Sphere of Influence
María Suarez Toro,
Saturday, Jan. 20, 2024
My sphere of influence is defined,
not by my body’s geographical reach;
not even by my own
present day story,
or even its history, Guayasamín, Lágrimas.
that I have learned
and written
over the past 75 years.
There are times
in one’s life,
when the planetary DNA
yells a different story.
A story that,
regardless of our
dissociated
laboratory of the Newtonian mind,
screams out loud
to remind us
where we come from.
So far back,
it tells us
that it is
the very gift of life
what brings us back,
even in the painful love
we are able to feel,
in some others’ territory,
no matter how far.
When I gave myself the chance
to have my DNA tested at 65,
I surprisingly discovered,
that I came,
of course from the Ocean,
in way back millenary times;
and from my mother’s
embodied territory,
and my father’s seed,
surrendering to her fertile
love of the land,
so that I be born,
in a species
that is
the motherly kind.
Buy once upon a time,
my DNA tells me,
that in much earlier times,
our species already inland,
I came
from the southern part of Africa;
travelled through
what we today think of
as the Middle East,
then to Asia,
and ended up in southern Spain,
coming to the Americas ,
to become Indian
in the Antilles Caribbean.
Ever since listening to my DNA,
not knowing enough geography,
I have tied to historically make sense
of that particular million years’ gap.
I have hypothetically thought:
I, in my DNA,
came across The Silk Route
that connected Africa,
Asia and the Middle East
in the remote past.
Same as today!
The actual globalized Suez Canal,
belonging to the Arab world,
being contested
by Israel’s Zionist government,
and that of the United States,
for the sake of a new project,
the “Ben Hurion” Occidental Canal:
a modern Silk Route,
owned by the West,
in order to control
the world’s polarized trades
for the elites in the West.
The unequal,
abusive,
genocidal,
supremacist,
capitalist,
patriarchal,
dispute over Gaza,
by disappearing Palestinians
and all of Palestine.
It has given me back nightmares,
that once I stopped having,
when the silencing of the guns
in Central América
started in 1991.
We learned there,
that Peace does not come by chance,
or by having good ideas in our heads,
and trying to bring them to life.
Peace has not come
to Central América yet,
because as an institutionalized
patriarchal “peace” design,
there was no change of heart,
no change of relational paradigms,
no change of the way
we can live life together as one.
And today, with my DNA,
and what collectively
I continue learning to embrace,
I like to dream of myself
as who
I might
have been
way back,
before patriarchal,
capitalist,
supremacist,
past times.
A Palestinian Arab?
or perhaps I was a Palestinian Jew?
Or a Muslim in the Palestine land?
Or a Jerusalema Palestinian Muslim African dancer?
Or who knows what other combination,
in the promised land.
That land I see
when I look at the world
with the DNA lense,
which is nature’s own eyes.
I turn to the map,
to look to see
what was Palestine
in the pre 1948
remote past.
In the millenary Ottoman Empire
it was always a territory,
NEVER anyone’s
nation,
state,
or furling ethically
controlled land.
It was always,
a land,
from the river to the sea,
with many different peoples,
perhaps because it was the MECCA
of all three main planetary religions;
and perhaps even
pagans,
agnostics,
heretics,
nontheists,
or other multiple theists.
Religions and other beliefs
that before patriarchy
and before capitalism
and before supremacism,
would have not been instruments,
or even institutions,
but might have been expressions
of human’s reverence to all of life,
including the sanctity
of the territory itself
as the gift of live?
When I dream
beyond my nightmares,
I like to believe
that the territory of Palestine,
that ancestral sacred land,
the one in that conflict,
does not allow itself
to be divided,
fragmented,
torn apart
and abused to its ground.
When we know ourselves
part of the nature of the planet,
we-know-we-do-not-know,
where and what,
our sphere of influence stands.
Or vice versa:
we-know-we-do-not-know,
all that influences us,
beyond what and who
we think we are.
I ask myself again,
and again and again:
what is one’s sphere of influence,
when we KNOW for sure,
that the wings of a butterfly
in one place in the planet,
can create a typhoon
in another faraway
ocean or land?
There are times,
especially in times of distress,
like now,
when we need to remember.
We need be reminded,
beyond the known stories,
although with them on board,
be reminded beyond history;
but with history on board;
be reminded beyond
present day narratives,
but with them on board,
Who and what we are.
And there are also days,
like today,
when we meet as women,
almost from all over the world,
looking deep into
who we think we are
and what we think we can do,
and together as one,
across so many boundaries,
we metamorphosieze
to become the butterflies.
Who knows
where it will take us
and what we will do.
But confidence
in life has told us today,
we are in a very good track.
We meet cahordically,
somewhere between
caos and order,
but each holding own ground
while constructing a common
human and planetary ground!
But again,
we have to ask ourselves
in new light:
what constitutes
our sphere of influence,
is our common ground.
