Reflection

A machi (Mapuche spiritual authority) said about the illnesses that people are going through today: "If you want to heal yourself, you must learn to let your spirit reach your body because it tends to walk faster than the spirit walks". Today we live through illnesses not only in our personal bodies, but also in the community or social body and in the body of Mother Earth. It seems that the great crises in which we find ourselves and which have made us ill are related to a way of life that takes the spirit away from our bodies. We live it in the pandemic, we live it in the depressions, we live it in the political crises of our democracies, we live it in the overexploited land.

Living in Mapuche indigenous territory in the south of Chile, we have made a journey that has led us to discover that a healthy life has to do with all the dimensions of life. Nothing is separate. Mind, spirit, body, earth, relationships, everything is deeply interrelated. An imbalance in one dimension makes us as individuals, as a community and Mother Earth herself sick. We have been understanding this certainty through a profound conversion that living in this territory has presented to us. We have been unlearning to learn to recognise the infinite manifestations of God in a territory that is presented to us as an epiphanic place of the Spirit. An epiphany that has revealed to us a new way of understanding reality, spirituality, our own identity and faith. A new way of understanding ourselves as human beings in relation to the whole of creation. A conversion of our gaze from the wisdom of this earth that can be summed up in Good Living or, better said, Good Con-living. A horizon and path of meaning that the original peoples have elaborated from their worldview, religion and history of resistance.

This path has meant that we have been left without words, without answers, without pre-elaborated solutions. Perhaps the first step to return to a healthier relationship is to become silent in order to listen to the "word of the people of the land" and of the land itself. Listening to our own body, our personal and collective history. A word that speaks to us, that teaches us, that shows us the Life that we are invited to live and to Live Well (Küme Mongen), in all its diversity, its tensions, its lights and shadows.

It is quite an apprenticeship for people brought up in the city and in the formation of an instrumental-technological rationality that seeks to unravel the mechanics of things, dividing in order to understand and confront the world in a subject-objective relationship, which values everything according to utility or profit. In this logic, it is not easy to understand or feel that we deeply share life with all living things, and even less easy to understand that sick "bodies" express the way we live and relate to each other and to Mother Earth. We need to silence these sick logics in order to listen to the wisdoms of the earth, the wisdom of Good Living. This wisdom, which is at the heart of the spirituality of all the Abyayala Indigenous Peoples and also of the Mapuche people with whom we live in these territories, is an invitation to discover a new paradigm of life, based on the harmony of just and reconciled relationships with God and spiritual forces, with Mother Earth, with others and with oneself. A paradigm that moves away from consumerism and greed. A model that recovers those realities and demands that are essential for a healthy and full life. In the words of a wise Mapuche: "If I cut down the tree, I will eat in abundance... but there will be no food for my grandchildren". It is a life proposal that implies experiencing ourselves as deeply interrelated to one another. Others are men and women, but also the wind, the tree, the mountain, the river, the rock, the stars, the transcendent... all living things, the whole of creation. It is what the kimnche (wise person) call the "itrovill mongen", which describes something similar to what we mean by diversity of life, biodiversity or all living things including the transcendent. They are all my brothers and sisters. As stated in the Amazon Synod:

"It is about living in harmony with oneself, with nature, with human beings and with the supreme being, as there is an intercommunication between the whole cosmos, where there is no excluding or excluded, and where we can forge a full life project for all. Such an understanding of life is characterised by the connectivity and harmony of relationships between water, territory and nature, community life and culture, God and the various spiritual forces". (Amazon Synod Conclusive Document number 9)

The root of current injustices lies in not living in harmony. As an indigenous brother said: "Good Living is the concept of cosmological balance as a life project, a balance both inside the person and outside, in the relationship with everything created, and only from this perspective can we understand the seriousness of social conflict". From this learning of silence and listening, we have been opening our gaze to the experience that everything and everyone is profoundly united. That everything has life. That everything has an animating spirit. The Buen Con-vivir speaks of this living reality, where nothing and no one is alone. As a wise Mapuche says, when he speaks of the spirits that animate and give life to everything:

In the earth there are the Nge (protective spirits that animate every element of nature), there is the waterfall, the flowing waters, the sea, the sacred hills, the volcanoes, the stars in the middle of the sky, the sun, the moon, none is alone, nothing exists in solitude, everyone has an Ngen.

It is the world of the tangible and the spiritual that are deeply united. The territory is not merely a place with physical but also spiritual beings. Kuivikeche (ancestors), Kumeke pulonko and wedake pulonko (good spirits and bad spirits) occupy a special place alongside the Ngen. Relationships are traversed by this transcendence and presence of the spiritual, hence everything comes to life, meaning and interpellation. Thus, an illness is not merely a dysfunction or damage of a particular organ, but also incorporates a meaning according to the relationships that have been had with the territory, and also requires certain actions to find relief. Therefore, illness is not an individual problem disconnected from the relationships and context in which the person finds him or herself.Nor is the remedy disconnected from who offers it.

In a society that presents us with happiness on the supermarket shelf, it is difficult to discern, in the midst of an accumulation of unnecessary goods, what we need to live well. To live healthily. Many wise indigenous men and women say that as a country we are sick. Western science says that many illnesses today are "psychosomatic". The Mapuche would say that these are imbalances with the environment, the main cause of which is a lack of respect for the spiritual forces that govern nature and that govern ourselves. We suffer from headaches, backaches, panic attacks, anguish, stress and depression, which are only symptoms of something wrong with the way we live. To improve ourselves we need to learn to live well, to learn to live in relationship and not in possession.

Kume Mongen is a vital proposal that is urgent for our society. Not only for the Mapuche and rural world. Amidst the noise of the big cities we also need to live in relationship. Today more than ever we need to let the spirit reach our bodies in order to live healthily, in harmony. To live in balance and not in the frenetic race to accumulate goods. It is a proposal that moves us to seek other forms of economy, of political, social and spiritual relationships. We need to unlearn ways that have distanced us from the vital unity within ourselves, our communities and Mother Earth.