“[...]The large canvas, more than ten by five feet, and set in a massive frame, stood alone in a darkened room, with carefully controlled lighting and the walls draped in black.”

“Church did not doubt that his concern with scientific accuracy proceeded hand in hand with his drive to depict beauty and meaning in nature. his fait in this fruitful union stemmed from the views of his intellectual mentor Alexander von Humboldt, a great scientist who had ranked landscape painting among the three highest expressions of our love of nature.”

“In an age when most painters aspired to a European grand tour to set the course of their work and inspiration, Church followed a reverse route, taking is cue from Humboldt.”

“Church achieved primary recognition and respect as the most scientific of painters [...] But Humboldt realized that any fine canvas must be conceived and executed as an imaginative reconstruction , accurate in all details of geology and vegetation, but not a re-creation of a particular spot [...] None of Church’s great paintings represent particular places.”

“[...] I would go further and argue that this vision may now be even more important and relevant today than in the era of Humboldt and Church. For never before have we been surrounded with such a confusion, such a drive to narrow specialization, and such indifference to the striving for connection and integration that defines the best of in the humanist tradition. Artists dare not hold science in contempt, and scientists will work in a moral and aesthetic desert - a most dangerous place in our age of potentially instant destruction - without art. Yet integration becomes more more difficult to achieve than ever before, as jargons divide us and anti-intellectual movements sap our strength. Can we not still find inspiration in the integrative vision of Humboldt and Church?”

You haven’t really experienced Inti Raymi until you’ve sat beside a Quechua grandmother on the hilltop of Sacsayhuamán and listened to her stories. For her, Inti Raymi isn’t about the costumes or the crowds. It’s about remembering. Remembering how her mother taught her to thank the sun every morning. How her grandfather whispered myths about the condor and the sun god. How every movement in the dance is an offering to both the living and the dead.

The dancers train for months. They fast, they pray, they learn the movements from elders. These aren’t random performances—they are coded prayers. Every twirl, every stomp of the foot connects the body to the earth, the air, the past. You’ll see dancers cry mid-routine—not from pain, but from transmission. As if the ancestors are dancing through them. And maybe they are.

Tourists often watch in awe, cameras raised. But if you lower your phone, close your eyes, and simply listen—to the wind, the footsteps, the chants—you’ll hear something else. A chorus that seems to rise from the mountains themselves. The Inca believed the apus spoke through nature. And on Inti Raymi, nature answers.

So sit beside the abuela, share a piece of coca leaf, and let the sacred seep in. The show will end, but the story stays with you. In your dreams. In your heartbeat. In the fire you carry home.

Now up on Roku for the world to view. Wow!

Never could have imagined the journey this short documentary film would lead me on when I packed my camera in a carry-on and headed to Peru 15 months ago. A beautiful story that needed to be shared, for all of us. Purposeful. Heartfelt. Important.