Siwa

  • Language: Muysk Kubun
  • Region: Central Colombia
  • Contributor: Diana Castillo, Stefanny Contreras, Michael Ramírez
pond; lake; adult woman’s vagina
laguna; lago; vagina (de mujer adulta)
Activate captions to see English subtitles

From the waters emerged Mother Bachué, who gave birth to our people and taught us how to live well in our territory.

When father and mother created the world they wondered – who will take care of the world and teach to maintain order?

It was thus that they sang a new song and placed two new seeds in the womb of humanity, the lake from which Bachué and the primeval law of caring for creation emerged.

The lake is that portal from which possible worlds are born and where the spirit of struggle and natural order is strengthened. Our waters are creative centers, navels and connection paths that allow us to dialogue with other ways of thought.

Its waters sing stories, siwa speaks to us and reminds us of the womb, of the humidity of our first ‘mochila’ (cotton shoulder bag), our mother’s womb.

Returning to the lake is to reimagine ourselves, to look at ourselves in the mirror of its waters and recognize ourselves to organise our thoughts and spirit.

We are sons and daughters of the lake, our bodymind  is nourished from its waters. It is a call to listen to the mother’s voice, to fertilize the thought that sows and sustains resistance

To organize ourselves around water as knowing and not as a raw material, it is vital to stand firmly before the capitalist thought that turns the lakes into resources, and to resist in the face of its absurd approach to land use that overflows and destroys the territory, blurring from our hearts the firm idea and conviction that the lake has life, spirit and purpose.

In your waters I was born, with them I found myself and I will take care of your flow to sow myself and be a daughter. I will walk so that you continue living, because in you the rhythm of the universe is manifested, because in you the balance is maintained and I am made of you. We will sing so that your pain heals, so that life is reborn again and the will of the peoples continues to be born to return to their law of origin.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Learn more

English (UK)