Commentary by: Luciana Colibri
Community leader & KoguI EMISSARY
Sierra Nevada, Colombia

TIMES OF AWAKENING

The Earth is dying and birthing something new. We are living in times of awakening… and my call to service is towards this new dawn. I believe that we come from the stars and that we are beginning to remember our origins and that our mission is to caretake the Earth. But somewhere along the way, as humanity, we have forgotten. Like we have a blindfold over our eyes, we are clumsily walking through life, immersed in the karmic wheel of suffering and creating suffering for others. 

This has been described in all the ancient wisdoms. Yet something new is happening. We are living in prophetic times that our ancestors wrote about in scripts and stones. They foresaw a time on our planet where things would get critical and everything would shift quite suddenly. I am a midwife, and so was my great grandmother. Maybe this has a lot to do with why I consider myself a midwife for the new humanity. Today I am working with the Kogui in the Sierra Nevada of Colombia, and I feel this even more.

I somehow came into the world with this very clear vision. Maybe someone forgot to press the ‘delete memory’ button in my soul cell. But I have spent my entire life feeling alien to this world, looking around me with astonishment at human behaviour, and being profoundly confused by it. This was until I heard an inner voice. I had never heard it before, but it came from a pounding heart, and the feeling of butterflies in my belly when I saw the jungle for the first time. 

Southeast Asia

I was 21 years old, travelling through Southeast Asia, and the bus I was in had to cross jungles from one city to the next. Just seeing the jungle and feeling its pulse from my bus seat made me sweat and cry. What is this? I was confused. I was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in a big city, and I had lived in city suburban areas all my life until then. My family was not much into being nature lovers, so by the age of 21, I had never even been camping, much less immersed in a huge forest like this. So of course, seeing and feeling such an enormous jungle, the road passing through this immense physical body, was absolutely new to me. But this moment changed my life. It was the beginning of my awakening. It was Mother Nature’s calling.

Two months later I found myself on a longboat in a river in Borneo with an Iban native family rowing me downstream, and for the first time, I felt really human. There in the eyes of the children I saw for the first time, hope in humanity. The sparkle in their eyes, the purity of their smiles. They were climbing on rocks, fishing, playing with the tides of the river and the frogs. I had so many moments of bursting into tears in those months. I thought “We have been cheated! Anyone from the modern world, if they were here, would consider these people “poor” and “uncivilized”, yet here these people are the richest in the world!” I felt the abundance of this life in the deepest part of my soul. I thought, “I want to stay here forever.”

And when I sat in a paddy field looking out at the horizon and planning just how I was going to change my travel plans to stay here forever, I wondered how I would explain this to my father--that I would not be finishing my expensive university studies for which he was paying with all his devotion to my potential professional career in a competitive world. When I sat to consider all of this, I heard a voice, so clearly and I had never heard it before… and this voice told me “The light you feel, is not here, it is inside of you. Now you must take it wherever you go.” I cried in frustration. “Why can’t I stay here? The world is too difficult, too wrong!” “It is not your time…yet.” was the reply. 

As I packed some days after this, my heart was exploding with so many emotions and energy, and I returned to New York City, where I was studying film and communications. Five days after my return, 911 happened. I wanted to run away. I was in despair. I had paradise hanging in photos on my walls at home. I was nostalgic and sad beyond belief.

The light inside

But life continued and my life in paradise became a sweet memory. I finished my studies in New York. In 2004, a tsunami hit the Indonesian and Malaysian coastal areas destroying many of the places I had visited. I still don’t know today if my friends are alive because I lost all contact with people there and social networks were not what they are today. I happened to peek over someone’s shoulder on the subway and I saw they were reading National Geographic. The cover was an image from Borneo. It was an aerial image of mass deforestation. The jungle had been chopped to pieces. I was stunned. My paradise had been wiped out. I could immediately remember the inner voice, “the light inside”. It warned me that paradise is not a physical place outside but within. And I still had a long way to go until I found my own real paradise.

Many things happened, but long story short, at age 28, I fell ill. After one year and a half of suffering and going from one doctor to another, I started to feel I was falling into a vortex spiral with no end. Eventually I decided to trash the medications the doctors were giving me, and investigate more natural ways of healing. I had to return to my roots. And here I had my second call: the Peruvian Amazon and Andes. Argentina is on the east side of the Andean mountain range, and Peru on the western side. There in the middle, lies Peru where once resided the ancestors of one of the wisest and most powerful indigenous nations of all times: the Incas. So I packed back up and went there, thinking I’d go on an adventure for one month, to the Inca Trail, to find my own path back to paradise. The fact was, I never came back from that trip. I’m still here, still in the mountains.

Indigenous grandmothers

I discovered in my journey that my illness was a reflection of a life that was not in harmony. I sat with many indigenous grandmothers at the fires cooking and talking about womanhood, childbearing, and sharing many wonderful moments. I began to remember, bit by bit, and step by step, the path to my paradise. I began to study natural plants and healing for my own body, and eventually ended up birthing my own child at home with an indigenous midwife. It was at this time that my mother let me know that my great grandmother had been a midwife! All of a sudden this made a lot of sense… and my life mystery gained much more perspective. 

My pilgrimage to my inner paradise led me to the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia, home of one of the most well-preserved ancient cultures and wisest of wisdom keepers on our planet: the Kogui people with their beautiful natural bioreserve. It was love at first sight. My partner and I, with our newly born son, sat with an elder of this mountain and we began to unravel many of the mysteries of our own lives. We were invited by him to stay here and help take care of this sacred land. I knew it would take a strong preparation, but I was ready, ready to find my paradise again. I was home. 

Today I am a mother, sister, daughter, student of life mysteries, nature caretaker, world-bridge builder, and founder of Earth Wisdom, a platform for the meeting of the ancestral and modern wisdoms as a proposal for an education for a new humanity.

If there is something that I can acknowledge from what I have learned from living in the jungles of Southeast Asia, sharing with Kogui and Peruvian elders, and spending time in nature, is that paradise is indeed inside, just as that inner voice had counseled. Yet finding this paradise was a complete surrender. And a life journey. I am an eternal student of the mysteries, and if there is an invitation that I can l give to others, it is this: 

Luciana Colibri (Wayra Tika Bunekan) of the Colibri New Humanity Nation.
Find out more about the Living University of Earth Wisdom – Universidad Viva de Saberes de la Tierra:
www.saberesdelatierra.org