Teotihuacán Before the Tourists
“I was just there, which sometimes is the whole practice.”
I paid a guard twenty dollars to let me in at 5:45am. He opened a side gate, pointed me toward the Avenue of the Dead, and went back to his thermos.
In the half-dark the pyramids are enormous in a way that photographs don't convey. The photographs show you the shape. They don't show you the weight, or how the air changes as you get close, or how the ground has a particular texture from millions of feet over hundreds of years.
I climbed the Pyramid of the Sun as it was getting light. The stairs are steep enough that you use your hands on the way up. At the top the city is nowhere and the sky is everything.
I sat there for about an hour. I wasn't praying or meditating in any formal sense. I was just there, which sometimes is the whole practice.
The tourists started arriving around 8am. I was already gone.