Waterfalls and mountains became jungle and starry skies with impossible color comets. A new era started with secret missions, hidden doors, brothers and sisters singing together to the absurdity of the money they demanded to let us visit our grandparents graves. Nobody stopped us. Nobody can stop us now, because we keep on finding each other, and together we are very strong. We were many and we were united, laughing in Babylon and its endless sources of waste, singing, yelling, celebrating the beauty of the family we had always been, but that we discovered little by little.
Then everything became city, roads, yellow lines on the ground, fog, more mountains, maps, lice, and the same affectionate arms and eyes bright with curiosity of the many strangers that invite us into their homes, feed us, and gift us their kind encouraging words.
We separated, knowing that separation is an illusion, and that life would bring us together again.
City then became beach, which illuminated by the strong moonshine welcomed the slow mothers, making their paths by strongly pushing the sand that would protect their eggs. The beach kept, for many days, gifting us impossible sunsets, painted on pink and gold, round suns sinking in the ocean with an orange howl, while the full moon peeked behind it over the hills.
Children. Children. So many children asking, surprised! Where is your home? My home is the world, little sister, and yours too! Ah... More yellow lines turned the beach into desert, forest, night, desert again. And the desert brought us here... To Chihuahua. Land that was so familiar in the past, and is now so foreign.
This new era has delivered, at least for me, exciting evidence that those dreams that we had been imagining for such a long time are not impossible, as we always thought. They are so close that we can feel their breath and our skin shivers at their touch.
So much wasted time in tiny Manhattan apartments, in empty midnight streets in Mexico City, in overnight trains in Europe, arguing about the endless impossibilities of the utopias dreamt by the ones before us, and our very own! Impossible! Impossible?
What's impossible?
Rainbow gave me many important gifts. When I first arrived to this encounter where I had to face naked nature, pure earth, I was full of fear. What if I fall and get hurt? Mud, mountains, the strong current of the river where we bathed: everything scared me. At first, I walked very carefully, but one day, while swimming, I hit my foot with a sharp rock that made a deep, painful cut. There was no way to keep that cut clean and dry in the mud pools that were the paths of that land in Cobán, the rainiest zone of Guatemala. The cut went straight into the mud, and the mud healed, in a few days, the cut.
Of course... How could I have forgotten something so basic? Wounds heal. The body regenerates itself.
Why then should we fear to try new things? When we fail, we learn from those mistakes and we keep building and improving what we have. Rainbow was, and still is for me the reminder that Anarchy is love.
And it's also possible!
Many texts arrived to my hands with a wonderful synchronicity that makes me smile to this new era. Fighting for our Lives, Off the Map, many other texts by Crimethinc, and an unexpectedly appropriate novel with the title "The Way to Paradise."
After reading "Los Cachorros," in Nicaragua, I was craving reading more of Mario Vargas Llosa's work and after many hours looking in Morelia's bookstores, I finally chose a fat book which synopsis described a double novel. The story of two opposite characters: Paul, a painter that escapes the suffocating bourgeoisie of Paris to search in the Pacific Islands a more savage world, and therefore, more pure; and Flora, a strong activist that fights for the rights of women and workers, and who dreams of a more "civilized" world. She rebels against the conventions of the XIX century society, which reduce women to second class citizens, with no right to identity. Even though the characters are indeed a little opposite, I felt deeply identified with both of them, and felt, towards the ending, a profound reconciliation between my spirit of artistic creation, and my will to dream for a more just world, more loving, more horizontal.
Since Flora Tristán's times, women's condition has improved enormously, and the rough, sometimes extravagant fantasies of the first anarchists, have become more sophisticated, and not only realistic, but real.
The world changes and changes, like the rivers that flow whether we sail on them or not. But, would humanity's path have changed for good without the people who stood before us, fighting and building, in solidarity and also with doubts, the paradise that is never perfect?
Trying and failing. Over and over again.
Staring at the straight road in the middle of the desert or the jungle or the mountains I heard many drivers asking... Until when will this crazy coming and going will continue? At some point you will have to stop... Go back to society.
I also used to think that way before I found Rainbow, where I met so many that are a lot crazier than me, traveling on horses or walking, on boats or motorcycles, with dogs and cats and children and proving at each moment that NO! It's not impossible! The only real limitations are the ones in your mind!
I'm not getting married with the traveler's identity. And I also can't know how I will feel tomorrow, or in three years, or in ten years. But right now I see no reason to go back to the monotony of work, of conventions, of society.
It's not you Babylon, it's me.
And we are many the ones who dream of that paradise that is not easy. The paradise that can be here, in Earth, where we can create, embrace the earth naked, be brothers and sisters even when our energies don't synchronize, where we can finally get rid of oppression and slavery.
The next short term project: Food Not Bombs Chihuahua.
To keep dreaming the impossible dream until it becomes a reality.
