A Detour

...a goodbye

The white nettle came as an omen.

At the time she sprouted up on my balcony garden, I was too into my daily life to notice. I would pass the days working, writing, cleaning, cooking, taking the company of the mountains, and sun. Silently she grew, filling out her leaves and her spines into an intricate splitting.

By the end of winter, she was the largest being present on my balcony.

That’s when I fully began to notice her. Her broad thorny leaves spinning in the wind at sunset. Her tiny white flowers housing the end-of-winter bees. She had been speaking silently to me the whole time. What she said, I still do not know, but I do know that she knew my whole life was about to fall apart. She came to show me that I had been hurting myself this whole time. That I was under the spell of self protection.

Three months later, I moved her desiccated body to the compost. Her spines pricked my fingers, and then I knew. The pain told me what she had been saying the whole time.

In that month I would pack up a whole life, holding every moment left in pain and honey. The mountains shone splendorous for me in those days, and I could feel the flowers begging me to stay. But the warmth of the sun promised a new beginning, far away.

I am always waiting for you. 

Its as if time held me,
like I hold a breath
and I wait.
I go through my day, I live a life
but it's as if I am only fully alive for those short moments, 
when I smell your neck, and hear your laugh,
and the empty hall of time between
feels daunting and endless. 

I try and convince myself to shape that time, 
to use it to create something for myself.  
But there is something in me that holds still,
holds back
waiting to come up for air.

But when I’m gone,
I do not feel like this.
I know that it is you who is waiting.
Its you holding your life in the palm of your hands,
hoping it doesn’t spill out 
until I come back.

But when I’m home,
you can be set free.

I arrived in Santiago for the first time, twelve minutes to midnight on December 31, 2020. In the middle of the pandemic, after the social uprising of the year prior, the city felt hostile. The concrete pillars, the blocking of the sun by the high-rise buildings, grey abandoned and destroyed. I had to ask permission from the police through a website to leave the apartment for groceries. The health ministry called everyday to make sure I was properly quarantining. Conversations revolved around nightly beers in the concrete swell of summer, around the recent social uprising, the chance of revolution, but also the dystopic hopelessness of a global pandemic. Those first months were spent breaking rules to find moments of freedom, and feeling the contrasts of home.

The hyper urban living of the next visit also made me feel like urban life was beyond my ability. In a way, I never accepted coming to Santiago as my own decision, but more so the only viable path presented to me in that moment of life. I felt as trapped in that decision as I did in my first sunless apartment. And yet the city embraced me. Synchronicity would pop up constantly, almost as if the city was desperate for me to feel welcome.

I always felt like a stranger here, but also protected in the creation of my own reality. Folds of that multiplicitous reality opened to show me different things revealed on quiet street corners. Things needed, past pains, possible futures. All a little alien.

But there I was, trusting destiny and myself and the earth and this place at the end of the world that had slowly won me over with its silent mountains, ancient forests, living deserts and strange cities. Time was both new and ancient at the same time in their presence.

As I sit on the Earth I can feel deep roots, old roots that witness how quickly things change and then stay silent. I extend myself out, and feel the bend in the river of time. New cycles are always beginning and ending. If I’m lucky, I feel like I can catch a glimpse.

Santiago showed me how a city is a waking archive. A place where time, people, events, all knit together to form the history and the fabric of a place. We all contribute to its aliveness as we move through it. Touching past knots left behind by previous dwellers, only to be found by those the city chooses to show them to. All the people that have visited this city, who interconnect with the world, with past events, with ideas and culture. All that has gone on that has shaped the architecture, physically and energetically of this place. A curious geography of deep cracks the people step over. An embodied vision of modernity made steel and concrete.

Just like the moments in which I would write, sitting at a park watching people dance to reggaeton to the backdrop of a military marching band playing its nightly procession. A moment steeped in layered meaning, heavy with time. Multiple overlapping realities, present in a single moment, all with different roots but still co-creating together.

Santiago has shown me how many contradictions can live with one another and life can still go on. A place can be so many things at once. Where millions of realities cohabitate with one another, bumping into each other, co-creating each other, existing in untouched parallels without acknowledgement of the other and so on. Paths might cross for just an instant, or you might find a reality where you fit, or you just might be guided to move on.

Ciudad hecha de nudos. Que tu historia llama como un eco reciente. Siempre te trato de imaginar en tus distintas épocas de juventud. 

Testigo Silencioso


Testigo silencioso
	De tiempos pretéritos,
	Con ojos nublosos que se ocultan en el cielo.
¿Qué historias nos podrías contar,
	De nosotros mismos y los dolores?

Pero desde tu vista,
	Larga y antigua,
Como cuando llego a tu cumbre
	El humo
	De un balcón destruido, 
Y la ola de miedo
	Del pueblo que tú contienes.
¿Cómo entendiste lo que les pasaba?
La marea alta de terror que vivió tu pueblo,
	Por todos esos nublosos años.

Cordillera silenciosa,
	Llena de misterio, que nosotros
	No entendemos,
Tú has atestiguado toda
La historia humana que esconde
	La sombra de tu vertiente.

¿Qué nos cuentas,
	Con tus vientos fragantes
		De piedra y nieve?
¿Qué nos dices del tiempo
	Eterno y anciano?
¿Estamos destinados a olvidar?
	¿A no ver el dolor y la soledad del otro?

Sé que tus raíces ocultan
	Una historia más larga
	De la que vemos.
Quizás estas historias de dolor
	Forman parte también
	De un largo recuerdo
Que algún día tendrá sentido.

Pero por ahora, cordillera,
Que nunca nos dejará,
	Devuélvenos tu regalo
De ojos lúcidos y conscientes.
Ayúdanos a no olvidar,
	Con un pedacito de tu memoria eterna,
La oscuridad que vivió este pueblo.

Que con esa memoria,
	Le demos nombre.
Que con ese nombre,
	Logremos verlo.
Que con esa mirada,
	Logremos cerrar
La grieta que sigue en estos valles.

¿Habrán ya formado parte de tus huesos,
	Los huesos de nuestros amados desaparecidos
Entre tus holguras?
¿Estarán perdidos en tus laberintos
	Los fantasmas que nunca se encontraron?
Que sus llantos lleguen con la lluvia, 
y que la lluvia humedezca el suelo,
	Para que nadie diga que no están.

Cordillera ambigua y poderosa,
	Corral de nuestras vidas,
Que en tu raíz también siga viva
	La memoria de un pueblo libre y digno.

At what point do I decide I need to change? At what point do I decide to activate my power to completely overthrow my life and craft something new. I have already done it so many times, what’s once more?

It’s like the ocean in me begins to boil into a great storm. I want to rise and churn and remake my world, birth new islands and sink old ones. But then I also think, I have done this so many times now that I have been left stranded on this new deserted island of my making, only now at the end of the world. Tasked with rebuilding a life, slowly and painfully. If I allow a storm to pass again, sink the land I have just found myself on, then maybe my patience will run out once more as the cycle begins again. Maybe each time will be slightly different. The geography might change, the weather will turn, but won’t I be forever running from myself? Running from the stillness required to belong to a place?

I am a woman born in exile, taken from belonging and always in alien soils. But exile has taught me that all soils are one. That I am not only of a place, I am of the whole earth. Even though, I am now most comfortable in places where I am the most strange.

Santiago became the indulgence with all those hidden aspects of myself. That was the ocean beginning to boil underneath. The pushing of my edge to expand beyond my edge not in a way of outward expansion, but in a deepening of the unconcious self. I had walked into the wrong room, thinking it was for me. When really what had guided me there were the illusions that I held of myself. The illusion lent no clarity on the question of why I ended up there. Only an unconscious play out of what I had always kept hidden.

Septiembre 2023

Algo de estas tierras,
	De cordillera y mar
me llama. 
Me llamaba,
	quizas hasta antes,
	de que me diera cuenta. 
Algo nace en mi,
	Burbujeando de mi sacro profundo. 
No solo una empatia,
	Llena de voces. 
		Si no,
A veces oigo llantos, 
	soplidos de la tierra.
Sabios, y abuelos, 
	torturados y poetas
Todos hablando a la vez. 
Mientras que yo canto…
	Ayy, ayy, ayyy, ay.
Cambia todo en este mundo, ay, ay, ayyyi. 

– violeta parra 

The mother
The water
La muerte
El cambio

	El sol
	La luna
	Los ciclos 
	El cambio

The mountains
The fire
The ancestors
The new beginning.

Through the water I feel. 
I can feel life, lush, 
Speaking ancestors
Moving beads of wisdom as sensations on my skin.
Water’s life gently moves me 
To the origins of things,
To thick green beings 
All singing. 

In Santiago the mountains rule, 
fire, wind and a dry parched earth. 
But I am a child of the water, 
She moves through me, 
Into me. Letting me hear her, to hear the others. 

And so we begin ….