While there is sun: about dreams, emergencies and new beginnings

When I arrived here, it was just bush¹... Then I felt like putting up a patch... Who knows, maybe one day it will become a food forest!

Twelve years ago, I started a somewhat uncertain trajectory, searching for intersections between culture and international relations. When I started my master's degree, I believed I could propose something revolutionary that would help people understand and cooperate based on their ethnic similarities. Right away I heard from the person who would become my supervisor, holding a copy of my project in hand at the admission interview: "Maria Teresa, you want to study God and their time!" [Some people say I am an ambitious person]

At that moment I felt a little offended, bewildered.... I held on to my idea and was admitted. But I had no idea what was waiting for me. I joined another self-imposed challenge, having a very competent and demanding professor by my side. With her support, I deconstructed internal certainties and international discursive fallacies.

And while I trained myself as a researcher and sharpened my critical thinking, I also felt the need to bring to public reflections, ideas, and feelings about what was dear to me in that space-time.

Then, I started to publish some of my writings in the late Eder Lorategia: that magical place, so mine, which I named "beautiful garden" (literal translation of the original name in Basque). I then invited some people to share that atmosphere of beauty, poetry, nostalgia, social and environmental awareness, and other concerns that accompanied me.

The seed was there, even if I didn't realise it. The same Maria Teresa who used to take care of her grandma's violets as a child, the ferns at home, and who made seedlings and saplings of Surinam cherry trees in her apartment, also cultivated her inner garden. [What is outside sometimes reflects what is inside]

This intimate, micro, to some irrelevant, connection directly linked with the academic (and soul) curiosity that led me to learn about suma qamaña, the Andean Indigenous people's (living in present-day Bolivia) understanding of "living well".

Time passed, and the decade of my twenties ran over me. From Eder Lorategia I keep the reflections I made and the exchanges of affection with those who - even from a distance - came to visit me.

Now, at 33, I see myself in an interesting place. The spiral has taken a turn! I have been here before but see the world from a different angle. That flower garden has made room for some veggies patches (having food on the plate is vital!). The reflections that came from praxis but were still quite fixed in the search for a beautiful near-ideal, now come from a place of more maturity, from one who has experienced and witnessed somewhat transformative situations. [A doctorate along the way may have catalysed the process]

Anyway, what was meant to be a pragmatic introduction - a pilot post - has turned into what I do well: prose. The message here is about walking... Eder Lorategia (which still exists in me and does not deny my Iberian roots) today coexists and makes room for Teko Porã, which Cristine Takuá (2022) translated well as "the millennial educational system of balance".

Teko Porã, the Guaraní cosmovision that dialogues with suma qamaña/sumak kawsay, is a "beautiful walk". A way of life that is attentive, integrated, humble, and respectful towards nature - which is also us.

I, self-defined as a Latin woman - recognizing the social privileges I have access to for being read as white in Brazil - continue on this path of constant learning, making use of this space to keep sharing my prose and variations that now come from a place of emergency!

Clara Nunes so well interpreted in "Canto das três raças" (by Mauro Duarte and Paulo Pinheiro) the deep scars of the Brazilian people born from a colonizing and enslaving process, based on mercantilism and proselytism. This depredatory, genocidal and acculturating model that reproduced itself over much of the globe brought us to the Anthropocene. [A minute of silence]

(...)

Nature is wise, systemic and self-regulating. Humanity, however, has its limitations. While scientific data show us the environmental catastrophe towards which we are heading (spoiler: with the risk of extinction of our species), some people prefer to stick to the dictates of the patriarchal-capitalist system.

Therefore, I turn this space into a place of resistance and (re)vision. Here I will reflect, dialogue, and share other possibilities and worldviews that I consider viable for living well. And this construction is based on critical, diverse, inclusive, and decolonial perspectives.

I choose to dream alongside those who are already sowing the seeds of a new world. Who knows, maybe the world will be filled with food forests. It sounds ambitious, and it is. But as the song says, "the path is made by walking" ("Enquanto houver sol", by Sergio Affonso).

¹Some idiomatic expressions could not be fully translated into English from the original post in Brazilian Portuguese.