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Tell me, what else should I have done?
Have you ever wondered what your medicine is? What you came here to give and to share? The music of Almunis Alejandra Ortiz has been for many people I know, myself included, a great travel companion, particularly when I felt I had lost my way. A few days after her arrival in Barichara, which marks her return to Colombia after 17 years, I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with her.
Her sonorous fertility and lyrics invite us to ask ourselves about the root, about what nourishes and sustains us. That deep exploration, to which she herself was called when studying at the Berklee College of Music, led her to create Lulacruza, a group with which she closed a chapter in 2017, and through which she woveher connection to Latin American sounds together with a spiritual path of intense experiences. Today, through Minük, her new musical project with partner Markandeya, Almunis invites us to raise our eyes to the sky and ask ourselves about the medicine of the stars.
And amongst the stars, which are burning suns, Mirando el Fuego is born, their most recent collaboration with El Búho, a song that in my opinion embodies much of the essence of our time: the awakening of the feminine spirit that compassionately embraces the masculine, and understands that the masculine spirit also goes through the pain of reinventing itself and being born through childbirth itself. This global healing reminds us that the deeper and healthier our root is, the more we can expand and access the messages of the celestial spheres. Recognizing ourselves as channels of consciousness is the path to manifesting our own medicine.
If a woman is healed, all men are healed; if a man is healed, all women are healed. The journey of forgiving the father instead of killing him, from a symbolic perspective, demands courage. The value of not blaming the other and not seeing them as separate from me. This uncomfortable and liberating process of demolishing our own structures, questions in whose hands or in what we have placed our own healing. It is an awakening of collective consciousness that shakes even those ancestral and patriarchal traditions, which have often been healing without recognizing their own illness. It is urgent that we heal our altars, and, with love and without mercy, overthrow the “false gods” that have been wont to guide our lives.
I wonder if Almunis, like those of us who have found a cure in her music, also went through her own dark night of the soul in recent years. From her home in the mountains of her father’s land, the initial exploration and initiation of sound as a healing tool evolves towards an even more unifying perspective: that of service. Through Sonido Sana and its Embodied Voice workshops, she creates encounters for those who want to awaken their own voice as an instrument of reconnection with the purpose of life. A way of teaching singing that is not limited to vocal technique or the quest for applause. Paraphrasing Almunis: We do not express ourselves (writing, dancing, drawing, cooking, weaving…) to be loved, we express ourselves because we are love.
We teach what we most need to learn. What would you do to remember who you are and what you have come for? What would you teach while healing, and what would you heal by teaching? What would be your tool, your instrument? Or simply, as Mary Oliver, another woman indisputably connected with her creative mission, once wrote:
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what do you intend to do with your one wild and precious life?***
From left to right: Markandeya, Minük and Almunis Alejandra, in their home. Barichara, Colombia.
*** The summer day, a poem by Mary Oliver, click.
Images and text by Crista Castellanos.
