I’m not sure whether the concerns of life weigh on you as much as they do on me. But if they do, I invite you to listen to these words. I invite you to reflect on what today seems irrelevant, what appears to be a matter already overcome according to the modern world. According to the vast industry that daily sells us a single idea of what “evolution” means.
We are born, we grow, and we begin to walk a path that is presented to us as something natural. We build our dreams and do whatever is necessary to achieve them. It does not matter whether we succeed or not, but the truth is that we all try; because this world is built upon a single notion of what is considered human progress. A horizon that is generally tied to the needs of large capital. Even if we do not see it.
In this account of any human life, with whatever circumstances it may have been given, reflections on the causality of what we experience do not find much grounding. I am referring to the understanding of historical processes, to the events that have shaped the world we inhabit today. The present feels like a destiny we have been given to live, but whose origin we do not know and which seems very, very distant. This topic may seem to be the exclusive responsibility of specialists, but in reality it should concern everyone. For life in all its expressions cannot be the responsibility of only a few.
That is why I invite you to think, dream, and feel from the perspective that once ruled this land: when everything was alive, and when human beings had greater control over their own lives. A moment in which we had the possibility of establishing relationships with visible and invisible worlds; and in which everything around us was much more than a mere resource to satisfy our needs, as happens in our present. A time that, although it seems distant, is not yet extinct.
This is not about idealizing the past. Nor is it about considering that there are human beings who should be taken as a prototype for life. What we want to build here is simply a possibility. It is the act of pointing out that there is a door that can be opened or not. It is not about building dogmas or great theoretical models to guide our behavior. It is about collectively reflecting on certain principles that have guided many peoples in the world throughout history and that may also be useful for us at this moment.
Humanity is a very large and complex word, but also a very small and simple one. It sounds contradictory, but it is not. Humanity is made up of thousands, millions of different people, with an amalgam of colors and beliefs that anthropologists have documented exhaustively. We have described, mapped, argued. But amid so much fragmentation we have forgotten the possibility of seeking what is common, what makes us human. There we return to the point where humanity can also be a simple word, where it can become simply a manifestation of life like any other: like flowers, like the bees we find around, like the water we drink and bathe in, or like the stars that look at us from the sky.
For this purpose, it is necessary to make an exercise and start from a basic idea: “Every person is a person,” or as they say in Haiti, “Tout moun se moun.” All people have the same needs, capacities, and possibilities. What changes is the way we satisfy these needs, apply our capacities, and develop our possibilities. In all cases, our repetitive behavior becomes institutions that respond to the historical context to which we belong.
We all need to feed the body and the soul; but at this moment, in which we are going through a Western domination of the world, we have learned to satisfy our needs in only one way, under certain patterns. Moreover, we have learned to prioritize material nourishment and to consider everything else obsolete and unnecessary. In the fragmented world in which we were born, we have lost the ability to observe the spiritual dimension of our existence and to keep it present in our daily lives. We have also forgotten the institutional forms that could be woven around it. In short, we have lost sacred memory.
To reach this moment of rupture, countless processes have taken place. There are many stories to tell, which we will gradually address in this space. We will speak, for example, about how what Aníbal Quijano has called the Coloniality of Power has brought with it the loss of the principles of our spiritual institutional framework.
We must speak of principles, because it would be wrong to assume that in these lands from which I speak (present-day Ecuador), there was and is only one type of faith, the same gods. No, this is not true. But we can speak of principles that were common, as they have been common to many peoples, such as the idea that human beings are an extension of divinity itself, that we are a beautiful dimension of the Whole.
What is the Whole?
In many places, human existence cannot be seen or understood except in relation to all the elements that surround it. What happens in our lives cannot be separated from the stars, from water, from plants. These beings also have life, and because they are alive, it is possible to communicate with them in some way. Moreover, reality is made up of many material and immaterial levels. Thus, when we speak of the Whole, we refer to the set of visible and invisible elements within which human existence is woven.
In other words, beyond the link with what we now call nature, there are other planes that we do not see, but which are equally important for life. Planes that, unfortunately, are today relegated as superstition, unnecessary, obsolete, or outdated beliefs. Here lies, for example, the possibility of communicating with ancestors, of intuition, of knowing things without necessarily resorting to Cartesian rationality. This, of course, implies the use of other kinds of knowledge and the use of other parts of our body, which have also been pushed into the background.
There are moments in which we can become aware of the Whole—small cracks in time-space that appear innocently and naturally, and may even resemble the smile of a child happy in the arms of their mother or father (as primordial persons or forces); like when we encounter the Chuquiragua flowers.
These beautiful orange flowers grow only in the highlands. When we go up the Andean mountains and reach the highest parts, there they are. They welcome us and tell us that we are about to embrace the sky, to leave the earth behind in order to embrace what has almost no form. We are very close to encountering a breeze of peace for the soul, a caress that we sometimes call God or an embrace of nature. Whatever name we give that moment, the fact is the same: it is a reconnection with the deepest part of life, a connection with the Whole.
These moments exist, and despite how wonderful they can be, their existence is terribly overshadowed in the light of what we are experiencing in this stage of history: a chapter characterized by a marked global capitalist process that has led us to extreme production and consumption; an imbalance of the fundamental forces that structure life, tilting the balance to one side at the expense of the other.
There are many ingredients in the cake we have been given to live today; and it is necessary to analyze them in order to understand that they are merely circumstantial. A set of facts that, although presented as a manifest destiny, are nothing more than temporary events—ideas, forms, institutions that accompany us today but that tomorrow can and must evolve in order to guarantee the continuity of life, especially human life. For life always changes and will always change, but what we do not know is what will happen to human life if we maintain current conditions.
Thus, between a past that tries to slip through our hands and modern human affairs, La Ceiba Milenaria is born. The ceiba has been considered a sacred tree for many peoples. For the Maya in Central America, the “Ya’axché,” as they call it, is a bridge that connects the sky and the underworld. In the Ecuadorian Amazon it still occupies a central place in the life of many Indigenous peoples; and the ceiba has also been very important on the Ecuadorian coast, the land of my own ancestors. This beautiful tree, with its infinite possibilities of connecting life at all levels, now lends us its name for this project.
The ceiba, then, does not only give its name to this sacred tree, but also its function of building links between human beings and the Whole. La Ceiba is a space where we seek to understand how this relationship occurs at multiple levels: from direct connection with the Earth (through sowing and harvesting food, for example), to the existing mechanisms for connecting with other non-material dimensions of reality (through shamanism, for example). In this sense, what we seek through La Ceiba is to work on reconnection; on rebuilding the bonds with the Whole. Our objective is to build a collective reflection and to encourage those interested to translate this knowledge into their own reality, into the circumstances they happen to be living.
To continue with the work of La Ceiba, we must start from several basic premises, such as the following: 1. Human life develops within a much larger scenario, composed of networks that are sometimes called gods, God, energies. Whatever their name, the central idea is that there are greater and deeper forces within which human life is woven.
If we think of it as a metaphor of water, we could say that water, in some places, is born in the mountains. There it lies, resting in a dark womb beneath the earth. But at some point it emerges from the darkness and we begin to see it. When it is born, its small springs form what in this land is known as a “water eye.” Perhaps it is then that, through our habitual utilitarian relationship with the world, we begin to observe it—because we are thirsty, because we need to drink from it. But at the same time we ignore the dark world it came from, what it had to go through and travel through to reach this point.
To know water beyond its vital function for our body, we need to venture into this other dark side, into that unseen world; because it is this that will nourish our soul—another part of us that is scarcely valued today. It is precisely when we understand both sides that the possibility arises of grasping the greater principles in which our life is woven. It is the search or the remembrance of God, not as a miracle worker or someone we approach in a utilitarian relationship, but as a force or energy of which we are also part.
- The proposal of La Ceiba implies a new conception of the political.
Why is a new conception of the political necessary? Because, regardless of the Greek origin of the term, this concept encompasses all matters related to life; and as Rita Segato points out, today politics has been “hijacked,” confined to the public sphere and to the needs of the patriarchal political system in which we live (2016). This has also meant that the guidelines that shape each person’s life are decided in a few places, thanks to global structures that tell us what to eat, what to learn, how to heal ourselves, what to think, and what not to think.
It is also worth noting that we are generally used to seeing politics from an anthropocentric perspective, popularized by Carl Schmitt. He says: “the specific political distinction, to which all political actions and motives can be reduced, is that of friend and enemy” (1991, 56). And who is this enemy? “Simply the other, the stranger, and to determine its essence it is enough that he is existentially different and strange in a particularly intense sense” (1991, 57).
Carl Schmitt’s conception of the political arises from the European war context to which he belonged: he was born in Germany in 1888 and was a member of the National Socialist party. His conception of politics has been so influential that it still lies at the heart of international relations today. His proposal implies identifying what distinguishes us from other human beings, and these delimitations are generally established through state territorial borders or the needs of capital. But even though in this moment of history we struggle to define physical borders or secure sources of raw materials for production and consumer markets, life actually operates on another level—something that becomes more evident in this time of “climate crisis.”
When we call it that, it sounds like words such as “variable,” “equation,” or “syllogism”—words that conceal or reject a deeper meaning. Discourses we invent to speak only partially about things. Given the world we live in and the way we have been raised to see life, the climate crisis appears to us as just a set of data about what we call the environment: a sum of news about excessive rainfall in one place and water shortages in another, without deeper reflection on the causes of this disaster.
At this moment in history, when we receive news about the climate crisis, we must stop to think about what is happening. In every corner of the Earth, it is cold or hot in ways that did not happen before. In Quito, where I live, the Sun slowly burns us. A presence that has become almost permanent and has turned into a kind of monster that forces us to stay indoors. In these lands, the Sun is more dangerous because, given the altitude, radiation becomes more intense.
In this scenario, in which daily life is filled with problems of global scale, it is necessary to reflect on the world we live in from every place we inhabit. We must ask ourselves how we lost our connection with what we call nature, to the point of generating the crisis we are now experiencing. It is in this context that we must rethink the concept of the political. We must reflect on how our relationship with life in all its expressions should be, going beyond the will of large capital. Because the conceptions of life that govern us today are generating a crisis that will undermine the possibility of existence for future generations. We exist today enjoying many things that will not exist tomorrow.
A new conception of the political must include all aspects related to life, and this also includes death. For politics is not simply the relationship between human beings, and even less only between individuals in confrontation; its conception must include all aspects that are vital for existence. Aspects that go far beyond the satisfaction of material needs, because what is also at stake is the nourishment of the soul.
In La Ceiba Milenaria we will work on all of this. We will work by researching, constructing concepts, seeking to name what today seems extinct, restoring what we consider vital for humanity: sacred memory or connection with the Whole. In this sense, it should be noted that this is our commitment, an initiative that does not seek to build dogmas; because we must also not forget that many of the ideas presented here have led to the death of hundreds or thousands of people in the past. Whether through inquisitorial processes or practices derived from other institutions, what we present here has been criticized, mocked, and almost exterminated. For this reason, in La Ceiba we will not promote debates. We will pass like a hummingbird approaching flowers, showing its beauty and the rapid flutter of its small wings. It is up to whoever encounters the hummingbird to decide whether to stay and admire its beauty or to ignore it and continue on their path.
That is all I have to say in this first letter. Thank you very much.
To listen to how we read this letter to you, click here.