Category: El Salvador

Que Liberen La Niñés

~ Koyote the Blind ~ Leave a comment

Que vuelva tu risa.
Que tu luz no se apague.
Que se espanten los miedos y te huyan las sombras.
Que tu cama te acoja seca y suave.
Que la loma sostenga tus pasos y te vea correr.
Que la luna no te llame en vano.
Que tu voz ya nunca más resuene en ecos de paredes frías y duras cuando llames a tu mamá.

——- (translation)

May your laughter come back.
May your light not extinguish.
May the fears recoil and the shadows run from you.
May your bed embrace you dry and soft.
May the hill hold your steps and see you run.
May the moon not call you in vain.
May your voice never more resound in echoes of walls, cold and hard, when you call for your mom.

defundICE

immigrationreform #noconcentrationcamps

Ask Yourself Who Is Telling You to not #stayhome

~ Koyote the Blind ~ Leave a comment

If you are worried that the pandemic is being used to push for a vaccine, or even make one mandatory, then ask yourself why Trump, Fox, and the fake, corporate sponsored, white supremacist conspiracy theorists are all coordinated in trying to make people not observe social distancing.

Why did the governments of so many industrialized countries told their citizens not to pay attention to the scientists?

What is the federal government and white supremacist groups now pushing for a premature lifting of the precautions?

Why now, when the lockdown is succeeding in flattening the curve?

The answer is obvious. They care about money and not people. If there is a sure way to push for a vaccine, it is to make sure as many people as possible die. While they’re at it at it, they make sure enough minorities and elderly people die. They want to contaminate as many as possible. They create division and ignorance on the people through massively distributed disinformation and lies.

The solution, as El Salvador is demonstrating, is not in vaccines. It is in the time proven method of isolation and helping one another. It’s worked before, and is working now. Yes, it has. Only the lack of knowledge of history is allowing these liars to manipulate so many.

At least try to remember this. Trump and the greedy kept telling you to ignore the warnings and recommendations of scientists and epidemiologists. People started dying. When we were succeeding at flattening the curve, Trump and the greedy pushed hard to stop what’s working. When more die, see who gets richer, and who dies.

A Child Sitting by the Ocean

~ Koyote the Blind ~ Leave a comment

As a child in El Salvador, I would stare at the ocean in this picture, vast and loud.

In El Espino, this almost infinite amount of water expanded from horizon to horizon, flooding the consciousness of the observer. As far as the eye can see, ocean all the way to the sides. Just imagine that vast ocean pulling at your consciousness, stretching your vision as much as it can be stretched.

I sat there just watching, trying to encompass such vastness with my eyes. It pulls on the mind. It pulls with that moving uniformity, always changing and always staying the same. Nothing to break that moving monotony.

Behind me, the jungle. Which is to say, a vast nothingness. Only a hint of something behind me, also watching this ocean. And as the ocean keeps trying to penetrate my consciousness, as it almost drowns me with its almost behemoth presence.

I try to get a little bit bigger than it, to a be able to hold it. But my vision can no longer stretch. That rumbling comes from in front of me at first, but very soon that tremor of sound is encompassing me from all sides until I don’t know what is pulling at me more: the sight or the sound. 

After a while there’s no difference. There is just the ocean. Vast. And the little me that was there is subsumed by that roaring waters coming at me through my eyes and ears. Now, every little thought that tried to come up and say something, whisper something, was drowned.

I had been irrevocably swallowed by that monster. Dissolved. Even the sun who was shining harsh, hot, unbelievably hot on me, no longer seems to have a presence. Even the heat itself had become just part of that roar, part of that rumble and rolling of consciousness.

The regular movement of that vibration has by now become every sensation outside of me, and inside.

Triad Experiment #2

~ Koyote the Blind ~ 2 Comments

The second time E.J. Gold’s Triad was used was when I put together a small party to rescue a friend and relative who had been tortured and killed in Central America, and had subsequently been stuck in a bad place in the underworld.

My brother and I scried his location and situation. He had been killed by a gang in El Salvador, and buried alive next to a river by the border with Honduras. My brother and I put together a band of warriors and set up a rescue.

We gathered our tools and entered the bardos, headed to the underworld and travelled down to the place where he was. As we got closer, the atmosphere was of course getting heavier and heavier, and replete with the ambushes and pitfalls typical of the hell dimension.

At the right moment, I used the Triad to open a portal to the higher dimensions, and once rescued, our cousin could safely pass through with us, facilitating a quick exit and restoring his voyager’s memory. There was a sublime pause as he stopped to thank us and his gratitude touched everyone’s hearts.

Mission fulfilled. Liberation was attained by a tortured soul. The gate was closed and the Triad put away.

There Is a Well Here

~ Koyote the Blind ~ 2 Comments

There is a well behind me––an old well. It has been covered by a layer of wood, also old; weakened by the constant rain and the salt that comes with the tropical wind. It has seen many years go by.

No one remembers why there is a well here, in front of these crossroads. There are no houses around. There is no settlement; no permanent resident in this area of the desert. We know from old maps that there is a river of water flowing through in front of me underground.

Sometimes I imagine the dark waters flowing from left to right. Silent. Not reflecting any light, for there is nothing to reflect. I wonder then if in the absence of the solar light this river of water perhaps reflects different shades of black.

And if it were to reflect different shades of black, who would be there to witness?

Behind me, there is a well. The well has been closed off for a long time. Unused, it is being fed by the silent waters––the dark waters. What kind of thirst, I wonder sometimes, are these waters meant to satiate?

I lend an ear to the rushing of the waters. I hear off in the distance the rustling of silent feathers. I close my eyes. I listen to the sounds of the world. They become unimportant. I listen to everything around me as I listen to the falling rain. Not one sound is more important than any other sound.

My thoughts… the constant stream of words and images and symbols, one following another, without any real meaning or logic to it. I sit here and I listen, and they flow from left to right. Moving inside me with no apparent truth in any single stream of thought; with not one image pulling me with it. I simply watch and observe the current that moves, and the lack of meaning in every sentence that is uttered does not deny the fact that there are different shades of non-meaning––different aspects of this unending stream of non-truth, of illusion.

One after the other they flow under the surface of my consciousness and I sit here and I listen for the rustling sound of silence behind the sounds of the world.

The sounds inside me become just as unimportant as the sounds around me. Suddenly, I feel myself immersed in darkness––darkness of light and darkness of sound, sustained in a space of infinite nothingness, only made trickled-reflections of passing tenuous light, lit by an ephemeral attention that is no longer focusing on anything in particular.

 

A Note to the Person who Said It’s not a Big Deal to be Told to Go Back Where you Came From.

~ Koyote the Blind ~ 3 Comments

People like me are told those hateful words all the time. They are meant to make you feel less, and to get others to bully you. They are meant to make feel out of place, like your contribution doesn’t count, and like you will never be welcome in your own land.

It is a racist move precisely because of that intent. Yes, we all learn to live with it, to ignore it, and to continue being decent human beings.

Nonetheless, it hurts.

It hurts to see it being done to your children and the people you love. It’s easy for you to say “so what? Get over it. It’s not a big deal”

Ah! The callousness of the privileged! How well you mask your racism under a pretense of emotional equanimity! Those of us who have experienced over and over, however, can see the truth behind your pretend wisdom. You are not above the fray. You are the instigator.

Sharing my Inner Space/ 32 years of Art (a book review)

~ Koyote the Blind ~ Leave a comment

I have read Martivón Galindo’s Sharing My Inner Space, and I realize now that with every painting and every poem she has been marking a special space in the journey that so many of us undertook back in the 80’s, when the Salvadoran diaspora uprooted us from the place where we wanted to live, love, die, and create. We left because we had to, away from decades of war and oppression, and everywhere we went we kept looking hard inside the most recondite corners of the heart for that something we brought with us, to make a life and create art, and to find ourselves even in places that forever made us feel strangers.

In this book, Martivón gifts us with a tremendous experience through the use of poetry, print, and painting. It is a powerful storm that penetrates your consciousness under the command of an accomplished artist who has dived into the depths of her soul, and confronting the turbulent history of war, exile, emerges in ultimate triumph a master of her perceptions. She takes us through her encounter with exile, an event that shaped an entire generation of Salvadorans, but she does more than make us look at the world, she takes us with her as the seed of her soul emerges from that encounter triumphant, and continues to create and define her artistic world.

Martivón is not content with showing us her skill and creativity. She shares with us that most intimate process of her genius: the process she has gone through as she discovers her true self. We witness this discovery when she manages to put in word and image the creative powers of a soul that is always seeking justice and always burning bright with the wild fire of truth.

Porque lo invisible es el misterio
encerrado en la lágrima de una estrella
Ayer como hace treinta años
busco lo que no está
para encontrar mi luz
mi propia sombra
en el invisible gran universo de lo posible––Martivon (pg. 160)

Every great artist has an inner process through which her silent, intimate center faces the vast expanse of the unknown, and every one of them produce art that touches in us that most intimate abode. Their art awakens somehow our own truth. Martivón’s art does that for us, of course, but she takes a step further. Sharing My Inner Space is a living document showing that invisible inner process through which her genius emerges.

Witnessing this book is a most enjoyable experience. I promise you, the core of your perception will be touched by it, and you will find yourself on a journey through your own inner space. I recommend this book unreservedly.

Raindrops on the Old Rooftop

~ Koyote the Blind ~ Leave a comment

I hear the empty spaces in between the words,
like empty spaces between cars of a moving train,
like the sound of rain that falls
on the rooftop of my grandmother’s house.
It falls.

I hear.
Drops of rain carry no meaning;
a drop no more important than any other drop.

I hear my thoughts.
They come and go.
River of movement, river of life.
I do not grab one to follow.
No importance to it all.

All concerns about this body,
of karmic debt, of life before,
are no more.

They grab nothing.
They move and carry nothing.
They appear and nothing contain.

I live, I go;
and when in between thoughts, I die.
And nothing stays.

This Refugee’s Heart Forever Longs

~ Koyote the Blind ~ Leave a comment

I was a refugee once. I knew nothing of an “American dream,” nor did I seek economic prosperity or opportunities. Nothing about your dollar called me. I came here because the army in my country was getting paid one million dollars by your government to kill people like me.

There are so many of us who came here, not to find a better life, but simply to survive. A better life? For life, period.

The road is dangerous for most. We know it well. You risk aggressions, robbery, rape, and death. You give yourself to the fates, the blessing of the elements, and the hope for the kindness of the brotherhood of humans.

You are grateful when you arrive, but you know the ordeal has just begun.

I was lucky to have been able to prove I was persecuted back home, for being a student of Philosophy, for working for war refugees, for speaking up for justice and a better world. Those were my crimes. That made me dangerous. I considered myself fortunate. I arrived to the US unscathed, and I stayed without once being detained. I went to court, and I was able to prove my case. I was one of less than 2% of Salvadorans granted political asylum. The Reagan administration was adamant to not grant any more than that, lest the public knew what he was really doing to my people. I was lucky. There were so many more more deserving, more in need, and more invisible.

The love for your family forces you to suffer all indignities in a place where you don’t feel alive. Between a cold hell and the fear of death, you take one more step each day towards a future where perhaps your children will feel like they have a place to call home. 

For the love of them you leave the people you love and the land where your spirit thrives. For them you accept as normal a life of racism, police harassment, and the indignities of always being the lesser, the other, the silent forgotten. For the sake of your children you give up even the hope of truly belonging to the society you give your life and work to.

Your mind is forever now on the day to day issues of survival, raising children who forget your language and adopt the manners of the people who won’t ever see you as one of them. Your aspiration is to one day see your children happy. Your mind settles for the hope of one day being normal, but the heart forever longs for that place where you once felt a human being.

Are They Still There?

~ Koyote the Blind ~ Leave a comment

Today, there is no volcano in my view.
No people.
No path.
No city.
No hum.

Today it’s just the fog
holding and dissolving billions of worlds.
They have become more clear and solid.
They exist within me, and without.

The word showing an external reality is no longer dead.
It’s the gate keeper who is dead.

Who, then, punishes the archangels?
Or do they exist inside me in caravans?
Do they exist in my grandmother’s room,
collecting dust and gathering consciousness of little children?
Does the manticore fly?
Does the unicorn travel on solar paths?

Is the man in the cross still there,
looking at me with those eyes,
asking me if I know that I am there
nailed to the same cross,
to this creation of my mind,
unable to move and going everywhere at once?