Lisa María Madera
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​A Flor de Piel


2/7/2020 0 Comments

We live in the ring of fire...

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... along the Avenue of the Volcanes: 32 volcanoes on our mainland and 15 volcanoes in the Galapagos Islands. Now, like me, you may have been taught in an elementary science class the definition of Life and. in that unit, you learned that rocks and mountains are inanimate. 

And while you memorized the rock cycle and learned about the different parts of a volcano, you learned these things with the knowledge and certainty that
these lumps of rock and soil, with their seething gases and molten lava, spitting out mud and rocks, spewing lava and vapor, these mountains with their underground chambers and springs and lakes, waterfalls and rivers, these ancient moving geological formations are most certainly NOT alive. 


I was born on the flanks of the sleeping volcano Guagua Pichincha. 

As a child I lived in the Ecuadorian Amazon and at night I would stay up late, my eyes pressed into binoculars, watching the volcano Sangay miles across the canopy erupt in blue and green gases that hovered over the crown while glowing lava flowed down the gleaming white cone.

Years later, I lived on the flank of the beautiful and seductive Isabel Tungurahua. I watched for her red rocky face at sunset and at dawn. I bathed in her thermal pools and witnessed the first thin spiral of vapor rise up from her crater in 80 years. I felt the earth rumble beneath me at her complaint and abandoned a town I loved, 7 months pregnant, 2 weeks in advance of a military evacuation of 22,000 people as Tungurahua erupted in spectacular fury. 


One week later, in Quito, I watched in surprise from my living room window as an unexpected plume of vapor, gas and ash burst, without warning, up out of the Guagua Pichincha rising 12 kilometers into the cerulean sky. 

I have swept ash from our porch and closed up windows and doors as a noxious sulfur cloud from Reventador seeped over our house. I have sent emergency volcano kits to school with my children including goggles, masks, band aids, suero fisiológico, bottled water, and snacks.  I have driven through falling ash, thicker than a blizzard, as Cotopaxi erupted, the prickly sound of pumice smattering across our car. 

As I write, 3 of our volcanoes--Reventador, Sangay, and El Cumbre in the Galápagos--are in an active process of eruption. This month a brand new scientific study warns that Tungurahua´s western flank may soon collapse. 

The mountains are giving birth. 

From my very limited experience--from this tiny window that is my life--I can tell you, most certainly, that these mountains are anything but inANIMATE.

I look it up:

Anima. ... The Latin origin of the word is animus, ‘rational soul, life, or intelligence,’ from a root that means ‘to blow’ or ‘to breathe.’

From the Latin. A noun. Declension: 1st declension Gender: feminine Definitions: 1. air (element) 2. breathing 3. life 4. soul, spirit, vital principle 5. wind, breeze


Did you know that volcanoes breathe? 
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2/1/2020 0 Comments

The snakes became talismans...

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Jewels of memory

​sacred encounters
marking my path.

The brilliant banded coral
waiting for me
as I return
home
on my bike,
a warning spiral of color,
at the foot of the cement ramp
leading to our front
door.

The elegant palm viper
draped
on the school gate
her flickering tongue
reaching out

her eyes
meeting
melding
with
mine.

The fat bushmaster
sunning
on the white
gravel
path
to school.

The rainbow boa
I catch
in our backyard
and
hold
for a few hours
in a cardboard box
before she slips away. 


In our summers
in our pink house
in Richfield
outside of Minneapolis,
I would search our tiny backyard

for garter snakes

elegant living treasures

catch them
hold them

peer
into their silky eyes
and feel powerful

silent and beautiful.

As I grow older
the snakes come to me

in my dreams.

Signs of creative
spiritual
power

coiled and waiting
to pour through my life.

I become a snake handler.
 
In the smoky rooms
of my imagination

the snakes coil
around
my legs
spiral my arms
crown my head
slip
down
the
length
of my spine.

​Prophetic words
pour
from
my mouth
on the
flickering
forked tongues
of serpents.

In Atlanta,
in graduate school,
I walk through
Candler Park.

I call them

and there

they appear
​again
sunning in my path,

slipping along the forest floor,
sliding silently into the pond.

Every time
​
I see a snake,
I bow in its presence,
aware of a profound sacred blessing.

Our encounters are brief.

Every time

they slip
through
my grasp,

I mourn them.


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    About the Author

    Lisa Maria Madera is an Ecuadorian American writer and educator whose work explores how cultural narratives shape our individual and communal relation to the Earth and her creatures.

    Madera's work has appeared in Ecopsychology, Hypertext, JSRNC, Minding Nature and in Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations forthcoming from the Center for Humans and Nature. Her short story Luz Maria has been nominated for consideration in Best American Short Stories 2021.

    ​Dedicated to fostering compassionate and resilient communities connected to Nature, Madera also designs and hosts trips to Ecuador providing opportunities for observation and reflection on how our relationship to the world is shaped by the cultural narratives that define us.


    ​Madera offers her work in a vision of hope and blessing that these reflections might empower all of us to realign our relationship in kinship to the Earth, to her many creatures, and to each other, ultimately realigning ourselves in right relation to the world around us so that we might live sustainably and in community.

    Madera is currently working on a memoir entitled The Covid Chronicles: Lessons from Pacha Mama in the Face of Despair.     

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