The main motive for
"nonattachment"
is a desire to escape from the pain of living,
and above all from love which,
sexual or nonsexual,
is hard work.
George Orwell
I
Tuco considered his choices
and choose to store his saddle.
The horse was stabled at a ranch that taught kids how to ride.
No "retirement" there.
Arlu arranged his flight to Chile.
It's hard though, to leave the landscape that's shaped your life.
Yet Tuco knew that only the other choice included Arlu.
What wasn't clear was how this all played out
as "nonattachment."
He may never know.
Choose. Now.
That he knew.
He began to research the desert in Chile.
The Atacama.
Arlu asked him to begin there.
It's not what you look
at that matters,
it's what you see.
Henry David Thoreau
II
On the flight south,
Tuco read, "Most of the precipitation
that comes to the Atacama
is in the form of fog that blows in from the Pacific."¹
No monsoon season, he thought, trying to imagine such a place.
"If you camp there,
even after five days,
you will notice that there are no flies
because there is nothing for them to eat;
that's how dry it is."²
Tuco wondered, "What will Global Warming do here?"
"The few things that are able to survive in the Atacama
live on the combined moisture from fog and dew."¹
Ah, he thought, less fog and dew dries even a dry place.
Not a place for a horse - domesticated or not.
Yet there are ruins of a village older than when the Buddha was alive.
Online he'd found the photo of
The
ruins of a stone age village (500-800 B.C.) at Tulor.
In the picture, the Atacama stretches beyond the ruins,
to the horizon of mountains.
And Tuco studied the pictures of Pukara
de Lasana,
the ruins of a pre-Incan fortress on the Rio Loa.
Then he read "San
Pedro de Atacama is a little over 8000 feet
and if you aren't already used to the altitude,
you might want to spend part of your first day taking it easy."
That's very high up, he thought.
III
He hated hiking, and not having a
horse
but he knew this wasn't the landscape for one.
Let the journey begin.
Find the local trends, the history of heat and cold,
of water and snow. Farming?
What did those Tulor villagers do for food 2,500 years ago?
Tuco considered the rain
shadow effect,
is it possible that it will change as the global weather changes?
Time to search for data and theories.³
Unlikely to become rain forest but what could happen? How?
Then it will be time to see, to journey into an alien desert.
To see what is.
Patience,
the answers will piece together in time.
Arlu may come by as well.
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