Citando a Julian Katari del 08/03/2025, 1:04 pm

Smoking flowers

Two espressos and 1 mate are barely enough to get me writing this today. We are exhausted from an accumulation of intense activity the last days that culminated yesterday singing tunes till midnight to my ancestral family at Casa Cabral, after the intense dance we had all day long in the ravine, images promised. I get to see things today from a different tune than 10 or 15 years ago. So many of the great elders, friends, dancers and healers are now gone; so the few that are left, the grown ones (I prefer that than the concept of "old") I see from the light of  "see them well, enjoy them, caress them and love them, be tolerant of their mistakes and their neuroticism, for it may be the last time you see them". This is a totally different scope than many years ago, when dancing was easy because we had the support of the elders, they took care of things. We were so young that we would even dare to complain about them teaching us, correcting our mistakes and telling us the way we should do things.

Yesterday bearing the first word (main leadership)  in the group of 30 dancers and some 300 spectators, the role is completely turned around. I am of the elders now, and as I try to teach the relatively younger ones (I still consider myself young) and harmonize the extremely complex dance ceremony as I was taught, I get the backlash of doing so. Young people simply don't like to be told what to do or not to do, yet, they are there to learn. My final word then, was about that. Honoring the goddess Chalchiutlicue, the mother of the living waters on earth's surface, giving the offering to the river, to whom thousands of years before our direct decedents -the Aztecs-, the Toltecs of Teotihuacan already revered as the highest and central most divinity of all.

Life is a subtlety, and the delicacy and intention with which you pick up a flower, blow smoke for a prayer, or speak to your relatives, changes all. The same way, clearing the forests, changing the shade coffee plants for sun varieties with greater yield, changes how much water is available, and in the end, all aspects of life. We think our simplest actions do nothing, that throwing flower petals and copal smoke is just some stupid belief, but no. Everything computes in the final outcome of what happens. Today's nawal reflects this intrinsic property of the universe, the subtlety of beauty, the fugacity of love, the least physical aspects are the spice that changes the taste of the plate we are served in life. Pay attention to how you move your fingers, your stance, everything, the blinking of your eyes, will change the outcome of life. Life is that, the beauty, the symbol we pick up from the subtle.