My Personal Journey

BORN FROM  A U.F.O. MAGNETISM

In the year I was born  my father bought a piece of land in the mountains of southwest Colombia and named it ATLANTIS,  It is in this land where the present events are happening and this lines are written.

My father was at that time a renown researcher and speaker on U.F.O.s phenomena, metaphysics and all sort of so called occult knowledge.  My mother  was a young and beautiful lady with a deep thirst for meaning, for knowing, for mystical union.  She fell In love with the speaker and the teacher fell in love with the student. Few weeks passed before the pregnancy and in January 24/1978, when the sun was right at the zenith,  I was born.

 In my very early years, the family would travel from the city to Atlantis every week.   The first big building was the main house, a big double hexagon resembling a fraction of a bee hive, with hexagon rooms inside arranged surrounding a central yard.  After the main house was built,  six meters tall pyramids start to appear in the landscape of the central area of the land. Those were built with precise measures, angles and orientation to serve as real vital energy condensers where many experiments were undertaken. The big idea behind Atlantis project was to build up a center for research,  spiritual community and a refuge for the major catastrophes that will come to the planet.

My first 5 years of life passed inside the paradise, the garden of Eden before the fall. My mother was totally devoted to my service and I received very caring and inspiring homeschooling. Half of my time I would be in nature, walking in the gardens, the small forests, playing with horses, cows and chickens, with a lot of happy moments of being alone. These situations were planted deep into my soul as the seeds for many of my current life causes and conditions, especially those related to be founder and resident of an Ecovillage, totally in love with learning and unlearning processes, a solitude defender and a permanent seeker and performer of communion acts with nature, the cosmos and the Great Spirit.

LOST PARADISE AND SELF DENNIAL

At the age of five my parents went into divorce. Later on, my mother got a job and I joined the regular school. Because of my advance skills due to the homeschooling, I ended up joining first grade without having the normal standard age. This was a small decision with long lasting consequences: since that moment I was always the youngest of the group by 1 or 2 years or even 3 and 4 at University times. This condition was a permanent push to my psychology to mature and develop faster than my biology, creating several types of tensions and dissatisfaction leading into states of missing self acceptance and self denial.

When I was thirteen, my father was kidnapped by the guerrillas when he was entering Atlantis farm and kept captive for 8 months in the jungle. During this time, his whole psyche was shattered and he came out as a radical catholic abandoning all his previous mystery enquiries and abandoned also Atlantis land, since the whole territory was under heavy violence and guerrillas control. It was the beginning of more than 10 years of total abandonment of the land when all kinds of pillages, robbery and decay fell into the farm. 

SOUL  BREAKTHROUGH

 University times were a breakthrough for the soul at many levels. From a very conservative school with fixed schedules I enter the zoo of a public institution of 20.000 students being totally autonomous in my time management, courses registration and class attendance.

I made my first international backpacker trips visiting South America and was especially touched by the power of our ancient past, feeling the call for the first time of the ancestral heritage and wisdom.

Since the biology studies were very easy to me and I could manage to keep the grades high with not much effort or even attendance to the classes, I started to wander around different environment and interests. These include hiking into the mountains, jungles and lakes, but also philosophical and political qualification for later involvement.  Epistemology, chaos theory, systems thinking, super strings, action research, Marxism…all outside of the biology curriculum, complemented with formal courses from another faculties: geology and environmental management for engineers with some more from social sciences.

This was the beginning of an undergoing taste for universal knowledge, a certain fascination with the renascence epoch where all disciplines, social and science, philosophy and spirituality, art and engineering met in a single person.  Politically rooted, this was both a true inspiration and a rebellious act against the ultra specialization promoted by the mainstream society, higher education and production systems. I refused to take any specialization courses of the biology department and focused only in the comprehensive fields as ecology, evolution, microbiology, conservation, etc.  Nowadays I am a plumber, a juggler, a teacher, an electrician, a permaculturist, an entrepreneur, a cowboy, a medicine man, an administrator, a puppeteer, a musician, a researcher, a film maker, a facilitator, a project developer…and I consider it to be one of my strengths. 

Almost naturally, a very strong position and criticism to the standard type of education offered at the university began.  This took many forms, especially the creation of a student group that later on evolved into our own NGO: Iniciativa Baudó.

We worked for 5 years with 20 communities of the Chocó, a region with the highest biological diversity on planet earth, located in the west part of Panamá, Colombia and Ecuador. Ocean, Beach, Mangroves, Rainforest, Mountains and Rivers compressed in a narrow fringe with annual rainfall regimes that rise to 12000 m.m. This richness is inhabited by afro descendant communities that mold and are culturally mold by these ecosystems.

Our work with them was oriented toward the cultural reinforcement and environmental preservation in face of the so called progress forces arriving into the region and slaughtering the resources and the social fabric.

One of the most remarkable aspects of our work and a major learning from that experience was that the communities themselves were the ones to ask for help and the ones that financed the main expenses of the project!!! This brought about an incredible sense of appropriation and responsibility for the process and tasks from their side. We where young biology students gathering information, materials and  methodologies to put at service of the process, but the organized communities where taking care of our transport from port to the work zone -12 hours sailing in small boats since there are no roads in the Chocó. Once in the region, they will take care of our accommodation, food and mobility from town to town and to research zones.

The results were amazing considering that was a self financed project and that our presence in the zone was sporadic.  The first big goal was to develop a political base work with the communities to give birth to an organizational structure that ended up being a confederation of 5 community councils, each of them grouping several communities of the same vicinity. This organization, plus the social, environmental and geographic mapping, plus the historic reconstruction of the settlements including traditional practices and cultural ethnography, made it possible to raise a case to the national government for the legalization of 365.000 Has of land, including all the ecosystems, that until that moment had no legal status or ownership rights in favor of the inhabitants.

After studying laws and decrees, we all made it and after 4 years of labor, five collective ownership titles were issued by the Colombian government in favor of the communities. So we moved into our next step full of joy and hope: The environmental management and develop plan of the 365.000 Has and the thousands of inhabitants. 

Meanwhile at the university our reputation continued to grow and many new generations of students –from our faculty and others- were interested in our ideas and actions. Some of us finished our courses semesters and were ready for thesis. We design 4 interwoven thesis as projects to harvest the information required to move forward into the Phase 2 of the big project. These thesis looked into the history and present state of the different ecosystems as well as into the mutual molding relation between humans and nature. My own thesis was called “approximation to the ecology of the ecosystems of the Chocó through the traditional knowledge of the Baudó communities”.

When I complete my field research I received a scholarship to attend a course with Vandana Shiva, Wendell Berry and Helena Norberg-Hodge at Schumacher college in Devon, UK. The course was called “Community, Globalization and Sustainability”. So many learning, unlearning and insights that I intentionally don’t want to enter into them, just mention that the bigger picture was clearer and clearer. I will never forget the conversations with  Brian Goodwin, a world authority in biological evolution and MSc coordinator at Schumacher’s, or the lovely presence of James Lovelock who I had imagined as a giant via his Gaia work to discover later such a gentle short old fellow.

2000 was the year of major new connections. It was like a intense neuron networking, heart opening and soul shining. All the strength and clarity from the global “alternative” movement for sustainability, combined with the mind blow up brought to me by the studies of the Mayan mathematics, cosmology and calendars, together with the deep healing and mystical experiences once I started walking the Medicine way, specifically with the Yagé medicine from our Colombian jungles.  Here once again, I prefer just to mention the medicine, since going into its nature, will require much more space.

Lovely research my thesis work, it was 6 months of complete immersion in the area, its ecosystems and its people.  I already had a piece of land in the river, offered by the 1 community as a gift, had my own canoe and enough fishing skills and friendships as to move more permanently into the area.  When I returned from UK I was ready to deliver my final thesis report and move into the Baudó area with the woman I was in love in those times.

THE COSTS OF POLITICS IN COLOMBIA

First hit was the fatal news that my beloved and some other visitors were killed in the Baudó area by paramilitary groups. These illegal armed groups had taken control of the territory and were using it as hiding places for their drug operations.  All of the sudden the place of my dreams, my future residence was a forbidden zone for an outsider like me and my beloved woman dead body was somewhere laying under the sea.

Second hit was an official communication from the Biology department professor council stating that my thesis project was not scientific and that research was not approved.

Third hit came when I was called into the university vice-chancellor office to show me a threatening letter that came under my name with a list of 10 students accused of being guerrillas elements inside the university.

After very strong times of confusion  something good came out of the tragedy: by direct orders from the chancellor the biology department accepted my thesis and I received my diploma as Biologist.

I made my way out of the country joining the Rainbow Peace Caravan in its way to Ecuador and learnt that being politically active and community oriented in my country is life risking. Learnt that there is no ideal, project or cause that is worth losing your life for it.  Learnt that there is a major agenda for our lives and sometimes our own ideas or projections are totally distinct from it.

NEW BEGININGS

After joining the rainbow peace caravan I began a mutation from an intellectual and political oriented activist into an artist, clown and juggler. As a traveling NGO,  the rainbow caravan delivered several workshops, courses, seminars and gathering as inspiring environment for social and ecological activists. This continue to develop  my training in facilitation tools, Permaculture practice, transformative art and events production. One of the main poles of the Caravan was Liora, co-founder of Gaia University, and it is that remaining friendship from those days what could be the most important reason for being a student with Gaia U. in this moment.

This was one the major unlearning events of my life as it completely reshaped my concepts about myself into some kind of personality metamorphosis.

In 2002 I returned to Colombia because a serious process towards an Ecovillage with our tribe in my natal city of Cali had began. We were an average of 30 people getting together on a regular basis to dream and discuss our projected Ecovillage. A piece of land in the tropical rainforest, also in the Chocó region, was offered to us and we took the decision to move in.

Out of the 30 people, only four of us where ready with our lives packed in a couple of baggage. There were many that said they will follow in the coming weeks. It never happened and once again a life learning was acquired: the distance between saying and doing is so vast for the majority of people.

After 1 year of struggling with rainfall all year round, lots of mud and steep hills, abundant poisonous snakes and absence of backup, the project of the Ecovillage was abandoned and we started a new project for a natural reserve there using our NGO. Today, that land is a beautiful example of community based conservation with many visitors all year round.

In 2003, after coming back from the Call of the Condor, a continental vision council held by the Caravan in Peru, new energy, inspiration and conditions gave birth to a new attempt to create the Ecovillage.

This time, the land was Atlantis, my lost paradise. The security and violence in the area had dramatically changed and now it was safe to move in and start the reconstruction. With a group of 5 people –not 30 as the previous project- we started the new Ecovillage by making a friendly occupation deal with my father. Sometimes is better to have a small group of committed people to hold the energy for a new project than a big group of supporters, as illogical as it sounds, it is part of a well known recommendation of many Ecovillage pioneers around the globe.

After some unexpected situations, from the original group of 5, only my partner and I stayed on the land as full residents with our new born daughter, Inana. Seasoned times followed. Yami, my partner was in charge of the baby, the cooking and the housekeeping, I was in charge of the garden, the maintenance and the cows. We were making our income by milking our cows, making cheese and yogurt and sell those to our friends in the city every week.  It was major challenge to our beliefs and dreams, to our hope and determination. Now I can say that it is worthy to bet your whole life in the name of your heart call.

THE STORY OF NOW

Slowly new members start to join and live with us, sharing our vision and projects. In November 2012, Atlantis Ecovillage will be 9 years old. We are now groups of more than 30 members including residents and non residents. In 2011 we managed to get enough money as to buy our first piece of land, 7 Has that are now collectively own through our NGO.

Our Ecovillage is well established and known as a retreat and event center.  We learnt that more than any physical production of goods, the events and education activities were much more profitable and directly linked to our mission as an inspirational center.

My path has taken me into holding a position inside 2 very important traditions, lineages, schools and service streams:

One is the Dances of Universal Peace, a spiritual practice of singing sacred phrases and mantras from the world traditions together with live music and circular simple dances.  This modern school of practice was born inside a millenarian womb: Sufism. The iron heart of my teenage years has been transforming into a winged heart and my inner flame has found a safe and welcoming place to shine, grow and light other flames.

Nowadays, our Ecovillage is the most important training center for facilitators of the Dances of Universal Peace in Latin-America.  I am an official mentor for the international network, meaning that I can certify new teachers and have the responsibility for the transmission of the practice and the continuity of the linage. I am a Sufi mureed –initiated student- and serve in the global borad of the organization.

The other important path is the ancient wisdom and traditional knowledge of the original peoples of this Turtle Continent. Under the umbrella of the Condor-Eagle prophecy, many ancient practices, medicines, rituals, schools, ceremonies and lineages are coming into the light after centuries of secrecy and rejection by the main society.

I’ve been walking with our elders, especially from the Amazon jungle, the Lakota nation and the Andean tradition and have been entrusted with many precious knowledge, medicines and ceremonies to share with the people. As Sundancer and Chanupa –sacred pipe- carrier I work with sweatlodges –Inipi or Temazcal as we call it in latinamerica- and keep a sacred mountain for vision quest. I also walk with the medicine of Yagé and Awacoya facilitating ceremonies for the healing of our family’s bodies, minds, emotions and souls.

In these two complementary pathways I am happy to connect with the reality beyond any kind of rationality and be in contact with the reality of the powers of our Mother Earth and the Spirit World. I have witnessed so many “miracles” and unexplainable phenomena that faith is no longer a question for me. I have had access to so many experiences and realizations that are impossible to describe with words. I am totally grateful by the immense humbleness that this ways bring into my life.  Deep humbleness comes from a verified smallness of the individual self.

THE GROWING EDGE AND THE GAIA U PROMISE

The Atlantis Ecovillage positioning and develop is interwoven with the networking process. In 2006 we were part of the creation of RENACE COLOMBIA, the national Ecovillage network, and the beginning of the Call of the Mountain, the annual Ecovillage gatherings in Colombia. Our Ecovillage, the network and the gatherings have been in an ever increasing process of their maturity, capacity and convening.   

In 2010 some of us attended the Visions Council in México and identified the need for a renovation of the existing continental ecovillage network. We felt that the vision council was a good methodology for scaling up our gatherings in Colombia and also that there was a need for Spanish speaking spaces for the Ecovillage movement, since almost every material, book, and networks were in English.

We asked the formal blessing from the Mexican tribe to bring the Visions Council to Colombia, invited the Coyote Alberto –one of the elders of the Mexican family- to come and started an approximation with the most organized Spanish speaking networks: Spain and Chile.

In January 2012, at Atlantis Ecovillage, we hosted a multiple event: the sixth call of the mountain or national gathering, the first Visions Council of Colombia, and the first Spanish American Ecovillage gathering, with 477 participants from 26 different countries.

A new Latin American network was created: CASA, the Council of Sustainable Settlements of the Americas. With new structure, this time giving strength and space to the national networks and holding a new concept: to include other forms of projects beyond just ecovillages, opening space for Permaculture centers, ashrams, eco neighborhoods, natural reserves, eco towns, caravans, etc.

I am presently involved with the emergence and consolidation of CASA, especially related to the field of education and governance. I am also serving in the coordination team of the Colombian network, where we are moving into multiplying strategies and net growth in quantities and qualities of ecovillages and supporting networks.

We think and feel that there is enough maturity in our projects, networks and individuals, as to play a more significant role in the overall social change that we are all hoping to manifest. We want to take a more active leading role in a bigger movement that has been knocking at our doors. We want to make it easier for new ecovillages to start, for new supporters to get involved, for regenerating and resilient policies to appear.

This Gaia U M.Sc. is part of the professionalization we are getting and it is my hope that it will be of benefit for the networks, my ecovillage and myself.