Nasca Mythology, Earth Wisdom & the Creative Imagination with K.M. Huber

Ancient Peru, the living land, and the wisdom of the more-than-human world weave through this conversation with K.M. Huber, author of Call of the Owl Woman and Dance of the Owl Woman.

Together, we explore the ancient Nasca world, the meeting place between archaeology and imagination, Andean cosmology, ritual and relationship with the Earth, Deep Ecology, feminine lineage, and the wisdom carried by grandmothers. We also speak about Patya and Silver Owl Woman, and what these ancient ways of seeing might teach us about restoring relationship with an animate, living world.

Connect with K.M. Huber’s work
Website: ⁠kmhuber.com
Visit the PATYA’S WORLD pages for printable PDFs of maps and glossary.

Books:
⁠Call of the Owl Woman, A Novel of Ancient Peru
Dance of the Owl Woman, Patya’s Journey

✨ Women & Mythology Podcast is a soulful exploration of myth as a living force in our contemporary lives.

Hosted by Maria Souza — Comparative Mythologist, Poet, and Educator.

📖 Learn more: www.womenandmythology.com

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello myth lover, I'm Maria. Welcome to the Woman and Mythology Podcast.

SPEAKER_01 0:12

We have thirsted. We have suffered. We lost homes and those we loved. We now stand here altogether. And together we're enough. We stand here before Creator. We stand here before the sky. Our feet are planted on a mother, lifting souls and spirits high. She lifts our boats when battered. She lifts us when betrayed. When she calls on us to journey, we will answer unafraid. We can't see into the future. We see what we meet behind. We look out toward each horizon, ready for all that we may find.

SPEAKER_00 1:05

Mythmaker Podcast Network. Hello everyone, and welcome back to Woman in Mythology. I'm your host, Maria, and I'm very happy to share today's conversation with the author KM Huber. Kathy is a writer, former teacher, and librarian whose life has taken her across many countries and cultures, including more than 20 years living on the desert coast of Peru. Her fascination with ancient history, archaeology, the natural world, and earth-honoring traditions eventually led her deep into the world of the ancient Nazca people, and became the ground from which her novels, Call of the Owl Woman, and its newly released sequel, Dance of the Owl Woman, Patia's journey emerged. Set in 6th century Peru, Dance of Owl Woman continues the story of Patia, a young Nazca woman living through a time of drought, cultural upheaval, and religious conflict, while also navigating her own relationship with ancestral knowledge, the land, and the path that is calling her forward. I feel we can find many similarities with our lives today. What drew me so deeply into Kathy's work was the living world that surrounds this story. This is a novel in which stones have presence, water is sacred, mountains are being with whom we can enter into relationship, and the boundaries between the human and more than human world remains wonderfully porous. And this became very much the heart of our conversation. Together, Kathy and I explore what the ancient NASCAR world might teach us about living in deeper relationship with the earth and how archaeology, imagination, and lived experience can bring an ancient culture back to life. We speak about ritual and the living land, feminine lineage and sisterhood, the wisdom carried by grandmothers, and the way stories can reconnect us with forms of knowing that modern life often leaves behind. This was such a generous and wide-ranging conversation, moving between archaeology and imagination, story and lived experience, ancient worlds, and some of the questions we are facing in our own time. I hope you enjoy my conversation with KM Huber. Let's dive right in. Hi, Kathy. Welcome. Thank you so much for being with us.

SPEAKER_01 3:39

Hi, Maria. It's my pleasure to be here. Looking forward to our conversation.

SPEAKER_00 3:44

Me too. I am so excited. And I would love to begin by inviting you to introduce us to the NASCA people. Who were they? Where do they live? What do we know about their society, customs, worldview, and relationship with the land? And perhaps could you also share some of the archaeological evidence that has helped you understand the society?

SPEAKER_01 4:08

That's a huge question. But I'll start where I started, which is first hearing about the NASCA many years ago when Eric Montanekin was talking about how these lines that were created in the desert must have been done by aliens coming to land on the desert or something, because there were these giant pictures on the ground that were only visible from the air, and people didn't understand where they had come from, why they were there. Some of them looked like big landing strips, some of them were animals. So that was a curiosity. I always loved the idea of ancient civilizations and mysteries. So that planted the first seed. And then I never expected I would meet a Peruvian and end up living in Peru, marrying someone from a country I had never even thought about going to, really. So when I was exploring Peru and I actually visited the Nazca region, I was really impressed by the textiles, the art, the fact that in the desert they had managed the water system so well that for 700 years they thrived in a desert, one of the driest places in the world, the Atacama Desert, which is from goes from Chile up north. So I was very curious. And then my daughter, who was born in Peru, when she was a teenager, was saying, What can you write something that my friends would want to read? Something about young people and multicultural stuff, because we bounced around from to several countries as they were growing up. And she was like, and make it something that's also about True. And we were living there at the time and liked to talk about archaeology and different cultures. And so we picked the Nazca culture to learn more about together and started, we worked in an archaeological site in Lima that was contemporary to the NASCAR culture. And I began doing the research, and she went back to school, and it just evolved from there. But the NASCA culture is, like I said, it survived for 700 years through drought after drought. And as we're hearing a lot now about El Niño and the phenomena of El Niño and how that affects the climate around the world and how it creates climate changes, and places that usually are dry suddenly have floods, and places that are usually wet have severe droughts. And we've gone through many of those cycles. And I went through some of those cycles while living in Peru. And I was curious about what had turned the corner for that particular culture, that it suddenly disappeared. Not well, suddenly is over a hundred years, it just declined and disappeared. It wasn't like somebody invaded and took over. It was very connected to what was going on climatically and what that would have been like for people who had had managed that balance, who had found underground systems of water that they brought to the surface, who had managed so well for so long what happened. And so I was also curious about what happens when a culture is on the verge of collapse and things changing and falling apart around you. And mind you, I was this was 20 years ago when I was first thinking about it. And then to have the book come out at a time when we are facing that in our own culture and thinking about tipping points and all of that kind of stuff. So that's part of the background on why I got involved. And then the archaeological evidence took me in a whole new path. Because we had, my daughter and I had this great idea for how we could wrap things up and some of these really fun things about how there might have been balloons and there might have been all of these. There's so many theories about why they made the lines, who made the lines, how they made the lines. And the more I learned, the more I had to discard some of the possible scenarios that I had thought about. But one of the things that fascinated me, there were there are several things. The orca, which nobody really talked about in prove very much because you don't see it that them that often. They are occasionally seen off offshore. But to have a culture that has orcas on their pottery and their textiles and in these big designs on the earth, this landscape art, why would the people who lived, they lived inland, they would go to fish? But they must have had some very profound experiences with these animals for them to be so important in their lives. That and then severed heads. I did not know what to do with all of that. There, there was a lot of data among the archaeologists and the anthropologists. Were they trophy heads? Were they like the shrunken heads that you take the trophies from your enemies? Were they ancestor worship? Were they and all of these different theories I played with and I ended up using incorporating a lot of those elements in the book? But I had never expected to have so much focus on heads that had been removed from bodies. So that was an important piece of the archaeological evidence that led me into exploring avenues I might not have explored otherwise. But this could be a whole podcast just on the NASA cultures. I don't think that's gonna help help people uh understand as much about what it is like to live in a world where you are much more connected to nature. And that was the other thing that I wanted to bring to life was when you are living much more in the cycles of nature, what do those, what does that rhythm look like? What does that world look like? What does it feel like?

SPEAKER_00 9:55

This is also fascinating. And we could really stay in this for so long for a whole podcast episode, because just in your response, I already have so many immediate questions. But I would love to ask you as well, what are some of the challenges in bringing such an ancient world back to life? And how did you navigate between historical evidence and imagination? And where did you give yourself permission to imagine freely? Excellent question.

SPEAKER_01 10:26

That was something that took me a while to sort out because there was no writing. The only evidence we're gathering from are from the ceramics, pottery, textiles, images, the iconography, the way of life based on archaeological evidence. But to bring to life people when you don't know who they were. It's not like we have history and it's historical fiction that incorporates history that we have a record of. It's so speculative, so much as imagination, that I did a lot of research on different kinds of cultures in different parts, particularly in Peru, what vestiges there might still be. Just the way that the Spaniards went during the conquest, a lot of what we know about the Incas is filtered through the eyes of the Spaniards who are trying to get rid of the old ways of thinking or the old spirituality and we replace it with the athlete, what they were bringing in. And so a lot of the stories that are told about the Incas that we do have written records of are through those filters. So I was very aware that I'm bringing my own filter. But at the same time, how can I use that filter to bring to highlight things that are ancestral wisdom that can be recognized and appreciated today? So I took liberties in creating the characters. They may not have had the same kinds of thoughts or feelings that we do today, but trying to imagine that and speculate what could have been and base it on whether or not it was plausible given the evidence that we don't know. I did really make an effort to have it see grounded in a plausible reality.

SPEAKER_00 12:17

It feels that because you were perhaps doing this with your daughter or in conversation with your daughter. Maybe do you feel that also interfered in a positive way? Her imagination or her intentions around the creative work?

SPEAKER_01 12:36

Absolutely. And I don't know if I mentioned that that conversation has continued over time. And now she's an adult. She's got a two-year-old son and was, and she's also an artist, in addition to being a teacher and an academic. And but art is her passion. And so she designed the cover in conversation. She designed the first cover and this cover, the second cover, and she finished that one last summer while we were we were spending the summer together. So that's all it's been in conversation. The feeling that I wanted to have, or the original feeling that she wanted to have, which was by intercultural, multicultural understanding, learning languages. Like I said, we lived in different, not only did we live in Peru, but we ended up living in Bolivia, in Costa Rica, and then we moved to Atlanta in the United States, which was probably the biggest cultural change for us from having lived in Latin America. And so that clash of cultures and coming into Atlanta, for example, where people are like, didn't know that a lot of their classmates didn't know the difference between people in Africa and people in South America. And master she wore clothes to school. It's like some all kinds of stuff. So we talked a lot about assumptions and perspectives and prejudices about different kinds of people. And it so I felt obligated to bring in another culture into the Nazca world, which is why we the character of Mochiko is there because he's from Moche, the northern culture. And in a lot of ways, there was more there's more records of sort of violence, but they also had a lot of seafaring stuff that I was able to incorporate because the NASCAR didn't have boats. They had inflated seal skins to go out and float around and do their fishing in lay nets and stuff. Because they were a fishing culture, but they did not have these boats that could travel. So we had this character come in from the north and incorporate some of those differences and that whole idea of how do you communicate with someone when you don't have language? How do you learn each other's languages? That was the two lines that came out of those conversations.

SPEAKER_00 14:59

This resonates so much with me because I'm from Brazil, born and raised for over 20 years there. And I completely understand the prejudice, the misconceptions around it once living abroad and being in other countries. And also how the land, the culture itself, and the work, the research shapes us. I really believe that deep research has the power to transform the researcher as much as it informs the work itself. And I was wondering how did writing dance of the owl woman and immersing yourself in the world of the NASCAR, but then also all these other countries in which you live to shape to you as a woman.

SPEAKER_01 15:44

I think it really helped me find my own home in a sense of what making sense of how I relate to the world. There have always been somebody who collected rocks wherever I go. I feel like I need to have a rock in my pocket or I stop and kill a piece of wood or driftwood or something. Things just keep end up, feathers keep end up migrating into my house. And when I was researching some of the contemporary healing traditions in Peru and some of the ancestral cosmovision, I started interviewing different anthropologists and teachers in some of the different traditions. And I kept asking questions. One of them was talked to some of the an anthropologists who had been researching the Geros and the high mountains at Fruit, because that was one of the purest forms of Quechua language since the conquest by the Spaniards, because there was a group that just went so far up into the mountains that they were very distant from the continuing cultural and the changing language, for instance. So when José Muniz del Prado heard people in the marketplace speaking a very different strain of the language, he realized it was the older version. And he ended up going and researching and studying with these higher up in the Andes, where the Afus, the mountains are very sacred, and the relationship daily with the earth is sacred, and the rituals of daily life are very much incorporating the natural world, thanking the earth for its gifts by giving them the first drink when you are sharing something, for example. So as I was getting deeper and deeper into this, I was also very interested in the shamanic aspect of these lines in the desert. Perhaps they were partly from shamanic experience. And one of the symbols that was very common on the ceramics was the what looked like a star in a circle. And I always thought it was a star and circle or stars or sun or whatever. And then I, as I was researching, I found that actually that's the cross-section of the cactus that's sacred to the people, that they would create a visionary broom from. So a lot of their traditions, or what I'm turning to healing insights, would involve making this broom from this cactus. And so I was looking for somebody who knew more about that and those traditions. And I ended up, this is like the small world. My husband says, Oh, I went to school with a guy who got into that studying that kind of stuff. You should check him out. And he was from his brother's class, a younger class in Lima in Peru. And it was Oscar Mira, who has become a great cross-cultural shamanic teacher and practitioner. And I went to one of his workshops, and there was a whole synchronicity that led me to that. It was just timing was impeccable. It was like so unusual. It's when you feel like everything is converging and taking you to a particular place at a particular time. And it was an apprenticeship series, and I had missed the first one, but I was invited to participate and go and take and do a catch-up sort of introductory session with someone in Atlanta, which is where we were living at the time. And when I walked into his sort of Mesa room, the altar space and how they set up their Mesa, which is a traditional from two different traditions. Oscar worked in the southern tradition and the northern tradition, one that worked with the uh the cactus tradition, the Wachuma tradition, and one that was with the Kero tradition that I was talking about, the high mountains. But everything in healing is connected in with nature. Like the healing items are often stones or shells or things that are imbued with the energy that you've been working with. And so when that when the initial instruction was to have a certain thing, a shell or a stone or a feather to represent the different directions and to bring something that was significant to you. I had all these things that I'd been collecting that had special significance to me from either where I was at the time I collected it, what was happening in my life. And all of a sudden it took shape in an altar before me. And it made sense in a way that just felt like going home. It was like an altar that's a visual, concrete representation of both your inner life and your outer world. And it's a way to work with that map to yourself and to the world, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 20:54

It does. And I am so honored to listen to the story. Thank you for sharing it with us. I absolutely love listening to these sacred stories and sacred moments in women's life. And this actually leads me to ask you something that's really stayed with me when I read your book towards the end, where you mentioned you had a drumming journey. And I wonder if there was where the arcas, the jaguar emerge for you. And how did that experience shape your understanding of the cosmology and the role that they play also in you writing the story? I would add also to our listeners that I discovered through your book that the Andean cosmology is interconnected through the Kondor, which is the upper world, the puma, the physical, the present world, the kind of middle space, and then the serpent, the underworld. And I was wondering if you could also speak to us about the symbolic meanings and these three worlds and your drumming journey and How did the arcas also appear in the Jaguar? How this all kind of comes together?

SPEAKER_01 22:05

Like I said, that could be a whole nother podcast. Let me see if I can just touch the basics. Because that that drumming journey that I mentioned was when we were living in Bolivia. It was before I'd even thought about writing this. I was working on a different book at the time. It was something said in the United States. It was historical fiction, World War I and Vietnam War, and very character-driven. I was very involved in that. And I was not thinking about as much. I was raising kids also. There was more of a tourist in my travels. I loved being able to, because of my husband's work, being able to go out into communities and meet people in very rural areas and stuff. But I had no real connection or understanding of the traditions for what I was seeing around me in museums and such. But I had a group of women that we would meet to talk about meditation, spiritual practices. And I had never done any drumming. Just somebody said, Hey, I have this tape. Let's try this, see what it's like. And so we all lay down on the floor, put this tape on. And I was just suddenly in this whole cinematic world where I went through very visceral, feeling like I was standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon or something, with behind a ceremonialist in full regalia with his feathers and his, he was in the position of the cover of the book. He was like talking to the sky. But then he became a hawk. And as he was flying and circling, he entered a cave in the side of the mountain, or the cliff side. And suddenly I was in this journey going through the center of the earth mountain or something. And the in the waters. And at the time, that vision was the bird, the big bird, which was eagle or hawk. Again, I wasn't thinking condor, I was just thinking this great bird of the sky. And then the feeling of going through the earth was very serpent. But then when I came out, it's like I came out as a jaguar running across the desert. And it was very powerful. It was so much and so visceral that I was trying to paint it, I was trying to draw it, I was trying to see if I could find sculptures that somehow would reflect that feeling, that that spiral through the earth and then the coming out, which ended up feeding much of the imagery in the books, because it just I kept coming back to it. But I did not know about the three worlds and that condor the serpent and the perma. But the next time I went to from Bolivia, because my husband's parents were still in Lima, and we went through Cusco and we were at the marketplace, and I saw the statue of a condor sitting on the head of a serpent with uh puma with its mouth open at the base, which I later found out was not, that's not the usual. I saw that first time I had seen something like that. I got it, I still have it. But since then, what I usually see in the chops is the condor on the top, the puma in the middle, and the serpent underneath. But the one that I found in the marketplace was more like what my dream had been or my vision had been. So it was unusual. But then later on, I when I was learning about the mesa and the tradition, it was the different pacha, my pacha, the different world. Pacha is world. So when you say Pacha, which we'll might talk about later, it's actually not just Mother Earth, it's the world times space. So you've got the world of the underworld, which is not so much we think of in contemporary Western culture, you think of heaven, earth, and world. It's more like the sky is the realm of spirit. The underworld is also the realm of growth and exploration and the unseen. And that's where the serpent is symbol. And Puma is the one who's in this realm. So how should we call it our consensual reality physical world? And then there's all just kinds of stories and mythologies and that kind of connect these worlds and how they communicate. And the hummingbird is also a real strong feature. Orca was not there. Orca was not there until I started the research on Nazca. And I said, What is Orca doing here? I grew up in the land of Orcas. I remember when they were first talking about, it shows how old I am. Before they started capturing them for captivity and making them show animals, people didn't, people only thought of them as killer whales and of the top predator, apex predator of the ocean. I had no understanding of how I knew that they learned fast because they were starting to train them for sea world and stuff like that. But they are have such a presence and uh personality and a spirituality in a sense that an intelligence, a consciousness, and a social light that is pretty amazing. And I don't know how much you know about orcs, but I've also since then studied them all over the world in some of the different ways and the different types and how they are is different as people in a sense, in terms of how they organize their what they eat organizes how they hunt and how they communicate. They're very social, linear. They it's one of the few species like humans that actually a female lives beyond reproductive years. Most species, once you can't reproduce, you're not really valuable to the species. But the orcas, the grandmothers, are the ones who are the matriarchs that the leaders of their pods and their plans. So very fascinating. So I felt like I had to go to prove to begin to really understand the culture of these features that that are incredibly sensitive in ways that we don't usually attribute to marine mammals.

SPEAKER_00 28:43

Absolutely fascinating. I would love to ask you about this modern life that we live today and community ritual, the living land, which feels so different. The modern world we live and the world you describe in your book in Dance of the Owl Woman. So could you speak about the relationship between these rights, the land and the community? I know you've touched already a little bit on this, but if you want to go a little bit deeper, and how as modern people, how might we begin to recover some of that sense of communion and connection with the more than human world, with the land, with each other? And if you believe that it's even possible, this deep form of spiritual connection, is it even possible, you feel, in modern life?

SPEAKER_01 29:34

It's all that much more important. I I think you were talking earlier, maybe it was before we began about creating spaces for silence, which is really hard when you have small children and you're involved in so much. But those those moments where one of the things I love about small children is the wonder, the sense of wonder when they pick up a leaf or a rock and they're just so absorbed in it. Or my grandkids, because they know I love rocks, are always bringing me rocks, and it can be a handful of gravel. It's like what is special about what you discover each moment in your life and creating that little bubble just of reminder. And I think when I was first looking at your question, you said, and I did I didn't know it's I assume it was a a typo. It said, live ah, h I n g and like or having that off or something. Yeah, that's that is it. That's having that feeling of you take a breath, you enjoy the sun, the sunset, the the way the trees are blowing, whatever it is, those are the moments that really connect us to outside of ourselves or to interbeing with other things. When I lived in New York City, the parks were so important to me because those were the places where I got to see green. And in recent years, like the last mayor just made it a point to plant more trees. So when I was there last year, I was amazed that there were cherry blossoms in all of the Lower East Side. I was like, wow, this is it's awesome. And it's the lack of that, I think makes it so easy for us to abuse the earth and to see it only as a resource that you can spend and use up and not see the cost of losing what we lose when we don't consider the cost to the water, to the supp the water. I think we keep coming back to that because and I need to share this because one of the most profound observations for me living in Peru was what a little bit of moisture can do to a desert. It's I grew up in the Pacific Northwest where it rains more than anything else, or at least a fine drizzle, not necessarily the downpours, but where moisture was something that I was ever present for me. And living in a desert made me much more aware uh of that precarious balance because there are these hills just south of Lima that when Lima's a funny place. Okay, it's on the coast, it's on a desert, but the winter brings in this cloud cover that just hangs over the city. They say that was uh locals' revenge on the Spaniards when they suggested that's where they should build their capital, because it was summer, the dry season, when they said this is a perfect place for your capital. And then six months later, the fog comes in and just sits over the city for months, and then it's clammy and cold and miserable. But the hills turn green, these dry, barren hills suddenly turn green, and these amankaias are growing, these big yellow flowers that just burst out of nothing. Everything becomes just covered in green, and these trees that look dead during the rest, very few trees, but some will just pop up and then they will dry up during the dry season, and then they will just flourish again in the the and not even wet season, it's not rain, it's just the moisture of the clouds that hang over the the the valleys on these hills, and it is like magic. It's really such a uh visceral sensation in a short time. It's like where your cycles, you really see the cycles, and you know that there are some places that don't get that, except for many, every few decades or something. And yet those seeds are still there, just waiting. That seed just needs that little bit of moisture to suddenly birds to life to blossom. And that's one of the metaphors that kind of comforts me over time, even when things seem really despairing and really impossible. It's like I remember those changes.

SPEAKER_00 34:12

The elements they can feel very magical. And water specifically, it's such an important element in your narrative as well. And to the NASCAR people. And as you were saying now, it is fertile for the land and for the psyche when we have something arid within us. Water is that fertilizing force that transforms that into potential. I would love since you opened the conversation on deep ecology, on looking at nature with inherent value, not as commodity, not as what it serves for the ecological processes, but having an inherent sacred value. And deep ecology, as I was telling you before we began, is it was such an important finding in my life. And there is a beautiful passage in your book that actually, when I was reading, I highlighted it, where the characters speak about every stone having its own value and purpose. And I found it deeply moving. May I read it? Sure. Let me just find it here. Okay. So it's on page 133. It's the first paragraph, in case someone who's listening has the book. He pats the large stone that he is sitting on. This one stood at the entrance for many years, but it felt but it fell in the last earthquake. It doesn't seem interested in standing up again. So I rolled it inside. Even stones get tired. He leans off he leans on his staff to get up. Some stones rest, some work, some become walls, monuments, grinders of grain, some stones cry to bring back the reins. I thought that was so beautiful when I read because it is so subtle, but it speaks so much to their way of being and a way of seeing the natural world and relating to the natural world. One that is not untouchable, some stones become walls, some grind, right? Some become a technology that is used. But also this understanding and a reminder that stones also get tired and they must be laid to rest. And just that relationship was something that in this very small passage, that if you're reading the chapter, you might just continue reading because it's also compelling and page-turning. But it really touched me. And I was wondering if you can speak about how deep ecology and the idea that all beings possess inherent value influence your understanding of the NASCA way of being.

SPEAKER_01 37:11

But the fact that they spent so much time in the landscape moving stones to create art, the fact that they their ceramics and their textiles are all just filled with plants and animals and birds, and it's just like being woven into their daily life. And also the idea of gratitude, of acknowledging gifts of the land, of the sky, of the earth. What I think really helps is the attitude of gratitude, as people talk about. When you acknowledge the gift of something or what you're receiving from it, you're in relationship with it. And I think it's so easy to fall out of relationship with the natural world, take it for granted or to walk on it. I started doing NASCAR lines, re-re-creating them to create a path to walk on, in which you are just being aware of your breath, aware of the change in space as you walk, like walking a labyrinth, except recreating some of the lines that the NASA used, and then I'm recently trying out other kinds of lines. But the experience people have, or what they talk about afterwards, is just the slowing down, the feeling the earth under your feet, the noticing the change in direction when you curve around or you stop and notice where you are, that being embodied in your body, in your breath, in your space. It's something that I just found really helpful for myself. And so I guess I wanted to explore that a bit more. And one of the things that we started doing one summer on the beach was standing rocks. And so that's the scene that right before situ talking about those rocks falling. I don't know if you remember this, she's trying to balance the rocks. And we used to do that, or we still do that. And it's like it becomes almost addictive because things that just seem impossible, if you get it just right, suddenly you find this line of gravity or alignment that it will stand in this stone that's really weird shaped with just one little point, is suddenly standing there on top of another rock. And you feel like it wants to be there. It's projection. I know where humans morphies everything, but it just feels you just feel that alignment. You feel that falling into balance. I guess that's that balance, and it's tenuous and precarious, but it's wonderful while it's there. And somebody can yell, and that's enough to fall over. But that moment of finding that place of balance is just magical. And sometimes the rock doesn't want to stand. I like to think about what a rock would tell us that we've walked over hundreds of times and it's been there and churned and turned over. And each one has a little piece of memory of time and place. I think that's pretty fabulous if you think about the many infinite possibilities of every moment and every echo through time and space. And we're here just kind of finding our way through it all.

SPEAKER_00 40:37

And when we consider this possibility of the stone having wisdom and all beings having this, their sort of wisdom, their sort of intrinsic sacred value, then suddenly the world is so much more alive. We return to that idea of a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects. You mentioned Patya in the cave, and I was wondering if this is a moment for you to speak of your protagonist, of your heroine. She is fascinating. And for me, she feels sometimes very magical, but then at other times she just feels simply deeply intuitive and profoundly connected to herself and the land. And I was wondering how do you understand her and how would you introduce her?

SPEAKER_01 41:30

It's funny. I when you ask the question, I suddenly back up in Puno by Lake Titicaka, the Altiplano and Bru. And it's I was there traveling with my husband to trace the path that Pilot would be taken to get to Tiwanaku, which is where ultimately she's called to go to Tiwanaku. And I wanted to do that physically. And I contacted this woman who I knew had had taken a friend of mine to some of the sacred sites in the area. And so I contacted her and asked her if she would be interested in if she had some time to go visit some some places and test out the route that Pachya might have taken. And as I talked to her about Patya and Pacha's experience in her growing up in a culture in the Nazca culture, it was common to elongate the heads so the babies were their heads were bound so that they would be long. And Pacha's grandmother had a dream in which she was basically told, don't let them bind her head. She needs to have the round head and it will become important. But Pacha never knows why it would be important. But then her little brother is also, his head is not bound because her parents think that it will be easier on her. She's not the only one who's different from her older brothers and the people around her. So that's part of also her challenge is being a little bit of an outsider, being a little different, also not really wanting to. She comes from a long line of healers. Her mother is a healer, her grandmother was a healer, and her grandmother had traveled all around with the caravans and brought back a lot of the medicine plants from different regions. She was very well known around the whole region. But Pat just, she likes to dance, she likes to paint. She doesn't, she has trouble remembering which route go with which ailments, and she has to remind herself. So she makes notes on the pots when she's putting things away to remind her that this is for stomach stuff and this is for something else. But she's that's not what she feels called to. And yes, she feels like the expectation everybody's expecting her to do that. But she also has gotten a lot of knowledge and skills so that she is able to use that when she needs to. But she's trying to find her way. And she suffered from a major trauma that she's still. Recovering from and all of her grandmother's teachings that have helped her to get through this suddenly, when her grandmother dies unexpectedly, leave her grieving and questioning and then being targeted later because she challenges things. So then, as you see in the book, she's accused of something she didn't do. But she wants to do things what's right. And she wants she doesn't put up with even the elders and the priests who are saying this is what the gods want because she sees through their motives. But oh, so I I got a little carried away. So I'm telling the story of Plata to Paola up in Puno. And she's like, I like this girl. I want to make sure she gets where she needs to go. I I really want by the end of our journey, she's like, I think Pati really existed. I think I think that she's coming back to help us remember how important it is to be in relationship with the earth. And that was she was on her own personal journey as well, and was getting involved with the Aymata teachers. Now, Aymata and Quechua are the two main languages of the region, of the mountains, anyway, because there's like hundreds of languages in South America. The indigenous, every tribe, there's so many different languages, but the huge, the biggest language groups are Aymata and Quechua, and what's come from them. And the Aymatics. Opening up also my learning about Indian cosmology, one of her teachers told us the three worlds is really partly been influenced by the Spanish conquest because they were bringing the Trinity from the church. But really the deeper layers are four because everything is in duality. Everything is the opposites in duality, sense, etc. So really there's four. And I've been invited to study more of that, but I've been unable to really get very far into that yet. But that's something I just wanted to plant that seed, that you have these four worlds, but you also have something that is part of that that that makes the fourth element. I will have to leave for the next book when I explore that.

SPEAKER_00 46:27

Would you like to speak a little bit about Silver Owl Woman? So for those who haven't read the book yet, who is she and what do you feel she embodies and awakens within us?

SPEAKER_01 46:39

The medicine women of the north were often depicted in the with the figure of an owl and an owl woman and could then connected to healing, especially in the moche tradition. You see the owl a lot in in the Nas, but there's also the burrowing owl, which is what I've encountered much more there. It's smaller, and there's something about, but maybe it's kind of the shape-shifting the small owl and these larger spiritual owls that embody that other between worlds. It can't when it came to me as the costume that is left for Patya by her grandmother that was only for use in high ceremony, it's not a visible thing, it's not something that's paraded around. It was something that was much more for transforming energies within sacred spaces and not so much for public. And one of the things that happens in this book is Patya is compelled to take something public that she's not sure is appropriate or doesn't know if she's transgressing, and yet there's a point at which that's what needs to be done, and it also calls attention to those who have secretly been somehow connected to this legacy that kind of calls it forth again. So there's a chance for rebirth of this sisterhood of women who have protected other women. That's what it evolves into in the next part of the song. At least that's okay. That I think something that I noticed in some of the other podcasts that you've been doing, the importance of being together and not trying to do things on your own. Just that that this these times really call for finding those who are doing the kinds of things that you feel are important or are sharing the values that you want to share or embodying the life you want to live. I don't know if it's making sense with that, but it feels like the more things fall apart around us, the more important it is to be with the people who are trying to build a connective life that will live on beyond what our society.

SPEAKER_00 49:18

Absolutely. I found that the power of community right now for me and being in conversation with others and being able to receive nurturance from others, support, and then also our ability to support others, it feels one of the most essential medicines. And it was actually motherhood that led me to understand this deeply, that I needed community, that I needed not necessarily to speak about motherhood, not at all, to be honest, but that I wanted to be surrounded specifically by other women and in that intergenerational group, women who were far more lived and had far more experience than me, and then women around the same age and women who were younger. And it's a lot of what I do at Women in Mythology. And actually, my new program called Anima Mythica is all about that. And community has become one of the big threads besides myths and stories. And since we are speaking a little bit about uh this connection, intergenerational connection, I know you are a grandmother to four girls. Congratulations on that. And uh I wonder what has becoming a grandmother taught you about this stage of a woman's life? And what do you feel is the role of the grandmother in our families and communities today?

SPEAKER_01 50:48

I think I I've been a little myself obsessed with grandmothers and the role that they play even when they're not in your lives. I grew up with my mother's mother had died when she was 12. My father's mother lived on the other side of the country. So I did not see her very often, but she was mythic in proportion. So what she did as a creative woman beyond her times, a difficult woman, but but also very inspiring. She was flying airplanes when she was 50 because she wanted to learn how to fly airplanes and would fly in the civil air patrol along the coast of Florida to make sure people were safe. And my mother's mother was also a woman really ahead of her times in many ways, very inspiring, somebody that I really wished I had known. But at the same time, she's been very much a part of my life, just from hearing about her, from knowing the stories about her. So I guess that's where stories are also really important because even though she wasn't in my life, she's probably one of the most influential figures, even though I never met her. And on a daily basis, I think grandparents are an amazing support for families that parenting is really hard. I think. It's a job that we're remarkably unprepared for in our culture. It's like we can learn how to be doctors and nurses and tech technicians and various things and computer experts that we're winging at when it comes to being parents. We're learning from the people around us, from what we observe that we like or what we don't like. But I don't think we're as prepared for it as good. That I think that's what that's what not having a lot of older people in my community in my family who are still around realizing how important it is to have when you can and to find those people that found family kinds of roles as well. There are a lot of people who can contribute to education and to the formation of our children as in communities as well. But the thing that strikes me about being a grandparent is how amazing it is to see your own children as parents and to see them click about, oh, now I get it. Oh, now I know what you were doing. Oh, I'm sorry I did that. I realize now what I was doing. Or I see my kid doing that same thing to me. And I think I understand now what I put you through, and all of those kinds of things. That that's almost more satisfying than the grandchildren themselves. I love my grandchildren. I love their minds, the way they work and all the different, all the different perspectives that that they bring to everything. But being a grandparent also takes it to another level in that if you have more than one child and you have grandkids from different parents, you have completely different constellations that when they're together, you're not just dealing with your own kids' sibling stuff, you're dealing with cousin stuff, you're dealing with different families and really seeing a bigger community. I don't know. I just having extra years of life just gives you a lot more experiences and situations, yeah, stories to weave into understanding how the world works and realizing your son who used to call you a dinosaur is suddenly being called a dinosaur by his children, and even more the first dinosaur.

SPEAKER_00 54:38

It is so beautiful to notice and to live through these things. I've also find that by becoming a mother and remembering my grandmother, one of them passed away this year, earlier this year, mother of my mother. And as I looked to my grandmother, it made me understand my mother more. And then it also brought much healing, becoming a mother and giving her grandchildren and having that to renew our relationship somehow. These new roles, me as mother, she as grandmother renewed our relationship and brought so much healing, vitality, conversation, openness between us, which was also very beautiful. And I feel both as woman and mother, grandmothers are essential in our lives, both as support, but as an example as well. And I'm sure you are a wonderful example of courage, of following passion and dream and creativity and wisdom to your grandchildren as they grow and come to understand it as well. Returning to your book, Kathy, because we're coming to the end of our time, unfortunately. I do have some questions that we'll wait for next episode. But towards the end of the book, you include a beautiful song that to me, because also I was reading it, felt like both a prayer and a poem. And I was wondering if you could read it to our listeners, because I would love if you could tell us a little bit about its origins and what it means to you.

SPEAKER_01 56:19

Yeah, one of the things that I kept revisiting was the idea that thinking of the passage of people over time and the journeys that groups of people and migrations have taken over time and some of the things that prompt them to move or to move on. And there's a lot. But I and at one point Patya is talking to her grandmother and saying, What's how do you know if you're going in the right direction? What if you're going in the wrong direction? And though you're the people that no one ever hears from again because you've made a wrong choice. And she's this is that's not the point. You create the path as you walk it, and you discover as you go that you need to make adjustments. But people would not have moved or migrated if there hadn't been something with them in there. There's always seems somewhere there's some suffering. There's something you've lost, whether it's an earthquake, whether it's a war, whether you're a refugee from political reasons or for environmental reasons. There is always through time these times of leaving, these times of loss, these times of having to move forward and trusting that you'll be able to make it. And that's what I was feeling this rhythm of these people just walking and thinking, where are where will we settle? Where will we find a home? Where will we be okay? And just being okay with that. That was part of it. But I keep hearing different rhythms in my own head as as I was writing it. And I and each time I edited, I would change it. So I'm not really sure what the actual song is that I was hearing. I felt it like an anthem at one point. We have thirsted, we have suffered, we lost homes and those we loved. We now stand here all together, and together we're enough. We stand here before Creator. We stand here before the sky. Our feet are planted on a mother, lifting souls and spirits high. She lifts our hopes battered, she lifts us when betrayed. When she calls on us to journey, we will answer unafraid. We can't see into the future. We see what we leave behind. We look out toward each horizon, ready for all that we may find.

SPEAKER_00 59:09

That was beautiful. I love the way you read it. Kathy, before we close and we come to the kind of final questions about finding your book, I just wonder if there's anything that perhaps we didn't touch on that you would like to share specifically about the book or your journey of writing it.

SPEAKER_01 59:28

I guess I only that I don't think I've done Pacha justice because she really is the character at the heart, and she's she and Ta Chico, everybody falls in love with Ta Chico, her little brother. But she's just somebody who's who has heart and soul, and she's suffered, but she's looking for ways to do the right thing by her family, for her people, and also to find the joy and the things that give her pleasure and transcendence. Dance for her is where she feels connected with the universe. Feels like she she's in her flow. And yet there's a whole responsibility that ends up coming with that because her gift also becomes her challenge, which becomes also transformation.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:17

Her journey is one that, even though the landscape of the journey is very different from our modern lives, it's one that resonates deeply because there is that component as well that you mentioned of being an outsider and wanting to do well, right? Wanting to do well for the family, but at the same time not losing track of who we are and weaving these both ways, these both worlds, these both threads in. I haven't read the first book. Anything that you would like to share about that? And would you recommend our listeners? Let's say if someone is new to the work, should they start like I did with uh Dance of the Owl Woman? Should they start with the first? What would you say? I feel if someone is starting, I would recommend them buying the two books because I wish that I did that. I wish I would have read both. And are you working on a third?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:15

I am working on a third. And the first just came out in audiobooks. So for people who are very busy and need their hands free, you can listen to the first on audio if that's easier, and then go on to the next. I'm not sure when we'll get an audio of the second one. But I just want to shout out that the narrator for Call of the Owl Woman, her grandmother is from True. And so that brings a special favor as well.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:47

Where should people find your book? Is there a specific website? Where should they find it? And also, if they would like to connect more with your work, is there a specific place you would like them to visit?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:01

Well, I guess you can find links to most things on my website, just kmhuber.com. But the books available through any major retailer. Some bookstores carry them, and if they don't, they can get them through Simon and Juuster, the major online retailers, Barnes Noble, Amazon, bookshop.org. If you want to support your local bookstores, is really good. So the Spanish version is available through bus.com. It's also a website. My website should have links to everything too.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:34

Now make sure to have your website available on the show notes. So for us to close, Kathy, I wonder if you want to share something special or if you feel is appropriate. If you want, we can share the invocation to the appus that's in your book.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:50

Okay. I do want to say just one thing that because I know that we share an interest in the work of Dr. Parisa Nicole's disgrace. And one of the things that she says in her forward to women who ran with the wolves, in her forward, she says, I once dreamt I was telling stories and felt someone patting my foot in encouragement. I looked down and saw that I was standing on the shoulders of an old woman who was steadying my ankles and smiling up at me. I saw that she stood on the shoulders of a woman far older than she, who stood on the shoulders of a woman even older, who stood on the shoulders of a woman in robes, who stood on the shoulders of another soul, who stood on the shoulders. And I just love that image of us like finding support at layers and layers. We are not alone. So I did want to share it. And that's the apples. I close the book with that because that's a way that, like in ceremony or in opening the mesa or the altar, it's traditional to call in the apples and the apples of the spirits, mountain spirits, or the energy of those earth beings, or however you want to call that. Tutelary spirits is one way. They're like or ancient teachers, or the essence of the earth that comes up through these mountains and the energy that comes through them. And so I have the ones who are familiar to me that I have had experiences with or learned from. I like to call with gratitude for all creation. I call on the Apuz to be with us. My beloved Mount Tohoma, known as Rainier, and all her cascade sisters. I ask to be with us, Mount Hood, beacon through my college years, be with us, Machu Picchu, Wainapichu, Salcantay, Ausangate, Pachetusa Ilimani, Yurak Orkle, Little Scaley, Old Bear Mountain in New York. Thank you for your lessons. Thank you for being present in my life. May your timeless strength embrace us all.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:14

Thank you, Kathy, for this beautiful closing, both with this invocation and with the image that Clarissa shared of standing upon the shoulders of older women and this forever lineage that we are part of. Thank you so much for being here, for sharing all your wisdom, your experience, your creative work with us.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:38

I really appreciate the conversation and appreciate your work, keeping the work alive.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:44

And to our dear myth lovers, see you in our next episode. Until then, remember your life is a story only you can tell. Stay close to what feels true and sovereign within you.