Looking for Answers in Chile

Looking for Answers in Chile

Chile is a country of long proportions in the southern hemisphere. Most of the world's people will never go to the southern half of the planet (let alone South America or Chile); they will never witness the Southern Cross in person, with their naked eye... But this is okay, I proclaim, because there are many other sights and stars to see in the world and beyond, and a few of us authors and poets may give those heavenly orbs enough justice and form to fill the appetite and sate the hunger of those that missed the south, to include the lands of Mapuches and Chilote legends of myths. Most Chileans themselves will never make it to that far off island, a large mass of land surrounded by southerly seas where there was enough pre- Colombian history for the original inhabitants to have their own gods and monsters, some of whom passed on to the current Europeanized generations, like us, the chilenos de nacimiento and the forasteros, the gringos and others.

I went there in search of answers, questions not yet posed, looking for people unknown and yet so very familiar, people from quaint places like Mulchen and Santa Juana and Coihueco, and Angol and Huequen and Collipulli and Renaico and Los Sauces and Puren, were quaint enough, the people living peaceably there and there. So many took me in and loved me, and I loved them.

Maurico, Cristian, Maria, Paula, Jimena, Claudia, Jose, Jorge, Eva, Pablo, Juana, Elizabeth, Yanet, Rosa, Jonathan, Guillermo, Hernan, Marcelo, Mattias, Pedro, on and on...

And found some of my answers as a full time church representative and foreigner, in a land of other cultures, familiar yet odd, for me the northern visitor.

I found some answers and keys to knowledge in those multiple seasons living upside down right side up and often sideways, but I forgot my share of all those great and wise things.

But I went back.

Some of those answers came back to me a few short years later, but other questions surged and other mysteries abounded. Literature of Chile, of Peru or Colombia and Central America and the Caribbean and of course Argentina, opened up a new universe of questions and answers for me. These phantoms and at times warm kindly spirits now followed me to the United States, or Mexico, or Canada or even in sundry parts of Asia, years and decades later...

And I went back again, even later in life, with a wife and two little girls, and new and old friends that brought me new insights and emotions, pains and joys, exquisite sorrows and epiphanies, again to be forgotten within so many hours and days of re-breathing or re-inhaling the airs of Gringolandia, my native Tierra de los Yanquis, los ee.uu, the Great and Powerful North America, where is the ubiquitous perspective so typically and at times tragically lies.

However, the millions are still there in Chile, and I was among them; I share and shared many of those vistas and smells and vapors and sentiments of love and nostalgia, Chilean hopes and fears large and small, which will lie dormant within me until a word or a sound or an aroma will arouse that thought, that feeling, that idea, that life and soul of the the one that I communed with, when 19, or 20, or 21, or 23, or 34, or 35 years old.

Could I feel those answers again? Could I relive or rekindle the sweet sentiments and answers to all those questions posed and answers received?

Are there more memories and answers in that nation, within its new peoples, the newer foreigners and the traditional old timers alike, the aged and the youth and all in between, the rocks and soils that I traipsed, the Copihue flower and the dusty sidewalks of years gone by?

I know that they are there.

When will those tickets be purchased to alight on the Southern Cross tarmac under the heavens once more? There are a hundred other destinations that beckon me and tempt my passport to be stamped...

I have to look for these answers.

I will continue to search for these ephemeral answers that I know are there, like the bright constellations that so few of us ever see with our own naked, solemn and wondrous eyes.

Blessed are we.

Blessed is querido Chile, and the God that made it so.

Neruda and Mistral? And my professors Gonzalo and Hilda and the others? Eternal gratitude to you and your masterful arts.

Gracias a la vida, canto the singer in Spanish.

Gracias por Chile. Es un grandisimo don de Dios mismo.