Watuq

Today I met a woman in the mountains, although I hadn't intended to meet anyone at all. I was traveling toward Ollantaytambo when a storm came through the valley much faster than I expected. I had watched the clouds gathering around the mountains for most of the afternoon, but I thought I had enough time to continue. I was wrong. The rain became heavy enough that the path was difficult to see, and when I noticed a small stone house farther up the hillside, I decided it was better to ask for shelter than keep walking.

The woman who lived there welcomed me inside without much conversation. She gave me something warm to drink and a little food, then returned to what she had been doing before I arrived. I found a place near the doorway where I could watch the storm moving through the valley and pulled out my journal. For a while, the only sounds in the room were the rain, the scratching of my pen, and the occasional movement of her hands.

Eventually, I became more interested in her work than my writing. Long cords rested across her lap, and her fingers moved slowly among them, stopping at different knots before continuing farther down. Sometimes she would pause at one for quite a while. I couldn't tell whether she was counting the knots, reading them, remembering something they represented, or doing something else entirely. Whatever it was, she seemed to understand a language that I couldn't see. There was a quiet knowledge about her that made me want to ask a hundred questions, yet somehow made me reluctant to interrupt her with even one.

Curiosity eventually won. I pointed toward the cords and asked her what they meant. She looked at me for a moment, then picked up one of the cords and held it toward me. I laughed and shook my head. I told her I wouldn't know how to read it. She smiled, placed the cord in my hand anyway, and returned to the others in her lap.

I sat there for a while holding something I didn't understand. I looked at the knots, the distances between them, the colors of the cords, and the places where one strand joined another. I started wondering what I would need to learn before any of it could mean something to me. By the time the rain finally softened, I realized she had answered my question after all. She could place the knowledge in my hands, but understanding it was going to require something from me.