We are tired of other people’s discourse of success to “live better” based on unlimited economic growth, unconscious consumption and competition. Let’s go back to our own, to the origin: to the Good Life. Because life is not a competition with others to have “the best” and have more, but for the joy of being and intensifying the experience of being alive. We have realized that those few who may apparently “live better,” have often done so at the cost of forcing millions who have and have had to “live badly.”
According to our ancestors, the origin of all the disease, social or personal, is that we have previously violated an Order. To live is to respect that order, that balance, the interdependence and the harmony of all things with each other.
We will gain freedom if we respect that Order. We’ll gain identity if we connect to the root language. Without belonging, without love of the terroir and the local ecosystem, there is no healthy identity possible. We are here to recognize ourselves as human, to clarify our roots, to regain our cultural dignity, the ancestral heritage, Mapuche, Aymara or rapa-nui, to strengthen and maintain it. Let us learn from our original peoples, for a people without identity is a people without conscience; and a culturally and spiritually out-of-addressed people, is easily abused and exploited. It is the sad case of the half-breed people of Chile.
In the territory of Chile existed and there is an ancestral experience of Good Living. This practice, which emerged from the very bowels of the experiences and worldviews of our first nations, sentences us: Chile, the country, or it is wiser – that is, or it is returned to good living, good breathing, good conversation, generous sharing – or the country will no longer be. Because it was built not according to “the nature of things”, the principle of integrative harmonization, but by denying the differences and according to the materialistic interests of the elites, which for more than two centuries took over uninsed power.
Knowing how to give and receive, know how to love, overcome fear and mental narrowness, open up to the other, being and relying on the natural network of communicative vessels, is the path of political solution that Chile and Latin America require. We postulate a science and a technological application at the service of the quality of life, not against it, respecting the neuro-rights that will preserve our privacy and freedom.
We respect the gift of life and its fabric of relationships, both visible and invisible, all within a framework of balance and harmony. Thus, Good Living is reborn as a philosophy of life because today we have the possibility of being teluric instruments: to give constitutional right to rivers, mountains, forests, land. Constitutionally we recognize these biological and geological entities as sources of life, wisdom and teaching.
The Sum Qamaña (aymara), the Sumak Kawsay (Quechua) or the Kome Mongen (mapuche), the Good Living, is the interdependent process of life in fullness, based on reciprocity and human solidarity work. We repeat what our ancestors always taught us: good living is life in natural and spiritual balance, magnificence and the sublime[1]. Reviving it today is not utopia, it is a matter of clarity, love and will.
We find that the soul of the land and the people of Chile was forced to live violent natural laws, their rhythms and their limits, with their backs to learning their balanced nuances, their gifts, their cycles, their times. He was disconnected with his family south of the Bío-Bío, they were imposed a splendous model of exploiting nature without living respectfully with it, taking her – and not giving him back – to his own bowels, never to distribute but to accumulate.
The model of state and government, implanted from Europe and then copying its ideologies, ended up favoring selfishness in human coexistence, appetites for power, obscene accumulation of capital, all under a facade of formal democracy. We were made to believe that “voting” was the important thing and not participating in the architecture of our destiny. And by adding incentives to over-ethics competition, he ended up creating this unequal society among us, disgruntled, sad and often violent human beings.
The recovery of our philosophy by the Good Living wants to reverse the above, not with a formula devised by a dome, but with the resurrection of an integral and holistic style of development. A community style of mutual assistance, suitable according to the realities of the 21st century. New skin of digital instrbut the same old heart of The Andean grandparents and Patagonian grandmothers. I see no other place of commitment than to be played for a new outbreak, one emerged from the ancestral sapiencial trunk that previously gave life to Chile.
Therefore, I register and play for the Party of The Good Live, the first one who has bravely dared to raise the blue sacred flag. Disappointed until the fed up with the “left” and the “right”, here I feel that is where my half-breed resonates best. And although today the legal conditions require him to be born as a “party”, we want tomorrow to see him die as a “whole”, that happy day when he lives throughout the territory, when it is a whole, because the good life will have already become flesh and full reality in the country and in the continent. Today, when Chile needed it most, this small “party” of the ancalao lof, a nucleus born in the heart of the Nahuelbuta mountain range, rises as a yeast, as an instrument of change, to disappear tomorrow when the great mass of an already fully humanized consciousness is dawning in Chile.
May hope, joy and encounter be again the engine of national coexistence. Not abuse, mistrust, let alone envy or resentment, all forms of incubators of violence.
Let us re-analyze Chile’s politics with the superior vision of the spirits that left, the ancestors, but who have not stopped taking care of us.
Let us participate at the local level, generating life and gifts, deciding what to do with local income, with the wealth that the same territory generates.
Let us stop the advance of desertification, never again to prey on the forest and our rich biodiversity. Let’s move on to the moment: let’s make one with the wood of our future and beautiful coffin. And he, the tree, will recycle us for the Blue.
Let’s protect the basins and take care of the natural water and everyone, never pack it at a good price for a few.
Let us reorder the territory and regions on an ecosystem basis, recognizing the harmony of Mother Nature, especially if our country depends on its gifts and natural fruits, today misunderstood as mere “natural resources”.
We fear the sustainability of development, not wild economicism for personal rents with sacrificial zones.
Let us educate the inner being and heal emotions; let us never again love and abort the spontaneity and intelligence of children.
Let us grow the organic wine of our vines served in stoneware pitchers, one that blows up the plastic of the concoctions dyed by the usury that sick.
Let’s establish the native and urban orchard as the great pharmacy and the main warehouse of our health, so that the blue heart is comforted again with the green matria.
The community is our refuge; water is our sister; the native forests, our grandparents; The earth, our Mother. We are not economic beings, we are human beings. Never separated, never sad, never suspicious. “Drunks of Blue”, as Elicura says, wobbly but without a doubt, I invite you to enter the foliage of the sacred tavern.
Newen, Force in Our Hearts
Kimun, Wisdom in Our Souls
SUM QAMAÑA, SUMAK KAWSAY, KOME MONGEN:
“Good living” for all of Chile
[1] Sumak in Quechua is “fullness, sublime, excellent, magnificent, beautiful, superior”, which is expressed in harmony, in the inner and external balance of a community.
The content poured into this opinion column is the sole responsibility of its author, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial line or position of El Mostrador.
