When I was as girl, they taught me that rocks were inanimate. They taught me to separate them from living beings, from animals and plants. Rocks were a different kingdom. I was thinking about this when I stopped to look around. I saw myself welcomed by the mountain, in a corner of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the heart of the world. A place which has been burnt, deforested, taken over by monocultures, fumigated, uprooted. A heart made of stones which open themselves up into paths, rivers, seeds, trees. A heart so strong that it forgives and, despite the violence, is reborn vibrant and generous.
It sprouts in deep and various greens, it sprouts with countless fruits which fall to the ground in plenty. For us humans, fruits are wasted, but in Nature there is no waste: what is not eaten by a bird decomposes and feeds the earth, travels between rivers, becomes a tree once again. Wonderful are the fruits that rot while they penetrate the earth and, in the dark, are reborn, hastily and slowly towards the infinite.
What death were they talking about when I was a girl? Which were the inert rocks, if right now, while I swim under the stream’s surface I can see the small ones move quickly along, wrapped up in the rapids. Rocks of infinite forms, countless textures, round, oval, covered in angles and lines. How can you call them inanimate if they are pure life? Enormous rocks meditate out of time, cradled by the roots of gigantic trees. Plants which help each other, chaotic and perfect multitude of beings without prejudices: the ceiba tree shades the climber, which in turn makes lofty paths for animals in search of the sun.
In this beating heart in the north of Colombia, the head of South America, disorder is a fundamental guide. Antithesis to the controlled French gardens, the continuous forest without boundary, upturned, mixed, without visible or measurable limits. Who can say where a tree ends? Is its boundary the earth which its roots open up, or the claws of a toucan which perches on its branch? Doesn’t the tree travel with the leaf which falls and becomes invisible to the human eye?
Sometimes, in this dream which is life – without defined beginning or decisive end – one gets bored of all its certainties. Going to a mountain becomes necessary. It becomes necessary to let your doubts grow, climbing, uprooting, making us lose our way. Let the forest rise up so we can lose our way and what we thought of as our destination: that which we had to do in order to be.
Let the forest rise up, without me, without you, without them… without us humans, who go around installing names and words, fences, crops, farms, and tourism in every space we believe empty just because it doesn’t make sense (to us) yet. Let the forest rise up, best of all alone, without so many ideas, so much halfway ecology or relative self-sustainability. Without our citizen’s wisdom which claims to support social progress, because maybe the future doesn’t exist where everything is fleeting present.
It is the world which ends, this human idea, the planted is reborn. If the only certainty is constant change, it could also be certain that the Earth and this Sierra can keep going without us. Nobody determines the destiny of a stone, and maybe human beings have no destiny other than to live in the moment, travel between landscapes and experiences, move through a flow of changes, break and open themselves up like seeds, transforming themselves imperceptibly every second.
