It seems incredible that we arrived in New York from Colombia when you were only six. I am writing to you 21 years later, not from a geographic place, but from my Hispanic-American soul condensed in a body like yours. A body that embraces the black, yellow and white race. I am writing to you from my heart, in which memories of my roots still rein: the silence of the Andean Mountains; the poverty of the countryside; the dialogue with nature; the slowness of time; the conversation of women on their front steps; the bent and sweaty walk of men and women carrying the weight of the world upon their shoulders; the happy smiles of children who, if lucky, get their daily bread; the miracle of millions surviving the greed of the powerful. I am writing to you from the social decay created by our antisocial laws and from the chaos to which we have been reduced.

For years I have tried to understand the Anglo-Saxon psychology, the white man who has polarized himself in his race, his conquests, his delusions of grandeur in the face of nature. I have become accustomed to the sky-scrapers whose floors interlock like beehives; to the human ant-farm; to the webs of pavement; to the supersonic noise; to the buzz of the worlds economic brain deciding our collective destiny.

One part of my heart gives thanks for the miracle that our people have been able to survive the material want created by lack of technology and the physical deterioration that could be healed with it. The other awaits the miracle that your adopted country will acquire a planetary consciousness so that the Earth and its inhabitants can survive the havoc of a supertechnology deployed for exploitation by a historically abhorrent imperialism.

You and I face different worlds–one the product of development and Protestantism, the other of underdevelopment and Catholicism–but we are essentially two women, two human beings, each a compendium of the psychological evolution that encompasses the prehistoric lack of consciousness and the slow emergence of consciousness throughout history. Egypt, Sumer, Chaldea, Persia, Greece, Rome, India, China, Europe, Africa and America are all condensed in every modern man and woman.

I thank you for growing up next to me, because it was my desire to bequeath you a better world that led me to search for the treasure of the human heart. In it I found the spiritual force that has permitted man to go, again and again, in search of the truth. That force rebels against lies and propels man to self-sacrifice for love of truth. That force makes him reject everything that is not of itself and promotes the destruction of all that is vain and false. That force finds refuge in the most indestructible of all forces: the loving human heart. But that loving heart finds itself imprisoned in walls built for personal defense. The light of Spirit is dimmed by the terrible confusion of our consciousness.

Twenty-seven years ago, when you were born, I was in that confusion. I had still not recognized that our historical challenge was to become conscious. And I thought I was conscious even though I clearly wasn't. Historically, we have been able to survive our lack of consciousness because it had not acquired bionic power. Today we have to answer the challenge if we are to survive as a species, healing the insanity created by the improper and selfish use of our science and technology. Yet this enormous evil that surrounds us is at the same time the biggest blessing that history has ever afforded us. It is forcing us to choose the only possible solution: freeing each individual from the yoke of self-ignorance in order to discover his true loving nature.

Today we are confronted by a machine led by our animal instinct that is too colossal a titan to destroy with mere human forces. But this enemy lives within each of us and we must transform it in order to stop projecting the hell we carry inside onto the world. Our enemies are not outside of ourselves, but the prevalent myth that they are doesn't allow us to recognize the little scared animal inside each of us who, out of fear, demands the security of power, money, land, and property, even if the price we pay for these is the blood of our fellow man. That little scared animal that throughout history has meant war, disease, hunger, man beaten by man, crowned with thorns by man, crucified by man. That little animal has to be healed with the only medicine available: Love.

Fervently desiring to give you a better world made me realize that the evil I wanted to exorcise for you, lived in me as well, obscuring my capacity for just reasoning. I would not have been able to teach you what is right and wrong because I couldn't unravel the tangle in my own psyche. Then I understood that, in order to help you, my mission was to come out of that confusion.

That is when I started my race to get ahead of the lies. That race began when you were born and my goal was to be able to teach you as much truth while you grew up as I could. Year by year I had to learn so I could uncover the jewels of truth that I would later give you; learn in order to illuminate the lies so that you would never grow up with them and, consequently, would never have to fight against them. I could only imagine the amount of work I had before me and I didn't even know where to start. But the sight of your beautiful and innocent little face while you drank from my breast, while you laughed as I changed your diapers and tickled you, while I told you stories, gave me strength and enthusiasm. What you were giving me was the love needed to melt the frigidity created by lack of faith in the future. The love with which I could destroy the cynicism to which we of the cold-war era had fallen prey.

The first question I had to ask myself was what is truth? Somerset Maugham once said that the greatest truths are too important to be new, so I resurrected the dead of history and prehistory and asked them to show me old truths that I may see them with new eyes. Thanks to this I was able to begin to break through the enormous ramparts in which we encase ourselves when we are sure that we know the truth. Since birth we are taught what our elders believe to be the truth. Religious, political, social and historic believes pile up like brick over brick. Then, individually, we take it upon ourselves to strengthen the fortification.

As children we are not trained to love our fellow man but to defend ourselves from him. "You have to learn to defend yourself in life," we are told. That is how we start, seeing those who surround us, not as brothers, but as hungry wolves ready to devour us. The fear perpetuates the dependence on the ramparts we have fabricated. We surround ourselves with them until, little by little, we find ourselves locked up in a cell. The light cant reach through our shelter and neither can love because we have closed the door in its face.

In that prison, we play the role of inmate, guard and hangman. There, in the shadows, we lament our misery without being able to escape it because the fear wont let us. And anyone who manages to break the chains, allowing the light to bathe him and the love to fill him, finds himself alone, screaming in the desert. When he approaches those who are his brothers, they turn against him because they cannot allow the freedom that threatens their refuge.

The second question I began to ask myself was, "Who am I?" I'm not sure why that was the question that echoed in my mind instead of the typical modern query, "How much do I have?" Perhaps it was because your grandmother had the good sense to make me aware of my intrinsic value instead of how much I had. She denied me all the material things that were not necessary. She only gave me three skirts, three shirts, three sweaters and one pair of shoes for the school year. And when I complained that all my classmates had lots of clothes and shoes, she told me that my value is not in what I own but in who I am.

It could have also been because I grew up listening to your grandfather call all the philosophers, no matter what their era or nationality, "My beloved Greeks." With no formal philosophical education, he had concluded that every thinker is the son of Athens and made a personal friend of each. Having grown up with these friendships of my father helped me when I later became interested in the Truth by helping me see the cord that tightly binds all of those who have given themselves to reason and love. A cord that has transcended the differences of nationality, language and time. I began by studying Socrates, trying to find a path to his world of Eternal Truths, and could not have asked for a better teacher. "I only know that I know nothing," was his first lesson.

I understood that this lesson must be contemplated and directed until it becomes part of ones blood so that finding answers does not destroy ones desire for knowledge. Every answer should be nothing but the basis to invoke another question. That way answers do not turn into chains, weights that hinder our search for wisdom. "I only know that I know nothing," opened hundreds of doors and windows for me. I am sure that it was with this intention that Socrates reiterated this phrase to his disciples. With it he hoped to crumble the walls of defense in which we encase ourselves. Socrates made me love that idea, that model (idea is the word used for model in Greek). In that phrase resides his greatness as a teacher. From it springs his method of teaching. With those words he asked me not to blindly trust in him nor anyone as teacher and forced me to humbly recognize the illusion of knowledge to which we are all anchored. His system of questions prompted me to seek answers within myself.

But why the inner searching? For a long time Socrates frustrated me. I thought he should give me the concrete, precise answers I sought. Later I realized that by not doing so he taught me to think. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, "Everything is a riddle and the key to the riddle is another riddle." Once I understood this, I realized that Socrates had indeed given me the answers I requested, but his plan had been to first light in my soul the flame, the fervent desire, to enter that dimension in which individual thought joins the universal and finds the ONE. With his help I found the thread of Spirit that could lead me out of the labyrinth. A labyrinth created by the illusion of the division of matter. When I excitedly ran to Socrates to tell him of my discoveries, he teasingly said, "But deary, I had already told you so." Yes he had, and so had all the great thinkers of history. Why then was it so difficult to understand that the universe is ONE and to act according to that fact?

A baby is potential, Spirit, energy that will be formed according to maternal, paternal, familial and social suggestions. The father and the mother are sculptors of this raw matter. But only now, thanks to Dr. Freud and his understanding of the psyche, do we know that this potential can be distorted with false suggestions and conditioning. This false conditioning began, as he said, with the strong motivation of seeking immediate gratification. This is true not only in primitive men and women, but also in the baby: The principle of pleasure is more important to us than any punishment we could receive after having satisfied it. Freud named this type of behavior the Id.

Society has innumerable false suggestions and ways conditioning its members. The Homo Sapiens first created these false suggestions when he became aware of his own thoughts. His newborn conscience, just emerging from the ocean of unconsciousness, responded immediately to his senses. Having perceived himself, he identified with his body and what his body felt. He judged some sensations satisfactory and others painful. If something felt pleasant, he deemed it good; if something felt unpleasant it had to be bad. But he was far from understanding that good and bad have little to do with his likes and dislikes. His judgment erred because he thought he was the limit of his body. That is why his life developed avoiding what he thought was bad and seeking what he thought was good. From this first erroneous idea that he was his body were born the rituals and institutions that his imagination conceived to defend what he considered good and shun what he considered bad.

By the time my parents took my tiny body and put it in the crib, generations of these erroneous thoughts and subconscious emotions already lived in me. And as a baby, I was but a sponge, absorbing everything that my parents told me. I was lucky because they had both identified with the socialist tendencies that generated the communist movement in the 19th Century, later solidified by Marx and Engels. Therefore, they had the conviction that the human race is one and that there is no reason for social injustice. What started to form in that crib was a pink-diaper baby (my parents were Marxist but they did not belong to the party, so I do not qualify as a red-diaper baby). One more daughter of the many sons and daughters that the radicals of the 30s brought to the world.

The word radical is very illuminating. It comes from root, to concentrate on the root. What is the root of the human being? The Spirit. To be radical then, is to not swallow the lies inherited by our societies from the Paleolithic age which distract us from our Spirit root. The first radicals were Egyptian. With Hermes at the head, they began a radical movement to change the conditioning produced by the idea that we are just a body lost in a labyrinth of material forms. They taught that the Spirit is the First and the Last because everything in the material universe is but the body of the Spirit. If you look at the world according to that Reality, every person is Spirit. The link between the Spiritual level and the personal is the Human Spirit, the True Being that lives unrecognized in us and our societies.

To be or not to be is the choice given to every baby in the crib from the beginning of time and the answer depends on the identifications the parents helped him to form. But each generation of babies will have the blessing of being born into a society that, as a matter of course, contains more truth than the last. It is not the same thing to have been born when most people believed the Earth was flat as it is to be born in the Space Age.

But what is To Be, or to become human?

When we want to find excuses for the spilling of blood throughout history, or the horrors that we do to one another, we say: "Well, we are only human." In this way we blame the Human Spirit in each of us, the innocent, for our inhumanity. every day this To Be in us is hidden by the shadows of our erroneous interpretations of Life.

We usually believe that we know ourselves, but what we think we are is exactly what we are not, because that is only what is transitory, what it appears to be. To know who we are we have to contemplate the Eternal and the transitory in us. The Eternal is Spirit and the Human Spirit. The transitory is our body, our intellect and our emotional mind. The latter is affected by the erroneous interpretations of our identity created by our intellect.

A better definition of ourselves would be: "I am Human Spirit and I am now living my experience as Adriana."

We believe a child is born with a personality, but that personality is defined by his identifications and the identifications of his parents. If there is love for culture in the home, the child identifies with what philosophers throughout the ages have called Being, or the seed of the Spiritual image. What Einstein termed Interior coherence. "The logic of theory," Einstein said, "has to emerge from an internal coherence, not because exterior evidence makes it more logical than other theories."

Culture promotes the Being in the child and plants the image of human dignity in his consciousness. This gives him the desire to seek the "precious gift of hope for the unknown future and things yet unseen," as Milton R. Konvitz put it in his book Judaism and the American Idea. Culture, derived from the Latin word cultur, has nothing to do with having a lot of books or works of art in ones house. Culture, as I use it, can be defined as the individuals obedience to the expression of the Spirit that lives within him. Amuary De Reincourt's definition clearly elucidates this point:

"Culture predominates in young societies awakening to life...and represents a new way of seeing the world. It implies the creation of new values, new religious symbols and artistic styles, new intellectual and spiritual structures, new science, legislation, moral codes. It emphasizes the individual instead of society, creation instead of preservation and duplication, prototypes instead of mass production, and an aesthetic rather than ethical way of seeing. Culture is essentially the builder of brilliant paths.

"Civilization points to the gradual standardization of growing masses of men within a rigid mechanized framework. Masses of common men who think alike, feel alike, seek conformity, are inclined to bureaucratic structures, and who's group instinct dominates the creative individual."

Civilizations from the beginning of time have not developed on culture or the illuminated ideas of the men who erect them in the hopes that they will become fields for new seeds to blossom. Civilizations have fed instead on the survival instinct, a union of individuals who need to protect themselves. The minute this herd instinct takes over, any culture is smothered and kept from growing and developing. The very ideas that founded the civilization become a threat to it. This is because civilization institutionalizes ideas and lowers those ideas to the unconscious level. Institutions, therefore, become self-preserving and change or development threaten their survival. They cling ferociously to the status quo and the development or growth of the very ideas which forged them seem like radical forces bent on their destruction.

Henry George, the American economist, said that society is an organism, not a machine. All organisms have to be constantly renewing themselves. Our bodies are creating new cells every second of every day. The individuals who make up a society are like the cells of our bodies. The minute a society fights their growth, it does not allow itself to evolve, and its ultimate demise is but a matter of time.

According to Reincourt, civilization represents the crystallization, on a gigantic scale, of the culture that founded it. But civilization, he says, lives in the petrified forms; basically without creativity and culturally sterile, although efficient in its massive organization. Egyptian culture had already died when Egyptian civilization began to develop because it took the ideals upon which it was founded–the humanistic ideals of Hermetic culture–and twisted them into instruments for its survival, taking slaves for labor and honoring the gods above its people. Then individuals within the civilization who fan the flame of truth and culture become threats to the society, are called radical and are destroyed or silenced through ridicule. This has been the fate of every civilization since the beginning of time. Every civilization has been born in culture, every culture has been smothered by the civilization which grew out of it–all but one. Jewish culture, which stopped being a civilization in 70 A.D., never stopped keeping the flame of its culture burning. Until today, when it once again became a civilization in Israel.

Civilization is anti-human because it responds to the survival instinct no matter who or what gets hurt in the process. Western Civilization, which wants to rule the world, is also already dead because it has smothered the growth of its individuals. But today the threat is much greater because modern science and technology has allowed it to extend its decaying body throughout the world. If all the men and women of today do not become more cultured–in lieu of being civilized–we will see the biggest devastation ever imagined.

But there is hope. Every civilization is like a flower that dies but leaves its seeds dormant in the ground. The seeds of every culture ever conceived are still here waiting for us to water and fertilize the earth around them.

What my father and mother did for me and my sister, and you and your cousins, was to make us identify with culture, with that mode of Being that has nothing to do with taste in art, good books or beautiful architecture. For civilized men and women, art becomes little more than a status symbol, same as a good home library or living in a nice building. We all know that civilized men and women can–like in Nazi Germany–put intellect and emotion, science and art, into the service of inhumanity and total beastialization. Culture is wisdom, that mentor who teaches us and illuminates our path with the flame of the interior Spirit.

It is a good time for red-diaper babies, be they like me, the daughter of sympathizers, or the sons of party members like Jos Kornbluth whose play Red-Diaper Baby you took me to see in New York. It is a good time because our parents loved the human race and fervently illuminated our lives with an ideal, the ideal of justice. The ideal that radicals like Moses have taken up throughout history: Humanism.

Kornbluth's monologue, which narrates his life as the son of two communists, revived my childhood memories. Between laughs it made me realize that all of the important concepts that were positively interwoven in my life were rooted in Marxism, which is the philosophy of history put to use in everyday life. With this I am not claiming that only the cultural veins that come from Marxism are important. Every cultural vein is universal and all culture that reaches the child is vital for the rest of his life.

"I could not ask for an egg," said Kornbluth, "Without my parents telling me the whole historical philosophy behind the egg." You yourself suffered the same fate because the importance of history is completely rooted in me. As far as I am concerned, nothing can be understood unless we know where it comes from historically. You also have joked that you cannot ask me anything without my taking you on a long historic tangent.

Another great identification for me was my maternal grandmother. I loved to listen to her stories about the Virgin Mary and the Holy Child. After the frenzy of activity at my parents house, where they were always discussing societal lies, speaking with horror about the bomb and rounding up signatures for peace, it was of great comfort to know that the Virgin Mary could protect me from all evil. Mom and dad taught me God does not exist, but I decided he did exist and fought with them all the time for being unbelievers. They say I loved to contradict them. If they said white, I said black and no one could convince me otherwise.

My belief in a higher power is what saved me from the cynicism that affected many of my peers. The world was wicked and evil but if I could get on the Virgins good side, everything would be fine. Mom and dad say I always looked at them like I thought they were the enemy and would scream at them over the most innocuous things. I wouldn't wear pants claiming, "I am not a man so the Virgin Mary wouldn't like it." Besides, I was on to their inconsistencies. They claimed they didn't believe in God, but they apparently did believe in the devil: they threatened me with him every time I got rebellious in defense of the Virgin. That really made me mad. I would stomp my little four-year-old feet as hard as I could and scream, "All right Devil, come and get me if you can. Ill kick you out and down the stairs!"

That was the beginning of what my parents were afraid might be my criminal tendencies, evidence of which mounted with every day. On one occasion they took me to see a movie about boxing starring Mickey Rooney. There was a scene in which his opponent gives him a terrible beating and I started screaming, "Don't let him! Get a knife and stick it up his mouth!" Naturally, my parents slunk out of the theater with me, hoping nobody would recognize the progenitors of such a disturbed little girl. But I had learned it from listening to their communist and sympathizer friends discuss social justice and injustice: A big guy like that beating up a little guy like Mickey Rooney was a great injustice wasn't it?

On another occasion, my paternal grandmother came to visit us. She had a lot of big varicose veins on her legs. Dad asked me to get her slippers and I refused. "Ariadne," she chided me, "I see that my son is not treated very well here. I am going to take him away." I got furious and yelled, "Take him and you'll see that I'll get the gun from Uncle Eustacio (who was an aviator so I assumed his uniform meant he was a soldier) and shoot those ugly veins right out of your legs!" Once my parents got over their shock, they tried to find out why I would say such a horrible thing and I just answered them with a question, "Isn't it a terrible injustice to take a little girl's father away?"

When I was seven, your Aunt Selene was born. I couldn't believe I had a little sister. I had to pinch myself to make sure it wasn't a dream. She was nothing but peace since the day she was born. She never cried. Unlike me, she was always full of smiles and good humor.

But my own rebelliousness continued. Soon after, I declared I had to go live with nuns because I couldn't go on living with people who did not believe in God. It was obvious to me that if we were facing such terrible problems even my parents could not solve, then I had to rely on a power greater than theirs to prevent the impending world catastrophe. I still remember my father looking at me with an ironic smile, trying to come down to the level of a seven-year-old. "If you go to school with nuns you'll have to stay many years in the same school," he warned. For me, anything was better than living with disbelievers. My parents finally agreed, since I could come home on weekends and the nuns might be able to give me the discipline they felt I sorely needed.

They had done the best they could. Their way of dealing with Selene and me was always constant. They made us responsible for ourselves from a very early age. I don't think they invented their childbearing system–Marxism had made it part of their character. Marx is the epitome of the responsible individual. He faced the challenge of the wild colt of capitalism and, to this day, his economic theory is the only force that has been able to even partly tame it. The concept that we the majority, have to become conscious and take responsibility for ourselves, refusing to endure the imperialism and materialism that has subjugated us throughout history. Once my parents became linked to this sense of responsibility, they could not help but pass it on to their offspring. If there was going to be a change in the world, it would be up to them and their generation and then us and our generation. This certainty was reflected in the way they educated us.

I would drive my parents nuts with that incessant way children have of inquiring about everything. "Daddy, what is that?" "Mommy, why is this?" "And when?" "And how?" It is only natural, of course. Everything is new to a child, but sometimes the poor parents are hard pressed to give clear explanations of how everything in the universe works. Your grandfather would always pull out the encyclopedia to explain things to me. Until I learned to read when I was five, that is, an accomplishment that met with many accolades from my parents. My great-great-grandmother on my mothers side taught me. She was the best teacher in the world (as a whole town in the department of Huila will attest) and I was lucky enough to have her for my first tutor.

But once I could read, my father refused to answer any of my questions. "From now on you can answer your own questions," He told me as he explained how to use the encyclopedia. My tendency was still to run to him every time I wanted to know something, but he would just stare at me with a look that said, "You know what to do." So I always ended up doing what I had hoped to avoid: look in the book. I didn't like consulting the book because it was so heavy for me to lift off the shelf.

As far as the grating whining of little children went, my father had little patience. Every time he heard crying, he would take a pencil and mark the calendar. Those lines on the calendar embarrassed me terribly. So much so that it became a conditioned reflex to try to stop crying before he reached the calendar. He wouldn't even ask me what was wrong. Mom would.

"What happened?"

"I fell. That rock tripped me!"

"No Ariadne, the rock didn't trip you. You just didn't pay attention to the fact that the rock was there. Pay attention to where you are going so you wont fall again."

I also remember coming home from school very proud of my high grades and having the hardest time getting either one of my parents to sign my report card. They would tell me that they were not interested in my grades, explaining they were no ones business but my own. I never got rewards for good grades like some of my schoolmates did. Your grandparents believed that good and bad grades were their own reward or punishment. I realize now what an important lesson this was. An individual needs to measure himself and it is better if the barometer is an internal one. Becoming fixated on external yardsticks does not allow one to succeed if ones ideas are not rewarded by society. In that way, most of histories greatest accomplishments would never have been possible. We would still believe the universe revolves around a flat Earth. That is why I followed this example in raising you.

In addition to his leftist sympathies, your grandfather had a great love for Greek culture. That is where my name comes from. Do you remember the legend of Theseus? Dad named me after Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos of Crete. It was an appropriate choice since my life's search for the Truth that could destroy the lies we all live by, mirrors the maze she had to conquer.

According to the legend, Poseidon, the god who ruled the sea, had given the king a bull to sacrifice to him. But, because of its extraordinary beauty, Minos decided to keep the bull for himself instead. As punishment, Poseidon made the queen, Pasiphae, fall in love with the beast and she bore the Minotaur, a monster that was half man and half bull. Minos had Daedalus, the courts architect and inventor, build a labyrinth in which to hide the monster. Using the fact that his son had died in Athens and that city's fear of him, Minos forced the Athenians to send a tribute of seven young men and seven young women every year, to be lost in the labyrinth for the Minotaur to eat. For 18 years, Aegeus, the king of Athens, complied. Then his son Theseus volunteered to take the place of one of the young men, enter the labyrinth and kill the Minotaur. Upon his arrival, Ariadne fell in love with him and asked her father to spare him. But Minos turned a deaf ear to his daughter. She turned to Daedalus, who fabricated a magic thread for her. She gave it to Theseus, instructing him to enter the labyrinth at night and unwind the thread along the way. Once he killed the Minotaur, who in his sleep would be easy prey, he could follow the thread out of the labyrinth.

When the Minotaur had been defeated, Theseus and Ariadne ran away together. After many trials and tribulations they escaped, but once at high sea, Theseus dreamed that Dionysus, the god of wine and revelry, wanted Ariadne for himself. Since he couldn't compete with a god, Theseus left her sleeping on an island and continued on to Athens. In the midst of such struggles, Theseus forgot to take down the black banner of mourning with which they had set sail towards Crete. Convinced his son had died, the king threw himself in the sea and drowned. The Athenians named the waters that had taken their beloved king the Aegean Sea, in his honor.

Theseus inherited his fathers throne while Minos, convinced Daedalus betrayed him, sent him and his son Icarus to prison. Not being able to stand being locked up, Daedalus created wings out of wax and they flew to freedom. But Icarus, being young and inexperienced, could not resist the temptation to fly higher towards the sun. When his wings melted, he fell to the sea and drowned.

On the weekends, when I was home from school, I remember laying awake at night listening to dads nightly discussions with friends about Prometheus, Pandora, Dionysus, Hermes, Theseus decapitating Gorgon, the Cyclopes, Narcissus and all the other inhabitants of Earth and Olympus. My father had a predilection for the myth of Theseus and that of Prometheus.

The seeds planted in my subconscious by Ariadne's myth would later grow into an understanding that, like Ariadne's thread, would help unravel the realization that I was here to consciously live the adventure of self-discovery. Eventually, it would also allow me to see the Minotaur as our false vision of life being rooted in the animal instinct, the inhumane in us ruling over the human, animal over man. This false vision (the Minotaur) could only be defeated in our collective psyche through our ability to see the spiritual connection (the thread) that runs through all historical ideas and events. History has been the great adventure of self-discovery. We have all been the unconscious instruments of Spirit, but now we are awakening and becoming conscious instruments, collaborators of Spirit, by adopting truthful ideas for our intellect (Theseus) and, through them, purifying our emotions (Ariadne). Thus begins the labor of reversing our historical mode of operation by putting our animal instinct to serve the human in us, as symbolized by the Egyptian Sphinx.

Besides mythology, I used to love to listen to the political discussions they had. I would hear my parents friends insist that they become party members. To which my mother invariably answered, "I cannot belong to anything that would restrict my freedom to think. If I belonged to the party, Trotsky would have to disappear from my brain and my vocabulary and I wouldn't be able to view Stalin as the assassin he is. I am not willing to do so. There are too many things I disagree with. I would rather be a free sympathizer than a silenced member." And my father, whose sense of liberty was so ingrained he didn't feel the need to defend it, would simply say, "No thanks old man." They were teaching me to be an individual, even though none of us were aware of it at the time.

As far as school went, I had entered a place where believing in God was hard work. We had to get up at 5 A.M. and had half an hour to wash our face, brush our teeth and hair, and make the bed. Then we had to file down to the chapel to pray with the rosary for an hour. At 6:30 we ate breakfast and at 7:30 we studied for half an hour. At 8:00, when the non-boarders arrived, classes started. At noon we took showers with a chingue, a garment we had to wear while showering and could not take off until we were dressed because we could never be naked. We had to become acrobats in order to dry ourselves and get dressed while keeping this hospital-like robe on. A nun would often open the shower curtain to make sure we were complying with this rule. I remember the day Norma Restrepo, a red-haired girl with freckles, was found in "shameful circumstances," showering naked. After such an affront, which at thirteen-years of age could not have been more humiliating, she came out wrapped in a towel with the scissors she had been cutting her nails with, and chased the chief nun screaming, "I'll kill you, you miserable nun!" The chief nun, with her black habit and white cornet flowing behind her, ran down the hallways trying to escape from Norma who, determined to give the nun her just deserts, kept her on the run and hiding behind columns for at least fifteen minutes. The fiasco kept us in stitches for the next two weeks, while poor Norma was put in isolation, writing down the thousand and one reasons why she should never attack a nun.

By then, God had a different visage for me. He was no longer the rosy-cheeked babe who had aroused feelings of love and protection in me through my grandmothers stories. On the contrary, He was now a furious and vengeful God who had to be feared more than anyone or anything because He was "all-powerful." A God who was going to fry all of us young ladies (the nuns designation of choice for us) in the deepest pit of hell because of our lack of discipline, cursing, dirty minds and attraction to all the sins.

Atheism came to my rescue. Unable to reconcile these two faces of God, my mind decided Marx must have been right: Without a doubt, religion was the invention of primitive man out of a need to explain the world and defend himself from a hostile environment. Then, utilized by the dominant classes of all ages, religion had become an instrument of social oppression. New religions were later created by people trying to change the status quo, but these too had become an instrument of domination for the favored classes.

"The opium of the people." I repeated Marx's phrase to myself constantly during my years of communist infection. As far as I was concerned, God was the excuse used by men and women to wash their hands of all their evil actions. "It is God's will," the priests would tell their poor, barefoot, hungry and illiterate parishioners, "But yours is the kingdom of heaven if, with resignation, you accept your cross, following the example of Jesus Christ our Savior." I considered it an insult that at the end of mass on Sundays, the altar boy went around collecting alms from hungry families to build, rebuild or amplify the house of God. Is this God so obese that He needs all these churches? I would ask my religion teacher, "In truth He must be very big, because His houses don't even have room for a waif."

By the time I was fourteen, the nuns and teachers at school became the recipients of the same contempt my parents had earned for not believing in God. The only difference was in the mode of expression: sarcasm replaced sincerity. I became a part of my generation. The beautiful myth that had once given me peace of mind had been drained of all life.

My philosophy classes weren't any easier. Philosophy is the series of questions that a cultured individual asks himself in order to find the answers that lead to other questions, all of which eventually form a string which can lead him to destroy the beast sustained by the lies he carries within him. He can then find his way out of the labyrinth by following this same string. I certainly couldn't expect pearls of truth for this string from the nuns, who's mission it was to make us all into perfect catholic cut-outs. Consequently, philosophy class became a torture chamber for Sister Adelaida and me, since she would then take away my weekend privileges so I couldn't go home. But I just couldn't keep my mouth shut in the face of such outright lies.

Like the lesson on Masonry, which she started by saying, "Masonry was a sect created by the devil." I immediately piped up, "Sister Adelaida, you don't really expect us to say that do you?" She looked at me, her eyes spitting fire, but she didn't respond. Next class, when she promptly called on me to summarize our last lesson, I began, "In the 16th Century a group of men, thirsty for knowledge and tired of the limitations imposed by the church, united to foster scientific, political and religious tolerance..." but she didn't let me finish. Sister Adelaida (whose second name was De La Paz or "Of Peace," but who we had nicknamed De La Guerra or "Of War") kept hitting the bell she used to call her class to order so furiously that her enormous desk fell over with a thunderous crash.

Another instance I have burned into my memory, is the rainy afternoon they took us to Terron Colorado. The school prided itself on providing a great social service by taking its high school students to poor neighborhoods so we could teach the children there Catechism. In and of itself, the practice of teaching children, who's malnourishment was apparent, that "God is the all-mighty creator of Heaven and Earth," was abhorrent to me. How could one teach that and then try to explain their situation? Someone once said that the world is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel. Well, on this particular day it certainly became a tragedy to me.

Terron Colorado was a neighborhood in Cali that didn't have any electricity, running water or paved streets. Instead, it had houses made of cardboard and tin erected on a red soil that turned to clay in the rain, making it almost impossible to walk on. In that mud, sat coughing a little girl, no more than five years-old, with eyes so blood-shot you could hardly make out her pupils. Several of us ran to help her, but Sister Atanasio immediately stood in our way, screaming hysterically, "Can't you see she's got whooping cough? Do you want to get infected? What will we tell your parents if you get sick?" and herding us back to bus, not allowing anyone to help the little girl.

The more time I spent with the nuns, the more convinced I became of the scarcity of love there was in those who claimed to be religious. I hadn't had a chance to see the charitable work of some Sisters who dedicated themselves to caring for the sick and the prisoners, or the priests committed to alleviating the devastation of poverty. Without their example, the word religious took on the stony countenance of the teachers I had grown up with. My judgment became polarized in Marxism and, in doing so, I became victim to the same blindness that I criticized in those who for me represented blind faith. I guess I was too young to know that none of us is qualified to throw the first stone.

By the time I was 16 I had dedicated myself to defending Fidel to my schoolmates. I tried to convince them that Cuba was an example to be followed and that its revolution had undoubtedly been but the first link in a chain that would bind all of Latin America to communism. I told them sooner or later communism would triumph over the injustice of capitalism and no matter how hard the North-American boot tried to squash communism in the Caribbean island, they wouldn't be able to. The surprise invasion of the Bay of Pigs had been halted by children while reinforcements were awaited and I claimed this was the triumph of justice. "There is no future for the Gringos," I proclaimed, "We are witnessing the collapse of capitalism. All the empires have disappeared and the North-American one is on its death-throes." Such attempts at indoctrinating my schoolmates was more than the Mother Superior could take.

They needed an excuse to throw me out of school. I had never wanted to embroider and they had never made me. Not once had an embroidery of mine graced the walls of the auditorium where they exhibited the students works every year. "It is indispensable for every woman to know how to use a needle and thread," the nuns would lecture us. While I acknowledged that it was valuable for any human being to know how to make a hem or sew on a button, I was allergic to those filigrees, specially if I was the one who had to slave over the cloth. When final exams for my senior year neared, I was suddenly informed that I would not be able to take them. When I asked why, the Mother Superior told me it was because I had never done any embroidery. My fathers intervention saved the day. He requested that the Mother Superior provide, in writing, the official reason for denying me the right to take my final exams. Since embroidery was not a requirement for examination, the Board of Education allowed me to take the exams at another school they selected.

Remembering all of these experiences, I often wonder which of all the lessons I learned in my youth was the most conducive to my curiosity. That curiosity which thrives in the child, but usually dies in the adult as he begins to think he has found all the answers he needs. "Inside every man there is a poet who died young." This is one of the quotes you love to collect and send me. I am happy to have fostered the poet inside of you and to feel you vibrate with curiosity and love for that which is unknown to the eyes, but not the heart.

Perhaps what helped me not become a prisoner to the illusion of false knowledge was my father showing me the Milky Way in an Atlas of the universe when I was six. He told me that it had been so named because of its white brilliance amidst such darkness. He explained that every one of those lights was a sun, each the center of a solar system like ours. Ever since then I look to the skies with adoration and see how much there is we do not understand in such vastness.

Socrates never liked to be looking up though. According to him, there is nothing up there that cant be found down here. I agree with his premise that the only thing of importance is to search inside oneself. But I think to explore the interior skies of our minds, it helps to love those that serve as a dome for this magnificent cathedral. That night the skies told me we are tiny. Our world is just another ball among the hordes in the Milky Way. I took it for granted that the other planets were full of people as well.

All my memories from adolescence seem part of a borrowed life, however. My thinking was still an extension of my parents life, a continuation of their desire for change and transformation through Marxism. There was more I wanted to find, but I had no idea what it was. I still had not felt that Being, that culture that made my father so enthusiastic about everything he read. Erick Fromm wrote a beautiful essay on the subject in his book To Be or To Have. In it, he asserts that in the mode of Being, a person reads in order to be transformed. Reading in this way is cultured. For an individual to take advantage of culture he must be willing to let it change him, transform him from being inhuman to human. The point of view of an individual who is not in the mode of Being is acquisitive. For him culture is not for transformation but for acquisition. He reads in order to acquire data. This is exactly the opposite of my upbringing with my father, whose enthusiasm for discovering the meaning of life is as exuberant today as it was 40 years ago.

I remember it as vividly as I remember my mothers ample soul, despite her tiny body. It was fascinating to see how different my parents were, and yet how similar. He loved philosophy, she the arts. While his countenance was serious and imposing it did not make me nervous because he projected calm. Moms, on the other hand, was very cheerful, but made me anxious because she projected nervousness.

A few years before I came home, mom had started taking art classes. She had made a studio for herself and I loved to go in there on weekends and watch her work. Her abstract canvases full of color fascinated me, but what I loved were her collages with crabs and fish skeletons (Marine Collages as she called them). I was very proud of her imagination. I loved modern art. My parents had several art encyclopedias and I couldn't be more in agreement with this century's artists. They were consistent with my communism.

Even in architecture: function had become its basis. Structures were built for the people, the masses, not to house God or emperors and kings. I agreed wholeheartedly with Le Corbusier, the French architect and city planner, who said that the worst architecture was made when the architect was thinking of the past. Urbanization was the name of the game. What was important were the dwellings of our contemporaries. Where they would live, study, work and have fun. Here too I saw the need for communism. Architecture had to serve the masses and I had no doubt that beauty had to give way to function. Blocks of apartments could house thousands and that was the only factor that mattered.

"Break with the past!" That was the desire with which my soul cried out. That is why it vibrated with abstract and impressionist art: it reflected my own rebellion. I did not have enough power of analysis yet to deduce why what we call modern art had appeared or the reason for the explosion of isms throughout the past hundred years. It was enough for me to know that it meant breaking with the past, demolishing a world on the verge of collapse.

I consider my time as a boarder with the nuns, as the first stage in my life. When I left the nuns, I felt a great sense of freedom. I had decided to study art, a decision clearly influenced by my mother. Not that she ever pushed me to it, just that her restlessness had infected me as well. One of Dads friends, upon learning of my choice, asked if I was ready for the path of sacrifice that life as an artist held for me. I couldn't understand what he meant. "Doing what one wants is hardly a sacrifice," I said. To which he smilingly replied, "Well discuss it again in a few years."

My parents did understand all too well what he meant, but they both agreed that I should do as I desired. This was one of the few things they agreed on by then. Their relationship had deteriorated because dad, despite his love of philosophy, was an incorrigible womanizer. His Paleolithic impulses in that area were much stronger than his humanistic ideals.

She had finally decided to make a life for herself in which she would not have to suffer the humiliation of my fathers infidelity. She separated herself from him as if he didn't exist even while living in the same house. I suffered terribly with the palpable coldness that permeated the house, but I found it hard to accept that I was suffering. My communist rationale compared my life with that of the aberrant poverty of 80 percent of my country's population and I felt ungrateful. Yet the coldness was inescapable and it came from mom. She used it as a weapon against my father who had fallen in love again and had a baby on the way with this other woman.

Mainly at my urging, Selene, mom and I left for Bogota. Mom was following in the footsteps of her own mother and for the same reasons. you've already heard about your great-grandmothers marriage at the age of thirteen, like most of the women of her generation. In nine years she had borne seven children, while your great-grandfather courted every woman within his reach. One day in 1938, Grandma got tired of her role as the jealous, relegated wife. She packed-up her kids and moved to Bogota. No easy feat considering she was leaving Huila, one of the most feudal states in Colombia. Her aunts lived in the capital, but she had to sustain her seven children by making felt baby booties.

Yet each generation offers an expansion of consciousness. For Grandma, hating the husband she left and his family was simply a law of nature. No one in her family could speak to them. But mom and dad parted as friends. Somehow, once she decided the relationship was over, mom could put the rest behind her, knowing that no matter what, he was her daughters father.

I still remember the day dad drove us to the airport to take the plane that would transport us, not just to the capital, but to a new life. Believe it or not, I cannot help smiling at the memory of his words to me: "Enjoy it now that you know it all because as you grow up you'll know less with every passing day." The same words I repeated to you every time you spoke with the same certainty I felt in those days.

I don't know how Grandma put up with my know-it-all airs. Only the great love she had for me could have overcome the repulsion my attitude must have induced. Every time I saw her, I delivered ex cathedra about Marxism and explained why her belief in God was a mere vestige of centuries of superstition which she, as an intelligent woman, should reject.

"Everything is matter," I informed her, "What people call Spirit is energy. Its as simple as that. We die and that's it: we decompose and become worm food."

I also insisted that she remove the Sacred Heart from her room, "It hurts my eyes to look at it Grandma," I would whine.

"So close them," she would answer with her usual dry humor.

"This is the country of the Sacred Heart. That's why nobody does anything to resolve our problems–we just leave them to Him. Besides, since we really believe in the proverb 'He who sins and prays is even,' we think we don't have to make any effort," I would lecture on, "The 'Wasn't Me Face' (as I took to calling that picture of Jesus because of his expression) will simply tell his father that it wasn't us either and well all be saved."

Despite all my posturing, I would often ask Grandma to pray for me when I had a test or something. "Pray to your energy my dear," she would reply.

My grandmother made the transition easy for me. I took to living in the capital with great joy because I could see her as often as I wanted. Selene, however, was only seven when we moved, so it was much harder on her.

In Bogota, I started college but, like school with the nuns, it was very disappointing, although not for the same reasons. I wanted to start showing off my artistic genius immediately, but my professors, with their fixation on technique, wouldn't let me dazzle them. Lineal perspective. Aerial perspective. Color technique. Human figure. Still life. There was no end to the tedium of practice, practice, practice. I made life hell for all my teachers with my constant nagging, "When are we going to create?" I wanted to smear canvasses with paint, to make Pollocks, Picassos, Klees.

"When you have the tools to do it," they would answer, "Can someone perform surgery before they study medicine?"

"But this isn't medicine, its art. Art is creativity or it wouldn't be art," I would try to convince them. Luckily for me, I never could. But they would tire of me and opt for letting me carry on without paying any attention to my litany.

Dozens of Bristol boards with monotonous exercises accumulated in my room by the end of each year. My color technique professor required us to leave no trace of the brush on the paper as we worked with the primary, secondary, tertiary, complementary and neutral colors, pigment degradations from light to dark, and monochrome. Sheets piled up full of points of convergence in cubes, cylinders, spheres and polygons, interiors and exteriors, shadows and lights, and horizons. Canvasses amassed with aerial perspective and fading drills. And, to have something to fall back on, all of us artistic geniuses were forced to learn decoration, architectural design and publicity.

My only escape was human figure class. The teacher was "the best," because he allowed us some liberties. Now I realize he was the only bad teacher I had. Yet, throughout all the meticulous practice, quitting never crossed my mind. I was going to be an artist and if I had to suffer some years of inane exercises to do so, I would.

For all my conviction and certainty, however, I had no idea I had chosen a profession that was teaching me philosophy. Nothing was further from my mind as I did one tedious exercise after another than that they might relate to universal truths. But later I would come to realize that the whole time my psyche was being fed geometry, perspective, color, light and shadow as well, it was connecting them with the universal symbolism of the subconscious.

At 17, I felt like a mature woman. I still had not started to know less. On the contrary, from know-it-all I had become know-it-absolutely-all. I began to sell the Golconda newspaper, the paper of the beloved and martyred Camilo Torres movement, a priest who had renounced the Catholic "lies" for the Marxist "truth" out of his love for the poor. The Pope excommunicated him and the government killed him. For me, it was a terrible blow. It was then that I began to think of going to the hills to fight as he had against the "forces of evil." But the beast of violence and vengeance was only able to put its mark on my mind for a short time and it never translated into action. No liberation can be found through death and destruction. Good can be borne only out of Love.

Julian arrived from Brazil around that time, having graduated as an architect. Since he was a distant relative (third cousin), I chose him as the brother I never had. I called him "little cousin" and tried in every way possible to convert him to communism. I didn't realize I had chosen to convert one of the mamma boys that always gave me ulcers. Coming from Huila and having been born and raised in the country, he didn't put on bourgeois airs, which I liked. His rejection the city and its customs sounded anti-bourgeois to me and I identified with him at that level. He smilingly listened to my long-winded speech, accompanied me everywhere, helped me with my design models. He was also willing to take me to eat at my favorite cafeteria, one of the first North American fast food restaurants in the country, where I discovered chili with meat and apple pie. After I had polished off two servings of chili and two desserts, he would tell me, "You are full now. You are the only person I know who has to be told when she is full."

We became inseparable. I was in love with an Italian violinist from the symphonic at the time. I had met him by accident. He had been merely polite, but I put him in my teenage heart as the best man who ever lived because he played the violin. Music seemed to me the most inaccessible of all the arts to ordinary people. I couldn't begin to understand how someone could compose a symphony. Painting is visual, it was tangible, but music is completely abstract. My violinist was not a composer, yet I saw him as a semi-God. Going to his concerts and sighing from the balcony had become my weekly ritual and once in a while he even invited me himself (perhaps he enjoyed such blind admiration).

I sometimes dragged Julian to the concerts with me. that's when he would get angry and start criticizing me. "Why did you cut your hair so short?" he asked me one day.

"My hair is curly but the style is straight. I had no alternative," I explained.

"I thought you would give me a less vain explanation. I was sure you would say long hair bothers you or something."

"Why would I say that?" I asked.

"Just look at your shoes," he retorted.

I could only smile as I followed his eyes to my big toe hanging out a hole in my sneakers. Sneakers weren't even used back then, specially in Colombia where girls went to college convinced they were walking down a fashion show runway. Part of my moms plan to make me see my worth in myself and not in what I owned was to give me only three skirts, three blouses and one pair of sneakers for the whole year. By the end of the year, after walking all over town selling the newspaper, my big toe was invariably hanging out. I didn't know what her motives were, but I didn't mind because after having worn a uniform most of my life, having three outfits to choose from seemed like opulence. I even enjoyed it when my big toe hung out and almost regretted getting new shoes the following year. I loved to create a scandal. For that same reason, I loved wearing jeans on the weekends–they weren't very well accepted on young ladies unless you were going to the country.

I think this desire to create a scandal in order to break societal traditions that seemed stupid to me, helped lessen the blow of my parents separation. Nevertheless, I must have had great resentment for my fathers new wife because I refused to visit him, as he had suggested, during my vacations. Because of my attitude, he maintained two houses, one for "them" and one for me and Selene when we went to visit him. My resentment went so far that once, after finally having agreed to visit, I packed my bags and stormed out to a hotel when he got ill and "she" came to see him at "our" house. Of course, I later called him to pay the bill. The things a parent will put up with–he didn't say a word about it, but I at least had the decency to feel ashamed of myself.

I don't know how Leticia put up with my disrespect for so long without saying anything or forcing my father to live in the same house with her. In the end, I was probably no the only one responsible for that, however. My father lost a lot of friends because he legitimized his affair. Even his social club membership was revoked. Our entire family was called "immoral" because we stayed a family: We saw each other on vacations, we talked on the phone and my father visited us in Bogota whenever he could. That was my first experience with what people will do in the name of defending tradition and I myself fell into the trap.

Julian followed me to Cali when I went to visit dad once. It didn't seem strange to me. After all, he was my best friend. But soon after that he became my worst husband (sorry). It had never occurred to me to fall in love with him, but the beautiful valley, with its romanticism, its brilliance, its clear skies, its green landscapes and warm breezes, put a spell on me. One day, we found ourselves kissing. A month later we were in front of the priest exchanging rings.

The union didn't even start well. His family didn't want to go to his wedding with the "communist" and mom tried to convince me not to marry him. "Ariadne, do you know how long this marriage will last? No more than a year. Julian is completely wrong for you. He only wants the good life. A woman has to admire the man she loves. Do you admire him? Besides you're too young."

"For Gods sake mother, I am nineteen."

"Where is the Ariadne who claimed she wasn't going to get married until she was fifty, when she would put an ad in the paper that said: 'Woman at the end of her life looking for a man with whom to share her old age?' Where is that rational girl who said she would wait until she graduated and was set in her career? If you insist you love him then at least just live with him (a very bold proposal from a mother in a 1960s South American Catholic country). Why do you have to get married? Don't you claim to hate everything bourgeois? There is nothing more bourgeois than marriage!"

Notwithstanding such unimpeachable logic, that rational girl, very irrationally got married the day of the graduation. I did, however, refuse to wear the white gown she bought me after she gave up trying to reason with me. I also wouldn't allow Julian to wear the tuxedo he showed up in. I forced him to change into jeans and a sport-jacket and I wore one of my outfits for school–big toe and all. The wedding–which only two friends of Julian, dad, mom and Selene attended–lasted only half an hour.

As you know, your grandparents on your fathers side, had ranches in Huila. They wanted Julian to build a hotel and a house for them in the nearby town of Pitalito. I didn't want to go to the ends of the Earth to a state in which I thought no civilization yet existed. But that's where I ended up, living with Julian in a small apartment off an allowance from his mother. He claimed we couldn't afford the excessive cost of my painting materials, so I contented myself making collages and starting a show on the radio acting out children's stories.

I soon learned that I had married a confirmed bachelor like my father so I began to look at our relationship with clearer eyes. Even though we had thought our love was sincere, it was really just a projection of our egos. He had sought to conquer the only girl who didn't die for him. And I, who detested all the feminine accouterments, wanted to prove I could get a coveted bachelor without them. After six months he still claimed to die for me, but he apparently died for everyone else. Marriage didn't seem to inhibit him from visiting whore houses and flirting with any woman who attracted his attention. He also insisted that I stop doing my radio show and adamantly opposed my becoming an artist.

After one failed attempt at separation came the final blow. I was five months pregnant with you when he infected me with gonorrhea, which he had gotten in a whore house. The fact that he put you at risk with his irresponsible infidelity was what finally ended it for me. I moved back to Bogota.

I may not have enjoyed my life in Huila while I was living, but I do enjoy it in retrospect, maybe because it seems like a movie production in my memory. I still felt I was living someone else's life. Ironically, I remember the beauty of Huila as a great place to be happy: I went horseback riding on the beautiful prairies and I swam in the enormous lake La Gaitana in which, according to legend, the Indian princess it had been named after threw all of her tribes gold so that the Spaniards couldn't steal it.

Being pregnant is what finally began to make me feel I was alive, that the play had ended and I would no longer be on a stage but in real life. Something very profound was being conceived and it wasn't just you. Maybe subconsciously I was afraid to bring this life into the world without first knowing what it meant to be a mother.

In Bogota, I worked as a freelance graphic artist. Soon I got a commission to do 24 original posters for a bankers convention. I thought it was a blessing since I needed the money to get some of your future necessities. The bank manager, who had given me the commission, picked up the posters and then wouldn't pay me. Finally, after several months of unreturned calls and surprise visits to his office, he paid me so "I would stop badgering him." For the first time, I experienced the exploitative tendencies of the human heart first hand. Through my communist studies I believed the rich steal from the poor and that the corporate mentality can make an employee into a thief even if he doesn't own the capital, but it was the first time I had fallen victim to it myself.

By the end of my eighth month of pregnancy I began to feel that difficulty of movement which all pregnant women experience every time they sit down, lie down or stand up. Luckily I had the support of mom and Selene, who was only thirteen. That is when the tight cord that unites me to my beautiful sister was forged. She was like a second mother to me: making sure I would want for nothing, that I ate properly and rested enough. Her excitement over the prospect of a baby was infectious. For me, the prospect of becoming a mother made me appreciate mothers. Not just my own, but all women in general as the incubators and gardeners of life.

Meanwhile, mom continued to paint. She decided to build a house in the country where she could make a big studio for herself. She and Selene began its construction in a small town an hour outside of Bogota called Silvania. They both loved the country, while I couldn't survive without cement.

Just before you were born, I got a letter from Julian sent from Sweden. His mother had advised him to travel in order to alleviate the pain of our separation. He wrote that he still loved me and asked if we could get back together when he returned. I answered that I was willing to give the marriage a second chance, but I didn't want anymore jealousy (ironically he was always jealous of all my male friends), infidelity, or his insistence that I stop trying to be an artist.

Julian arrived in Bogota eight days before you were born. Your dad and I decided to stay in my mothers apartment until I gave birth, which made cohabitation all the more difficult. When he got drunk and came home at five o'clock in the morning, we all had sour faces: mom, Candida (who for thirteen years–since Selene's birth–has taken care of us and our home), Selene and I. Julian defended himself by saying he was married only to me, but this reason had little effect on their solidarity with the pregnant little woman.

The day you were born, Julian went to the hospital with me at five o'clock in the morning. Two hours later the most beautiful little girl I had ever seen was born. The Lamaze class I had taken paid off: I gave birth without complications and a minimum of pain in only two hours.

"What an ugly baby," was Julian's comment when he saw you. In that moment I understood why I could never live with him–to Julian nothing was beautiful. He often made fun of me because he claimed that according to me everything merited superlatives. Nothing was less than divine, gorgeous, stunning, super-beautiful, grandiose, spectacular. "Its only a rock," he would exclaim, or "They're only wild flowers, there's no need for such a scandal." And, since he grew up on a ranch, he got annoyed when things like cows, snakes or insects (which in Huila were disproportionately large) scared me. He also disliked the fact that I didn't like to hunt, herd cattle or eat bulls balls. And he certainly resented my condemnation of the nepotism of feudalism and the illiteracy and misery of the peasants. However, what angered him most was my insistent desire to be an artist. "What do you want me to call you, Picasso?" he would rail.

You were born on the first of May in 1967, on the international day of labor, the day that celebrates the social triumphs of the worker. The only country which doesn't celebrate it is the United States, yet it was here that the First of May was born. On May 1, 1886 thousands of workers from Boston, Pittsburgh and Chicago had asked for "Eight hours of work, eight hours of rest, eight hours to do what we want," the American press was scared that the spirit of the Paris Common was loose in this country. Samuel Gompers considered it "a Second Declaration of Independence." Three years later the Second International in Paris declared May 1st as the day of all workers in the world. Many a time the international was sung around family fires in the United States and in Europe on that day. The day had been chosen, in memory of the ancient festival for the arrival of spring, as symbol of the step out of the winter of a class driven society to the spring of equality amongst men.

That day we were both born. For the first time I knew nothing. I felt empty, with nothing to teach you. Could I tell you the world was evil? I wouldn't want to, but I also couldn't tell you the world was good. I felt like an unconscious person who had to gain consciousness. On the verge of helplessness, an unfathomed love took hold of my heart. An overwhelming force radiated from my heart toward that little, defenseless life, giving me the strength to do what ever was necessary to protect it.

In order to continue the family tradition of using Greek names, I named you Alexiara. I chose it because of Alexiarus, the first prehistoric temple used for the mysteries of Kabiria in Greece. The Kabirian mysteries were based on the mythology of the divine Mother (Demeter) and her daughter (Persefona). In them, the woman is born already inducted, while the man needs to be initiated. Depicted as a water bird, sometimes as a stork, we see her in the vases of the mysteries of Kabiria, representing the winged femininity that gestates the new man. Like in other mysteries, the aspirant is ridiculed and he resists, but once he gives up his apparent loss is followed by resurrection. Mans destructive aggressiveness is transformed when the woman turns towards the depths of life and finds her Metaphysical Roots. Alexiar means he who destroys the god of war. The woman, receiving the power and purity from the son of the Divine Father, transforms man into a vessel of the true fountain of life. She is at the service of this fragile Divine fetus, depicted in the Kabirian vases as the fresh branch being defended by the water birds from the winged monsters, which represent misunderstood strength. The function of the mysteries of Kabiria, therefore, is to help man find his humanity. That is why I named you Alexiara.

1968 was very important in our lives: it was turbulent in the world and in my heart and, by extension, in yours. I think it was then, at 22-years-of-age, that my world consciousness awoke as the days passed listening to your cries for breakfast and a new diaper every morning. Anyone who heard you would say you were competing with the Ranchera singers of Mexico, who interspersed their songs with the melodramatic cry, "Aiiiii Ya Ya Yaiiiiii." Your cry imitated their unique style perfectly, which is why I called you "la rancherita del rancho grande" (the cowgirl of the big ranch, after a famous Mexican song). As soon as you heard me coming into your room saying, "Is La rancherita del rancho grande already up?" you would start giggling, knowing food was on its way.

While you learned to sit and then crawl, I continued to complain of the atrocities being committed around the world. I could take comfort, however, in the discontent of the worlds youth. Revolution was even possible in the United States, I thought, because the youth was up in arms. I felt like a part of the youth who burned their draft cards and invaded the recruitment offices. I identified with those who marched on the Pentagon throwing flowers on the soldiers rifles. Robert Kennedy infused me with hope, as John F. had before him. The Beatles and the concerts of electronic music gave new furor to my revolutionary spirit. "Long live our generation!" was the cry of a young Mexican during the revolts in Mexico City and my heart echoed it. Like the youth in China with Mao, I wanted to make a cultural revolution. Like Fidel and Che, I wanted to fight to the death for justice. Like Malcom X, I wanted to battle the hell created by racism. Like Ho Chi Minh I wanted to see my people liberated. From the universities of Peking, Prague, Barsovia, Paris, Berlin, Berkeley, New York, Chicago and Mexico, came the voices of a youth that was not willing to be confined by imposed believes. In this youth rested the worlds hope.

My dream of giving you a better world was coming true. We knew this planet was just one, small, fragile ball in space. That same year the proof came via Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders. The planet had been photographed from space: A blue jewel without borders.

But the dream had a rude awakening. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination was followed nine short weeks later by Robert Kennedy's. I couldn't believe it. Before the year ended, Mao had turned against the Red Guards, fearful that their cultural revolution would depose him as well. Castro and Hoshi-min applauded Russia's invasion of Czechoslovakia with which the world power suppressed the "anarchy of youth." The revolts in Paris had fortified de Gaulle. Nixon won the election in the United States. And, as if all this weren't enough, Pablo VI visited Colombia to attend the XXXIX International Eucharist Congress, producing the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of faithful, while the Beatles and Mia Farrow brought the Maharashi Mohesh Yogi to teach them to hear the vibrations of "I."

Did people change because governments changed or did governments change because people changed? The Soviet Union had shown me it was an imperialist power just as bad as the United States. If I didn't want either, where would I find a place for you and me? Ho Chi Minh had said that to chose between the two was as difficult as asking the fish to chose between being fried in oil or lard. Disoriented, I began to know less. My militant pro-Soviet stance to save the world had to be completely revised. I felt like the floor had dropped out beneath my feet.

Julian, on the other hand, left my life without much pain because you filled whatever hole he might have left. During the first two years of your life I didn't see him. He preferred to distance himself from us. So as the 70s began, I was 24 and you were two and a half and we lived in a small apartment with Candida, who had moved with us to help me care for you. Selene, who was 17 by then, became my only girl friend. We went everywhere together. She took your education much more seriously than I did because, having grown up with the nuns strict rules, I didn't want to impose as much discipline on you.

I wanted to paint, but didn't have much time to do so. I was working full-time in an advertising agency as a graphic artist (the second I had worked at). One day the agency's 70-year-old owner sent me a message with one of his executives. He said he would set up an apartment for me if I would live with him–behind his wife's back, of course.

So I joined a third agency. After a year there a male colleague, who had just started with the company, asked me how much I was making. I was naive enough to tell him. He marched into the managers office indignant that I, a mere woman, was making more than he was. To pacify him, the manager lowered my salary. Machismo was so rampant, that I didn't even recognize it as sexism. I just assumed that's the way men were. It never occurred to me they didn't have to be.

I don't mean to imply I wasn't angry. I was. So much so that I quit. Three strikes was enough for me. I took it as an a sign and an opportunity. I didn't want to end up a frustrated artist like all of the art directors I had worked for at the agencies. I asked mom if I could go live in her house in the country so I wouldn't have to pay rent. She, always ready to help us any way she could, readily agreed and, at age 24, I embarked on a new career as an artist.

Several friends lent me money and I moved to the house that mom and Selene had built with such love. At that time, the house didn't have as many cabins as it does now–your grandmother didn't stop building until she ran out of land. There was only the Big Cabin, as we've come to call it, and that is where you and I lived.

There, sleeping under the rough wood beams in the ceiling, surrounded by wild flowers and banana trees, listening to the little birds pecking at the windows, looking through the back window at the bubbling brook, I knew peace and introspection for the first time. It was in that house, isolated from society with only you for company, that I truly began to reflect.

I took you for a walk along the river every day. The sun sparkled over our heads without buildings to interfere with its radiance and the grass cushioned ever step without concrete to interrupt its green splendor. My heart opened to nature, learning to appreciate the rain, the night, the stars.

My studio was the cabin that we now call La Paz (Peace), although it wasn't as beautiful back then. It was little more than a cement shed, which afforded me the luxury of splattering paint without having to clean it up. I drew on an enormous wood table and two long stools served as my easel. The room was very airy and had two ceiling lights. I couldn't ask for anything more.

One night you and I were sitting on the steps outside the Big Cabin. You loved to hear me tell the stories of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Little Goldilocks the way I used to on my radio show: acting out all the characters with various caricature voices. You particularly loved the lazy drawl of Sleepy and the squirrels fast clipped chatter. I was just about to start the story, when you asked me what all those lights in the sky were. I wished I had an atlas to show you the wonder of the Milky Way as my father had shown me. Since I didn't, I made due with paper and pencil. I drew a little ball and explained to you that is the shape of the planet we live on, that some of those lights were spheres like ours and that others were much larger balls of fire. I told you how planets revolved around those fire balls, as the Earth does around the Sun. You kept staring up and after a while asked, "Why don't they fall?"

I started to tell you how planets revolve in space, but you were quick to clarify, "No, the people, how come they don't fall?" So I explained the law of gravity, which keeps us all attached to Earth. "Is that why the people who live up there don't fall either?" you wanted to know.

Your natural assumption that there were people out there reacquainted me with my first love: the infinite. I remembered dads joy when the Russians sent out the first Sputnik in 1957. When he first saw the headline he came running into the house screaming: "We did it! We did it!" He picked Selene and me up, kissing us and congratulating us. At eleven years of age, I thought he was blowing the news out of proportion, but dad was ecstatic that man had managed to conquer gravity and leave the Earth's atmosphere.

I started remembering that even as I got older, my radicalism overshadowed my childhood love of space. When Shepard and Grisson went to space in 1961, my only comment was to criticize the fact they had read from the Bible. When Glenn did the first orbit around the Earth in 1962, I complained that with so much to be done on Earth, it was a sin to be spending so many resources on space. And when Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin walked on the Moon, my fathers joy seemed out of place to me. "Thousands of innocent men, women and children are being assassinated in Vietnam. Resolving that conflict is more important than taking a step on a useless rock in space," I berated him.

But after all those years, you helped me share his enthusiasm for the first time. I suddenly exploded with joy over old and well-known news: Our species had entered the space age! I turned to you with wonder and pride and said, "Did you know that 15 years ago the first man, Yury Gagarin, went out towards those little lights?"

I began to seriously prepare for my first exhibition. During my years in college I had created only three paintings, none of which were in the abstract styles I professed to love so much. Still, I never stopped to ponder that contradiction. I thought my spirit was in league with the wave of modern art, but my first canvas was bright yellow and portrayed a girl with wide eyes staring at the spectator, holding a doll on her lap. It had nothing to do with the abstract expressionism that fascinated me.

My second also had a little girl with wide eyes looking out at the audience, but it was blue. Yellowblue. It would be years before I studied the symbolism of color, yet my subconscious seemed to already understand it. The third was of a black mother embracing a white son.

That was the first in a series of paintings of white and black children which I painted on weekends while working full-time in advertising. In these they were always sharing a toy, a book, a flower. They were all wide-eyed, staring at the audience. I was compelled to give a message of love between blacks and whites. Since racism was not as obvious in Colombia as it was in the United States, I assumed my compulsion was due to my following of the civil rights movement in that country. My impatience had grown with theirs. Spiritually, I added my voice to their marches and demonstrations, but somehow all my anger expressed itself on canvas as love between the races.

Now, with no steady income, I decided to work on an abstract series so I could begin to live off my work. Marta Traba had radically expanded the country's appreciation of fine arts. Originally from Argentina, she lived in Colombia for a fairly long time and left the flowering of modernism well cultivated. The public became accustomed to her televised discussions and had reached, if not an understanding, at least an acceptance of the variety of isms in the world. Thanks to her work, banks, companies and professionals began to buy art.

I thought an abstract exhibition would be a good idea economically. I could finish one fast, and then I would have the time and the resources to do what I really wanted. I was right. After an investment of only six months, I made enough to pay all my debts and go back to painting my blacks and whites.

That first of May, various friends came to help us celebrate your third birthday. After we sang happy birthday to you, we sat on the lawn to talk. One friend, Jose, had come with an older man of about 70 who I only saw that once and whose name I cant even remember, but who laid the first stone on the path of my life's search. Ever since then, as my beloved Dali used to say, "The only difference between a crazy person and me is that I am not crazy."

Enjoying the sun and the warm conversation, the discussion turned to politics and I began my usual lecture on Marxism. I should have called it parrotism. I was simply spouting borrowed beliefs which could never help my soul develop its own center. That day, however, marked the end of my borrowed belief system.

As the discussion continued, this older man got up and flatly stated that we were all wrong. "Communism and capitalism? That is not the problem. The world is not divided into two powers with apparently opposing beliefs. The world is divided into Jews and gentiles."

My brain must me on the fritz, I thought, What is this man talking about? But all I said was "Huh?" My surprise was shared by all present who sat stupefied and stared at him blankly.

I had never given the Jewish question any thought. I knew Hitler had killed millions of Jews, but I thought that was the result of one man's madness. In Colombia, a catholic country with a very small Jewish community, Judaism was never mentioned. The man had won himself an audience. All of those present (except for mom and one of her friends) had been born after the war.

"I don't understand what you mean," I finally said.

"The Jews have a plan to become the world's leaders," he asserted, "They are trying to destroy our culture, our principles and our religion. They created capitalism–the god of money–with which they destroyed the West European monarchies and aristocracy. And with communism, which was also invented by them–don't forget that Marx was a Jew–they destroyed the aristocracy of Eastern Europe. They have an innate hatred for any form of government that is not Jewish."

Everyone furiously attacked him for his words and Jose was obviously embarrassed by his friend. Mom asked him if he had ever read Marx's answer to Bruno Bauer on the Jewish question. "Marx didn't even consider himself Jewish," she reminded him, "because both his parents had converted to Christianity."

"Madam," he responded, "don't you know that a Jew never stops being a Jew? Marx is no exception."

In silence, I looked at him as if hypnotized. The others stopped paying attention to him, but he noticed my curiosity and suggested I read The International Jew by Henry Ford and the Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion.

The rest of the afternoon the topic was avoided and no one spoke with "the fascist," as mom disparagingly nicknamed him. Still, when everyone left I put you to bed and went to see mom, who had decided to stay the night. "Do you have that book you mentioned with the Marx's answer to Bruno Bauer?"

"Yes, do you want to read it? That man is crazy. Can you believe the lies he was spouting?"

"Id like to read it," I said. Curiosity had taken a hold of me. I didn't realize that it had been there under the surface for years. It may have been buried under my know-it-all attitude since my adolescence, but it had never died. Those big eyes I kept painting were my own desire for knowledge. Those black and white children represented my yearning to unite the polarities in my own consciousness. Even the abstract paintings I made, which were mandalas of energy converging in the center, were my subconscious need to achieve a harmonic convergence in the Center of my being. These images were coming from the Spirit via my psyche, but I was not yet aware of their significance.

Beyond the Homo Sapiens
© 1996 Mariu Suarez
Library of Congress
Washington, D.C.