I am writing at the beginning of the day that marks the end of the year.

Esmeraldas lives its own internal war, outside the wishes and embraces of the populace yearning for a good new year. Fire, kidnappings, deaths and in the rest of the country meetings, equipment, meals, rockets. Sometimes we shudder: are they fireworks or bullets? The animals, panting, hide. In many districts of the city, in order to leave their perimeter, they have to justify where they are going. No one enters, no one leaves without permission, only ambulances and whoever turns out to be relatives. We are almost proudly the most violent country in Latin America.

Purpose

In the rest of the world, increasingly violent and sophisticated wars seek a goal where human beings are numbers, lost or salvaged pieces, important if mine, others don’t matter. Each side claims to be right, considers itself a victim, and the other, that great unknown, someone who can be killed, kidnapped, tortured, because they are not recognized as human beings, regardless of their suffering, even when they are children. It is easy to recognize it in distant wars, but we do not assume it in the ones we live in every day.

In my garden, a beautiful caterpillar, camouflaged by a branch, is destroying the leaves of the Christmas tree, and the snails are hiding in the grass after a big night’s feast that has left holes in the beautiful leaves and in some cases dead plants. The cochineal refuses to leave as I carefully wash, leaf by leaf, the veranera that gives me beautiful flowers of various colors.

First day

Sapiens, we, the only survivors of the human races that inhabited this small and fertile land, are dedicated to the extermination of each other, and at the same time of the nature that protects, nourishes and sustains us. We are wild and unconscious predators.

What the plant has in the flower lives on what it has buried. What we see and suffer because of our collective violence is fed by what each of us and as a whole is, does, allows or remains silent. Once we create a monster that subjugates and rules us, it is very difficult to bring it down and destroy it. It takes on a dynamic of its own that eludes our individual actions.

The passing year

Unless we go back within, to the mighty center of our life, and find a flash of hidden light that seeks to illuminate the darkness, a diamond where the immense pressure of life has turned our initial coal into a light-radiating rock, there, from that Central reality can change . For some, it is not enough to find a path, because paths are created together, otherwise they are traces that time, wind, sun and rain erase. It takes many to build them. They disappear in the sand, in the ground you have to constantly maintain them, in the rock it is more difficult, but they last.

This cycle that begins needs us awake, aware and united, because we react or disappear as a society that claims to love peace and wants to achieve it.

The mirror that reflects us gives us a grotesque image that we urgently need to change. They will be patches if we act alone, or paths in the rock if we join together in proposals that we implement by accepting failures, correcting them and moving forward.

It is possible, it always has been. Are we ready? (OR)