Do you remember when tenderness nested in our hearts?
Do you remember the times when we marveled at the garden full of fireflies, that flowing river, the warm sand on our feet and the flower of a thousand petals?
Do you remember how we were moved by the crowd throbbing in unison, that total palpitation?
When was it that we stopped standing in front of the sun like awakened children brimming with future?
Why did we begin to distrust change and kaleidoscopes?
Yes, there were causes!
Things happened!
Things happened that opened serious gaps between us!
Then suspicion, fear and condemnation began to occupy more and more space in us, until we were hijacked.
And we became breeding grounds for violence towards others and ourselves.
Fifty years have passed and we are still lost, deaf and blind, separated, trying different ways to escape from that hardness that has been planted in our hearts.
But isn’t it true that sometimes you and I dream of that abandoned tenderness?
I have dreamed that we are once again profoundly brothers. Have you dreamed it?
I believe that soon necessity will bring us back to touch that humanity imbued with the divine, capable of uniting the heavens with the earth, which still persist in us.
Don’t you feel, as I do, that it is time to come closer and to love each other again?
I think that to rebel against violence is the most just rebellion because it opens our future.
So, I propose this to you, though timidly but also with faith that you will share this wish.
My enemy, my undeniable brother, let us be friends, let us free our chained hearts and dedicate them to cultivating nonviolence forever!
Patricia Rios – NYC, September 11, 2023