“And here she is: Juanita, the Inca mummy,” said the tour guide as we circled around the glass case. “Although she wasn’t mummified; she’s been frozen since her death 550 years ago.”

This was our third day in Arequipa, Peru, a city surrounded by volcanoes—majestic, silent, constant. Their ice caps float like clouds in the ever-blue sky, surprising you when you turn a corner, helping me orient the twists and turns of the city.

Now, we were learning about the Inca children who had been sacrificed up there, centuries ago. So far, sixteen bodies had been found.

“Juanita is the best preserved,” the guide told us. “Her body was so well-preserved that the food in her stomach was still intact.”

*

Usually, history museums don’t do much for me. I’d rather read a book. But at this one, I had chills the whole time.

Sixteen children sacrificed. One whose grave was found just 30 years ago, because the volcano erupted and sent her tumbling down the mountain.

When we left the museum, we turned a corner, and one of the volcanoes came into view. This time, it looked different. Now it was darker, deeper. It held death, it held a story.

*

Stories change the way we see things, even when nothing in front of us has changed.

They connect us to other humans—even across centuries.

This is the kind of shift I look for in my work with memoir clients — helping them find the moment where something ordinary becomes layered, alive, and impossible to ignore.

*

Of course, most of our lives don’t involve volcanoes or ice mummies.

It’s usually not the big, sensational moments that move us the most.

It’s the things we consider “ordinary.”

Being thirteen. Climbing a mountain. Feeling fear.

The parts that make us human: those are the things that give our story meaning. Those are the things that make volcanoes come alive.