SENTINELS OF AHUA

How is a mountain built?

A woman trying to break up the mountains, to understand them, is no longer a woman; she is a prayer appropriating her body on the land where the waters converge. It is read that Chihuahua could mean a place of water twice, for the Sacramento and the Chuviscar, then an idea comes to mind: mountains are organs of water. So if we set out to crumble a mountain stone by stone, we could understand why Chihuahua means a place of water, from the most essential of its symbolic structure.A mountain has no formulas; it's a voluntary act of the moment and of the reality that eludes us. If I extend my hand and close it, holding your body in the folds of my palm, a mountain is born. Is the mountain a feeling? Is the mountain the articulated gestures of Paulo? Is the mountain the echo of Pavel? What is a mountain? If we ask Cerro Grande, he'll tell us it's a body tied to a feeling, and I believe him. And in that knotting, it retains not only its weight of rock and earth, but also its memory of water, fire, and time. Then the cactus trees didn't hide; the only thing that remained intact were the sentinels, impeccable, as if waiting to rise and walk, or to break before me, to make me believe in the birth of the streams. This conversation between Pablos leads us to think of mountains as temples, as refuges, as places where the human meets the sacred. It's an attempt to dialogue with those knotted bodies, to listen to what they have to say to us in an invented language. Perhaps breaking apart a mountain isn't a way of breaking it, but of articulating ourselves. In every phoneme of this conversation, we find the echo of a ritual gesture. Mountains are mirrors that, when we look at them, reflect back to us the knot that we are, fragmented, waiting to understand ourselves. Trying to break apart a mountain is like seeking the threshold of the world's womb to be born from that cave on a Sunday morning with thirst wedged between our eyes and our chest.

María Silva

@yosoyelma