pieces until now. Here, those pieces finally came together as coca passed from hand to hand among the people gathered around me.

When I accepted the leaves, I thought about how differently I understood them now. At the beginning of this journey, they would simply have been coca leaves in my palm. Tonight, I could see the chain of land, labor, knowledge, and people behind them.

I had spent much of this journey thinking about Earth as the things that sustain us: food, shelter, resources, work, health, and the physical world beneath our feet. Sitting there on my final evening, I understood something else. What the earth provides moves through our lives by the ways we cultivate, care for, and share it.

As evening settled over the gathering, I stopped trying to understand everything happening around me. I sat with the coca leaves in my hand and listened to the voices nearby as the last light disappeared from the mountains. There was food, conversation, laughter, and the quiet satisfaction of people sharing what the land and their own labor had made possible.

Tomorrow I would begin the journey home. Tonight, there was nowhere else I needed to be. I felt the earth beneath me, the weight of the leaves in my palm, and the warmth of people gathered close. After weeks of walking, learning, and constantly moving toward whatever came next, I finally felt completely still.

I had enough. I was nourished. I was grateful. And for this one evening, I simply belonged to the gathering.