Today For You, Tomorrow For Me.” This is the meaning behind ayni, a living Andean philosophy and practice that awakens a balanced and harmonious relationship between nature and man. In Andean cosmology, this is expressed through complementary opposites such as male/female; sun/moon; gold/silver. Their interaction is a form of reciprocity called ayni.

One of the guiding principles of the way of life of the Quechua and Aymara people, this equilibrium of exchange and mutuality, which has been practiced since ancient times (since before the Incas), creates a cycle of connectivity and support essential to social and spiritual wellbeing. Anthropologist Catherine Allen describes it beautifully: “At the most abstract level, ayni is the basic give-and-take that governs the universal circulation of vitality. It can be positive … or … negative …. This circulation … is driven by a system of continuous reciprocal interchanges, a kind of dialectical pumping mechanism. Every category of being, at every level, participates.”

I grew up in Peru in the 1970s. Lima, its chaotic metropolis, was still alive with a deep imbalance—a colonial attunement to Europe and America that offered a blind eye and deaf ear towards the riches of the native culture. At that time anything that carried a whiff of the local indigenous was usually subject to derision. A white person wearing a sweater with a llama on it could be only a tourist. While this split between indigenous and modern Western attitudes has changed greatly over the last thirty years, I personally knew nothing of ayni until I left the country and traveled the world. 

But I returned to the land of my birth and childhood with new eyes and ears.

Read Ayni in its entirety here.