The forest trail

   snakes

   slyly up the

   mount.

Asking permission,

rightly,

for ever step.

I follow

   as I can,

   remembering

   little feet

on this path

running, waiting,

seeking my scent,

then pattering again.

The Ravens bear no foolishness,

   but their own, majestic flops.

                  Stones hum

                  moss pants

                  holly laughs

      mockingly

the slug

goes about

its business

whatever that

   may be.

The forest

dries

the fires burn

the people

smoke

it all all up

hopelessly.

Those men laugh

   and snort it

   up their nose

the

moss

the rock

the wind

the fire.

But who, who

will have

the last laugh?

She has

   pulled us

up

   from the pit

times

we cannot count  

   on the

   fingers of all our

   quick and our

dead.

When

we lie

in the dust

and needles,

when our turn comes,

even then

she weeps for us.

“Oh, oh my people

   that you would

   return to me.”

GREEN TAKEOVER — For Sylvia, Mary and Seamus

Blackberries call

from the green green hill

taunting,

rot,

regrow,

take over

the world like some dictator.

So many

poems

   about

blackberries.

I am so glad.

So the list grows

joy

sweet

sharp

free

unexpected

dark

  like blood

dangerous

rewarding

remembering

laying down

   the law.

The memory first

the threat follows

the twist

   comes

   down

   down

   down.

We fill our pails

   and our cheeks

our tongues

rejoice —

or reject.

One plucked too soon.

One honoured and preserved.

One wrapped in holy gauze

and dried for every generation

yet to come

   longing too

   to wander

free

and find

such

holy bounty

unattended.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: This was published by Reckoning Press, under a different title. Marcia has been living most recently in Buenaventura, where I met with her and her family last October. The community we visited, an internally-displaced group of almost 100 people, have been sheltering for four years in a building in Buenaventura. That building was destroyed in the earthquake. The people are currently living under tarps. Funds can be sent to Comundades CONPAZCAL. Message me if you are able to help. In the meantime, here is a long read, a background.

Marcia Mejia and her Indigenous community, the Eperara Nation, have lived from time out of mind on the banks of the Naya River in Colombia. Her settlement of Joaquincito sits right at the delta where the Naya reaches the Pacific Ocean and has been a major site of conflict during the Colombian civil war, The Eperara, together with 62 Afro-Descendant communities along the river, have defended their holy waterway and suffered terribly as narco-empires fight for control of this strategic waterway.

1.

Marcia stamps her flip-flop on the dirty floor.

“I can’t leave you, not with a whole two hours to go until the bus,” she says in a low voice.

“Go, go,” I say. “Go. I’ll be fine. Be careful on the street.”

We drop my bags on the sagging, tipping plastic seats in the terminal. We hug again. I brush back her straight black hair.

“You haven’t had supper,” she says.

“Nah.”

I’m trying not to cry. I’m old enough to be her mother, but I feel like her sister. She matters to me, and I am helpless, unable to do anything more to keep us close. She is so small, so invisible, so vulnerable. Steady, persistent, unstoppable, like a sturdy – but threatened – tree holding out her branches wide to protect her community: Joaquincito, of the Eperara Nation, on the mouth of the Naya River, in Valle de Cauca, on the southern Pacific Coast of Colombia.

The Eperara have lived on this river for time out of mind. But the enemies they face are monstrous, more dangerous perhaps than ever before: internal enemies and foreign beasts crouching at the door. Waiting. Who will move in? Who has more power? Bigger guns? Who can twist things around, play the game – cocaine, mining companies, massive hydro-electric dams – make a pile, shit on the people and the earth, piss in the river, and move on?

“Go,” I urge gently. “I’ve got food. Plaintain chips and lemonade made with panela. Besides, you guys have been feeding me too much for days. Plan de engorde – Emilie-fattening plan. I already didn’t fit into the canoe!” We both laugh.

“Okay, Emi,” she says. She turns and walks away. Her bright-orange wrap-skirt stands out glowing in the gloom. Somehow the bus station manages to be both fluorescent bright and deeply dingy at the same time. She’s gone. I take a deep breath. Alone at last. Time to think about where my heart has been and gone these past five days. I look around for my chips. Eat a few. I’m not that hungry. These have been days of fish and glorious starchy vegetables of different hues and sizes, and fruit I never knew existed.

Then, suddenly, the flash of orange is coming back! Marcia. Her face is crumpled.

“I can’t leave you here alone. So long ‘til the bus.”

“It’s good, really. Go. Go,” I say. All our plans went sideways, well, her plans. She and her brother, Plutarco, were supposed to have finished their business in the city by now. The government official had told them to meet in the park outside city hall at 2pm. That meant getting up at 5am in the community, waiting for the boat, waiting to catch the right tides, and then a three-hour choppy ride along the angry ocean into Buenaventura, the departmental capital, Colombia’s murder capital. But the official never showed up. We waited for hours, in the park, in a café, off to an Indigenous rights office, back to the park on the waterfront. I couldn’t wait with her any longer; I had to leave, my bus to Medellin was scheduled for 8pm. Marcia had walked me quickly through the darkening streets, her hand on my elbow.

“Okay, I’m leaving Emi,” says Marcia again, resigned. The orange in her beaded necklace, her orange skirt, her determined eyes set in her round face are all so dear to me. One final, final hug, and she’s gone, becoming a carrot-colored dot, disappearing into the darkness. Just as she leaves the evening rains call to the earth; the world outside erases and walls of water seem to form both up and down. I squeeze my eyes tight in prayer. Surround her with an impenetrable circle of protection. Make her invisible to the killers. Keep her safe. These are hard days for Colombian community leaders, especially for women and men from the Indigenous and Afro-descendant – Black – communities. More than 342 people have been killed in the past year-and-a-half, since the signing of the peace accords between the government and the guerrillas of the Rebel Armed Forces. Murder is still alive and well on the ground and around any corner.

I had met Marcia about three years earlier, at an international gathering in Brazil, Fe y Territorios, Faith and Territories. It was a busy, frantic conference, with hundreds of participants, but somehow Marcia connected with me, and she sought me out time and again. We sat and chatted.

“You have to come see me someday, in my community,” she said. I agreed, casually. I am the co-president of an international Christian human rights organization, but we are small and don’t have a lot of funds. I had no idea when I would ever make it to Colombia.

Marcia and I weren’t in touch regularly, but every once and a while, she would have access to the internet, and a note would pop up on my screen. Usually the same thing: How are you? When are you coming to see me? Hi, I would answer. Nice to hear from you. Not sure.

But then, three years later, I did end up in Colombia, at another international conference, this time in Medellin. Marcia was supposed to come to the meeting but problems on the river took over, and then the boat couldn’t get out. I had to admit, I didn’t actually know where Marcia lived. Somewhere on a river delta, somewhere in Colombia. I didn’t know how, exactly, to get to her.

Fortunately, I have friends.

La Comisión (the Inter-church Commission for Justice and Peace) makes the connections for me and sends me off on the night bus to Buenaventura. My companions will be Nidiria, a poet, and her friend Yamali, young leaders from the Women’s Committee of the Naya River Delta. They had both been at the conference with me, and they had also been shopping in the big city. Every day they showed up with one fabulous colorful outfit after another. And at the conference they were clear: they had the right, as women, as young people, as the descendants of enslaved Africans, to live full lives, safely, in their homes, in their communities. Travelling with them, I felt like a young adventurer, safe, yet just with a shake of dangerous.

The women shepherded me from the green sanctuary of the Mother Laura Convent on the outskirts of Medellin, through the long thin windy road down to the coast, through the sketchy, rough streets of Buenaventura to the safe house of the local Comisión leaders: Enrique and Maru -- Maria Eugenia. The Comisión being on the frontline of energetic insistence on human rights for all, especially for Indigenous and Afro-descendant community leaders, has been a particular target for violence. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights, of the Organization of American States, has ordered the Colombian state to provide for the safety of Comisión leaders. So, there is an armoured car in front of the anonymous looking house, and a guard, presumably with a gun.

We arrive to a household waking up. Maru is making eggs, tossing her mop of curls as she stirs vigorously. She turns around to laugh hello and – snap -- turns back to flip the arepas, fried cornmeal triangles. Enrique pours coffee. And surprise! There are three human rights leaders here from the Washington Office on Latin America: Adam, Gimena and Alex. They are going up-river this very morning, all the way to Las Conchas. We can all go together, they say. I have no idea where Las Conchas is, but it’s somewhere on Marcia’s river, so – let’s go!

The dock reeks, a filthy place. Things have died here, and just been left to rot. An old wooden boat sits submerged in the water, up to its deck. Alongside it, men load two fiberglass boats which look sturdy enough. A group awaits, and then we’re on board. The boats sag full, four of us gringos, and the Comision folks, my friends Nidiria and Yamali, going home. Most in the boat are community members returning up the river, including baby Kaila and her mom, from Las Conchas. Kaila had been sick, and they brought her out to see a doctor. Now she sleeps right snug beside me, in her mother’s arms, covered in a pink fuzzy sweater for the wind, and the spray that will come. We slip on life jackets. Soon we put-put into the harbour. We slide past small shacks, built up perilously over the river. Girls scrub clothes in the oily water, and glance up to see us, just with the corner of an eye. We glide through the green and brown water and then into a mangrove swamp.

Now the boats move fast. They flit across the narrow water, choosing first the left branch, then the right from an impossible puzzle of choices. It’s like they’re playing tag, and the boatsmen slip their caps over backwards and shout to each other with joy. The drone hums so steady that I am almost asleep, head nodding down, until suddenly it’s open ocean. Blue, white and grey. The silver curve of an ancient coin, across which are days and days of sea, until there are at last some distant, wistful islands or another. The sunlight is deceptively thin, but strong enough in half an hour to burn Alex to a crisp. I had remembered on time, and before we left had slipped on a light, long sleeve shirt, underneath my life jacket, despite the coastal heat. Jarring, nudging, roaring and soothing, the boatsmen know how to ride through the swells. Then at last we turn into the mangroves again. Nidiria calls loud and happy from the front, “Emi, this is the Naya!”

The Naya is a short river, only 120 kilometres long. It begins its life in the foothills of the soaring Andes and snake-winds its way down and across the jungle lowlands becoming a fat and brown river at its mouth, thick with spindly mangroves, where it finally meets the Pacific Ocean. Indigenous peoples have lived along the rich banks of the Naya since before memory can tell. But life was to change drastically when in 1526, Spaniards arrived in the area, a little more than three decades after the first hairy unwashed conquistadores landed on the islands of the Caribbean, claiming them for King and Queen and Pope.

Sebastian de Belalcazar, a former Castilian donkey thief, came to Colombia, and set out to pillage the hot lowlands of the Pacific littoral, founding the city of Cali, all the while slaughtering Indigenous people and fighting internecine battles with his fellow invaders. In the mountains beyond, rumours ran wild about the rivers of gold, and the fabled cities paved with the shiny stuff. The Pizarro brothers had actually found stacks of treasure and went promptly to work destroying the great Inca Empire. Balalcazar, though, would find no such treasure. It is reported that he was a particularly vicious man, even called to account by the Spanish authorities for slaughtering all the women and children of a particular village, while the men had gone into hiding.

Belalcazar – there’s a statue of him in the central park of Cali -- died in 155, while awaiting extradition to Spain, where he was to be tried for the murder of a fellow Spaniard. There were no pots of gold to be had in the lowlands among the fishers and the gatherers, so the Europeans set about creating sugar plantations. With the Indigenous communities all but extinguished, the Spaniards brought in boatloads of Africans to slave in the fields. Beginning in 1518, when the the slave trade began, an estimated 1.1 million Africans were brough through the hideous slave trade capital: Cartagena de Indias, on the Colombian Caribbean coast. Slavery was abolished in Colombia in 1852. Today, along the Naya river, there are 64 Afro-Columbian communities, while there are two Indigenous peoples reserves, the up-river and the down-river Eperara people.

We buzz along the lower reaches of the river and after about half an hour pull up to a collection of wooden houses built on stilts. We land at a shaky ladder leading up to a big house. It is the Casa Grande, the sacred gathering space, the meeting house, of Joaquincito, the home of the down-river Eperara people.

There she is! Marcia is waving madly and coming down the ladder. Everyone from the village is in the Big House, waiting to meet me. Enrique and Maru are talking with Marcia, explaining that we’re not staying, that I’m not staying, but that they’ll drop me off the next day. “Do you want to come?” they ask her. “We’re going to Las Conchas. You should come, but hurry and get your stuff.

Marcia disappears, and then is back with a little pink backpack and a little girl, maybe about nine-years old. They jump in the back. We beam with joy at one another. We did it! We’re together at last. There is no time to say anything, and we’re off. Up the river, buzz, buzz.

The green walls of the jungle close in around us hiding who knows what. The trees seem endless, eternal. Looks like here the jungle won. But then we zip around a corner and there’s a big town: Puerto Merizalde, named after its founding bishop, who dreamed of building a city in the jungle. We move along the wooden houses stacked right over the river until – There He is!  All of a sudden, standing high on top of a massive cathedral in the town that never became a city right on the dome reaching out to his people: a giant, giant, scary white Jesus hands extended in blessing. Good Heavens! We float along under his outstretched arms.

On the other side of town, we dock and climb out onto a soggy wooden platform. We’re stopping for lunch. At last Marcia and I hug each other. I meet Yasmin, her daughter, and we head up arm and arm to a table to my first fish of the Rio Naya. We eat with joy, and we catch up. Things are not well at all, on the river, in the country. Peace accords have meant nothing here at all. I listen, shake my head. Four community leaders dead in the last few months. Everything is a great unknown. Solemnly we board the boats again to travel to the next stop upstream.

2.

We’re heading further inland. Our next stop will be at the Humanitarian Zone of San Francisco, where we will exchange our ocean-going boat, for a river boat, that will make it easier to journey farther into the shallow river through the ever-thickening verdant jungle.

The region around the Naya river has a particularly troubled history, explains Enrique from the Comisión, with input from the WOLA experts, Adam and Gimena. In the past thirty years or so the Naya’s relatively short length from the thick coca-leaf sites up in the highlands, along the back and forth of the main branches of the river, to the lonely and unguarded Pacific coast has become a key route for the moving of drugs and arms. Everyone was in the business, making big bucks: the Colombian military (the largest in Latin America), the shady para-military bands (which have direct links to the official military, but operate with impunity). These latter are responsible for the greatest number of the human rights abuses. And last of all, but thick in the game, are Colombia’s two guerrilla organizations: the Rebel Armed Forces (FARC) and the much smaller yet still fierce National Liberation Army (ELN). Everyone wants a piece of this rich pie.

During Holy Week, 2001, one of the worst massacres of Colombia’s more than 50-year-long civil war occurred along the Naya river. Between April 11th and 12th, paramilitaries from the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia brutally murdered and mutilated an estimated 70 people up and down the Naya. Thousands more fled into hiding along tributary rivers, and to Puerto Merizalde and all the way down the river, and along the ocean and into the city of Buenaventura. After a number of years of displacement, communities started to return and to rebuild. An important tool for peace-making was granted to them when the Inter-American Court on Human Rights ordered precautionary measures for the communities, and a number of “humanitarian zones” were declared. These were to be areas exclusively for civilians, and they were to be entirely free from weapons of any kind, from every group in the on-going war. The communities would patrol themselves, and the Naya Community Council would oversee the civilian network.

We arrive at the San Francisco Humanitarian zone. I’m feeling a bit queasy, maybe the food, the sun, or the sway of the boat. I breathe deeply. We all pile out onto the shore. Good thing Maru told us to wear our flip flops. Disembarking is straight into the water, and the river bed is muddy and rocky. We are met by community leaders at the river’s edge, and we walk into the village to speak with the others. The village is crumbly and worn, but close and functional. We stop at one place and another. Everyone knows Enrique and Maru, and there’s some laughing and teasing. At one place we are given a shot glass to share. The WOLA people hand it around family, and I take a wee sip. Holy Beasts! There is a coal of fire in my mouth, in my thoat, in my esophagus, in my gut. Oh, I remember this. Isabelino, an Afro-Colombian leader who I me in Brazil had some and shared it around. It is a sacred drink, made with herbs, but also with a high alcohol content. My stomach-ache eases. That’s good news!

Just when I’m feeling warm and soft, suddenly out of no where, there is a helicopter close overhead. IT seems to be landing somewhere on the other side of the village. It is an army helicopter. We go down closer to observe. Then we see them, soldier after soldier, each shouldering a bundle comes down from behind a hill, turns left and disappears. We watch them warily from a distance, then go down to the next street. The leaders tell us what is going on. The soldiers have set up camp, right on the edge of the village, right on the border, on a jutting bit of land sticking into the curve of the river.

Adam, who carries himself with calm and confidence, consults with the villagers. Then leaving them behind, we gringos move forward to check in with the military camp. An infantry specialist comes out to see us, a little surprised. Adam and Gimena converse with him, while Alex and I fall back. They are not supposed to be here, while we have every right. We are invited guests and, of course, we are unarmed. Quietly I take out my phone and snap a few shots. There are heaps and heaps of provisions, what looks like sacks of sugar or rice. Everyone is polite, if tense.

I am getting the story in pieces. Officially, it seems, the military are here to search for evidence concerning the four community leaders – three brothers and a cousin – who were kidnapped, disappeared and in the end murdered in April and May. Adam raises his eyebrows. Of course, there is a lot mor that is not being said. Reaching even a basic understanding of what is unfolding requires many years of experience and information, and a canny ability to read into the silent murky places. Who has the most to lose here? How is the game played? The victims, it seems obvious, are the weakest ones, with the least access to power of any kind.

Later, I get a few more pieces of the puzzle. Valle de Cauca, a distant, forgotten corner of Colombia, was a central battleground and hiding place for the fighters in the civil war. It was mostly controlled by the FARC guerrillas. After the peace accords went into effect, the FARC complied and disbanded, moving into controlled de-escalation communities. An imperfect, fractious solution, but at least a step towards reconciliation. But the disbanding along the Naya has left a vacuum of power, and of course the movement of drugs continues. There is a lot of money involved, a lot of money to be made. Adam says that he has heard that ordinary soldiers request to be sent to this region. This is the place to make money. That may be the real reason the army is here. And behind the army, the para-military waits.

Finally, we move back to the boat, the new boat able to go further up the river. I am sitting beside Marcia’s daughter, Yasmin, in the front row, the bumpiest place. The green jungle walls climb higher and higher on either side of us, as the river gets both shallower and narrower. A couple of lime-green iguanas skuttle into the brush. There’s no more sun to burn us -- it’s rumbling and cloudy up in the darkening heavens. There are occasional single wooden houses, on stilts, and every once in a while, another Humanitarian Zone, with its big vinyl sign declaring it to be a weapons-free area, exclusively for civilian use. There are children running along the shore, men, and sometimes women, in impossibly skinny dug-out canoes, standing or sitting, and women, and sometimes men, leaning on the window frames of the wooden houses. Everyone waves, on the water, and on the land.

The boat sways and swoops. On one riverbend intersection we come across, incredibly, my friend Isabelino, who had given me a sip of the sacred drink when we were in Brazil. We wave, and laugh, and then our boats take off like horses to a gallop in opposite directions. The boat drones. I’m not sure we’ll ever get there. Baby Kaila has been with us, and all that time, in five hours, I haven’t heard her cry once. We haven’t seen houses for a while, when on one swoop we hear a sickening scrape, and thud. Then the engine dies. Our boat turns lazily in the current and starts floating aimlessly downstream. Where will we stop? What happened? Sometimes its better not to ask anything and just encomendarse (hand yourself over) to God.

Our able boatman manages to get us into one quiet lull on the river’s edge and then another, going backwards, we come to a wooden house high on the riverbank. He calls up. A gruff answer comes down. Then a man appears high above us with a rifle of some sort. It looks like he won’t help. Are we going to have to float down further? Then suddenly, it seems, peace has been made and we are receiving some help. A white wire appears, and something fancy is going on with the raised motor. We all cheer (mostly quietly, with our fingers crossed) as the engine put puts. And tentatively, we’re off again.

The going is tenuous, with the driver occasionally killing the motor. What has happened is that we are too heavy, and the river is too shallow. Once or twice we get out of the boat and walk along a sandbar. At one point, Alex, who’s a big man, falls into the river, while exiting the boat. What a star-studded super guy he was! Not one complaint, just a jolly resignation at riding the rest of the way in wet jeans.

It is officially pouring now too. Tarps appear from the boat’s storage, and we wrap them around ourselves. I tuck the end in around Yasmin. She’s shivering. I take of my sunscreen tacky embroidered white shirt and wrap it around her, and then the tarp, and then my arm holding it all in place. And then it happens: I love her. This little Eperara girl, who has the bravest mother on earth. Marcia, who has traveled to Spain and to the States, who has seen and touched and laughed at snow, who has macheted her way through every obstacle placed before her, a rural Colombian Indigenous woman with NO rights. Her sheer will is making it happen. Last year, in a short post on Facebook, Marcia announced that she no longer had a partner. So, there you go, Marcia, superwoman, single mother, protector of her people, especially the women, who knows her rights. I hold Yasmin closer.

Enrique drapes himself off the bow of the boat, holding tight to an oar, and measuring for depth every other bend in the river, or so. For a long time, Las Conchas is 15 minutes away, just around the next corner, until at last, half of us are dumped onto a sandbar, while the boat makes its final push to the community. Then it goes back for the other group. We are here. It is dark, and the rain is tropical torrential. We were supposed to be here at noon, and now its seven in the evening. In all it was almost a nine-hour boat trip.

We shake our feathers out in a dry little house on stilts. Kaila and her mother are welcomed joyously, and Kaila disappears into the arms of one auntie and then another, and then through a series of cousins, or sisters and brothers, I’m not sure. But her mother rests after a long ride. Nidiria is here too, though Yamali got off the boat back in Puerto Merizalde. The WOLA people are here of course, they’re the reason everyone has gathered, to tell the story of what is happening in these days. One problem. Everyone is on the other side of the river. Where are we going to meet? Will they ferry us over?

At last we make our way in the dark, in the rain, up the walkway that has become a river, to a school. We sit in the small desks, and the room fills up. They are crossing the river to come to us. Someone jerry rigs a lightbulb and a microphone, to a cord which goes out the window to a generator somewhere. More people come in. The room is packed. There are people standing thick along the outside of the barred windows.

First a round of introductions: leaders of five communities from the Naya Community Council, different roles, different functions, Nidiria who works with 300 women up and down the river, Marcia, leader in the Indigenous communities, Yasmin, and Enrique and Maru from the Comision, and finally Adam, Gimena and Alex, the friends from WOLA, and me, the co-presidenta of SICSAL.

Then, before we talk, a smaller group of men and women, young and older, gather in front of the small classroom, to drum, to sing. How could I ever describe this sound, not even music, exactly? How could I, with my thin-white-nordic blood ever say anything at all about what this drumming and singing means? It was something so ancient, so holy, so filled with resistance, and struggle and survival from what would it be – 15 – 20 generations from the capture and devastation of the ancestors in Africa? If this isn’t Resurrection, I don’t know what is. The drumming, the singing, the shaking, the lament, the song of fierce struggle fills the room, fills the hearts and souls of absolutely everyone present, pressing them into a bonded commitment, a kind of vow that can never be broken. When they finish at long last, I don’t know what else needs to be said. The women leading the singing say one thing: “This is a song of gratitude, and welcome. Thank you.” My eyes burn with love. I lower my head.

But of course, there is more to be said. Things are not well. One person after another speaks a part of the story. Adam types away on his computer, that came up river sealed in a freezer-size zip lock bag.

On April 17, three men, Hermes Angulo Zamora and Obdulio Angulo Zamora, brothers, and their cousin, Simeon Olave Angulo, disappeared from somewhere along the river. After they failed to return community members searched up and down the waterways. They reported the disappearance to the government officials in Buenaventura. Tensions continued to climb to an unbearable peak. A third brother, Iber Angulo Zamora, was being increasingly threatened. Support was again requested from the departmental capital and at last on May 5th a commission from the Human Rights Ombudsman office came to escort Iber out of the region. On the water they were confronted by armed men in a boat, who pulled Iber into their possession, and disappeared. Later, all four men were found executed. There were some reports that the murderers were dissident ex-members of the FARC, who had refused to surrender.

Fears were high that the army is using these murders as an excuse to move in and take over the region. And right behind them, the paramilitaries. The river is, some community leaders said, already surrounded by the army, who have no regard for the communities’ ways of practicing vigilance. Nidiria pointed out that for more than 300 years Afro communities have defended and conserved the river, and the earth. There was hope for increased unity between Afro and Indigenous Nayareño/as. People spoke of the memory of the displacement of 2001 and declared that these threats of re-militarization of the region shouldn’t startle them. The 2015-16 Peace Accords were a step forward, but there was still a lot of work to be done to gain full control of their territories.

There was some debate around small-time coca farmers, up and down the river. Historically these small farmers have never become wealthy but have served as a source for the raw coca leaves. Coca farmers are trapped. They have no other options. The government has promised to help with new crops, and thousands of farmers have signed contracts stating that they will no longer plant coca. But again, those getting shafted are the already poor. There has been no meaningful government support for the transformation, and in the meantime, the power struggle to control the trade ratchets up, with the farmers trapped in the middle.

The discussion carried on for a few hours. Lollipops and chocolate cookies were distributed at some point, and finally the gathering came to an end. I was surprised when Enrique asked if I might pray with the community.

“Of course,” I said. “That’s what I do.” Good heavens. How to pray here in this place, with these people, what can I possible say? Thank God for the Holy Spirit who always gives me the words to speak. I thought, well, what the hell, why not start the prayer like I start every prayer. Not sure if it will work here.

“El Señor sea con ustedes,” I said.

“Y con tu espíritu,” came thundering back, more people than I could count.

And so, in the dim flickering light, in the pouring rain, in a schoolhouse in Las Conchas I closed my eyes and prayed.

Third Letter from the Sacred Naya River

Arriving in Joaquincito

It rains all night in Las Conchas, and other than that it is perfectly quiet in the little dry house, except for a dog—there’s always a dog. Bark. Bark. Bark. But I sleep completely senseless, wiped out from so much sitting, travelling, listening, until the first roosters join the morning chorus.

We are up before dawn, so much to do. We eat soda crackers, and drink hot, sweet coffee, and then we go backwards down the river, and so much faster than the day before. The shallow areas from yesterday have been filled in with all the night’s rain. It’s still blustery, and even a bit cold, especially in the fast boat. Marcia and I make a Yasmin sandwich, and we wrap ourselves all up in tarps. There are children in school uniforms in the thin canoas, the dug-out canoes, standing up and pushing along the river’s edge. Today’s the first day of school, after holidays, and they are heading to the nearest classroom. Yasmin whispers to me, “We have school today too.” I have no idea how far we still have to go down river. Go, boat, go! We arrive in San Francisco. No sign of the soldiers, we change boats and float down past the giant Jesus frozen in eternal blessing.

Before long we are in Joaquincito, in Marcia’s community. It’s still morning, about 9 0’clock. Marcia, Yasmin and I disembark, climb the wooden stairs. I duck under the low roof, and step in -- suddenly we’re in the Casa Grande. It is dark, cool. I imagine it full of people for ceremonies and meetings. The WOLA folks and the Comision people wave and push off in the boat, and move down towards the river delta and beyond. About a month, Adam says, until they have their official WOLA report on the Naya River.

So, here I am. Now what? Surrender, open, trust, love. Plutarco comes out to greet us. He’s the head of the community, and later I find out he’s Marcia’s older brother, and the community health promoter.

Joaquincito is the Resguardo, a reserve of the Eperara community of the lower Naya river. There are Indigenous nations all over in Colombia, settled from the lowland river systems that head to the Pacific, or north to the Caribbean, or east to join the great Amazon, to the highlands that meet the mountains and the edges of the descendants of the great historic Inca nations of the Andes. In Joaquincito there are 42 families, mostly Indigenous, with just a few Afro or Mestizo families blended in. Along the river there are far more Afro-descendant settlements, 30 times as many as Indigenous communities.

Marcia leads me through the other side of the Casa Grande, through a wooden kitchen with a fire pit rigged up on cement blocks with a sand base. There’s the biggest cooking pot I’ve ever seen – upside down now. That must feed everybody.

“We just had a big feast,” says Marcia. “Five days ago.”

We shimmy down a treacherous (for me) damp wooden ladder, across some soft planks, and then up onto a long cement platform, about three feet above the wet ground.

“That’s the bridge,” says Marcia. “We fought years for that. Blood was spilt for it.” The bridge stretches out along the front of the houses. Each house reaches the bridge with a simple plank. Drainage canals carve up the land which is often under water, depending on the level of the river, which floods with heavy rain, and the sway of the ocean’s tide.

We go down two, three, four houses, to Plutarco’s place.

“We’ll stay next door, with my mother,” says Marcia. “But it’s more comfortable here.” We slip inside. “I’ll make breakfast.”

There are piles of kids, Plutarco’s children, Paula Andrea, Paulo Andres, Junior and little Ingrid. And Marcia’s son, Alejandro, and Plutarco’s wife. Then comes Marcia’s mother up the plank, carrying two full, sloshing pails of water from the river. What a delight it is to meet her!

I sit in a chair at a small table. Marcia has disappeared through a door and left me with the kids, who play, swinging in a hammock. Ingrid, who is one and a bit, stares at me with a look of suspicion, as she moves from sister’s hip to cousin’s arms, and then back again. Who’s this woman, say her fierce eyes.

Marcia comes back in a bit with a plate piled with food – just for me. Yikes. Four boiled green bananas, a hill of rice and a piece of rich pink pork.

“That’s from the feast,” she says. “My brother smoked it. It takes a long time, but it lasts then for a good while, about a week.” Of course. There’s no refrigeration here, only electricity once in a while with an expensive generator.

Dear Lord. I’m in Rio Naya bacon heaven! Who knew that pork could be this delicious? Greasy and meaty and smoky. The green bananas are starchy and bland, perfect with a piece of bacon embedded. While I’m finishing up a great fuss is going on in the house across from me – later I find out it’s the general store, which enjoys the only constant electricity, provided by a large solar panel. We head out to see. José de la Cruz has hunted an animal in the night, and now it’s coming to be weighed, and sold, I presume. I ask what it is, and get, “Rabbit.” “Wild pig,” as an answer. The beast is now headless, so I can’t really tell. Not by looking at its little trotters. A sharp thin knife carves it into pieces.

After this, Marcia calls me to go back to the Casa Grande. There’s going to be a community meting – a chance for me to get to know more people. We gather in the cool dark space. We sit on wide platform benches, men, many women, and many more children. Plutarco greets me officially. I say thank you, and then I listen:

Arturo, the school teacher, speaks first: We are one of 102 different nations in what is now called Colombia. After the Spanish invasion we were called savages, then we were called, pejoratively, “minors” or infants. In 1991 there were reforms to the national law and we were recognized as nations, and the afro-descendant nations were as well. We lived in peace. Then in 2001 we suffered the terrible internal displacement. We fled to Buenaventura, to other rivers, and no one helped us. We returned, and we know our rights, but so far that is just on paper. In 1989 the limits of our Reserve were defined, then in 2005 they were extended. There has been some disagreement with the Afro-community, but there has been a lot of work on building unity. The government owes us a lot, and we have received barely anything. Now, for example, they are saying something ridiculous: We own the land, as Indigenous people, but the government owns what’s under the land. That makes no sense to us.

Oh, dear Lord, I say. The mining companies are already hovering here. Beware. I tell them of my experience walking alongside the peoples of Guatemala.

Then Inez speaks: I am the head of the Women’s Association. We have had a lot of troubles. The government has promised us support, but nothing at all has arrived. And then there were the fumigations. We lost everything: even our seeds. We had yams and yucca, sugarcane and plantains. We lost most of it. We lost the seeds, and the earth no longer yields much. We’ve had to go further and further into the forest, away from the village.

Norberta speaks: We don’t want mining, or any such thing. We haven’t asked for much, but we haven’t received anything at all. We need a health centre, a school, decent housing. We’ve had no support since the displacement in 2001. We have insisted that there be dialogue. We are tired after 52 years of war. Our young people don’t want war. We live in paradise here. We have taken care of this place, we have looked after our own. They don’t want to admit that the military are here, and the paramilitaries, but we know that they are around. This is a Reserve, not a Humanitarian Zone -- like they have up the river. But this is a weapons-free zone too. Twice the army has arrived in the community, and twice the community has chased them off. All the Naya River has been in resistance. We have been fighting for 527 years, with our own culture, language and art. The last straw has been the fumigations in 2012, and 2013.

Cecilia agrees: Everything was lost. The earth herself got sick. Our food supplies have diminished. Our pineapple, for example. So diminished. And we live in fear. We built our Sacred Big House in 1991, and we have been saying forever: Mother Earth is not to be destroyed, not our forests. This is the very heart, soul, strength of the Earth. We are the only Indigenous community on the lower Naya, and we have been fighting: militarization, and big companies. And now they are threatening to fumigate again.

The meeting goes on, until many have spoken. I feel like I’m starting to get a sense of the story. Just a taste. Marcia invites me to go back to the house. They are going to carry on in meeting. I am exhausted. I need a nap. I think fondly of the hammock, as I negotiate my way up the slippery plank to Plutarco’s house. But what do I find? Ingrid is sleeping in the hammock, across its soft width, a perfect little bundle. I am embarrassed at how grouchy I feel : here I am uncomfortable and tired – and jealous of a baby!

Marcia is away in the Casa Grande for a long time. I’m glad she doesn’t feel like she has to entertain me constantly. I sit and read my book by the Andean theologian Victor Bascope, the man who showed me how to make coca leaf tea, and how to chew coca leaves.

He had told me about how hard it was to research the detailed story of the invasion of the Spaniards. The murder of so many leaders, named and those now forgotten, and so many others. The treasures that were stolen, and much, much worse, the theft, destruction, attempted annihilation of the Andean cosmology.

“When I look at the rocks making up the walls and churches and colonial buildings I just cry,” says Victor. “Each stone is an ancestor.”

I am reading about the nose-bleed high Andes, and I am here in the warm always wet lowlands. The people and stories are linked, though not the same, of course. But the invasion stories of the Spanish, the Portuguese, the English and the French have common threads. For King, for Queen, for Church.

At last, Marcia’s back from the meeting. They aren’t going to Buenaventura tomorrow after all. Not until Wednesday. I can go with them. Marcia’s worried that I haven’t had lunch. I’m stuffed, I reassure her. She’s trying so hard to help me, to guess what I need. I am still figuring out how to be here. Mostly – I try not to be a nuisance. Whatever may be uncomfortable or different or not the way I would do it. Forget it! Receive everything. I am filled with gratitude.

We go to the sacred river. Yasmin comes, and Paula joins us. Everyone jumps into the river. Even though we’re in the warm equatorial waters, I have to ease myself in, down the worn ladder. The water is brown and slow and cool. The river seems wide and endless, once I’m in. We splash and play. Marcia washes herself, and then a tub of clothes, while sitting on a low wooden step. The girls pretend to be sharks, and they do cartwheels from the soft bank into the water. They are like baby otters, twisting and splashing and smiling. They find a canoa, and they paddle around and around. They convince me to get in, and around we go, laughing without walls of any kind. And here at the river, it happens. Laughing, playing, we are now all friends.

This river is holy. It is the artery of the whole body, the means by which people here live. It is where they bathe, and wash, and pull water for every day things. It is their means of travel and their source of fish. The river changes, with the tides and the cycles of the moon and the rains.

“Naya Tooja.” Sacred River Naya, Marcia whispers. “Cho nara weda tooja beda.”  No human hand could have ever made this river. No human hands dug the channels or made the turns. We float, and more than that:  we are carried.

The Fourth Letter, the Last Letter

It rains all night again, and I sleep in Marcia’s bed – without Marcia -- with the mosquito netting all tucked in around in the absolute dark, in the absolute silence, but for the roosters that set one another off, and then call down the row, at three, four, five in the morning. By five or six o’clock, I know, everyone will be getting up. There was one single shattering of thunder last night—I didn’t see the schism of lightening. It was after we were in bed around nine and it seemed to crack the wooden houses with the power of its loud. Yasmin began to cry. Her mother’s soft words pulled her back in to sleep, to comfort, to shelter.

Again, I wonder what I can do, what I can say? It takes so much energy to host me, to welcome me, to worry about me, to make space for me. Would it be better if I did something in a different way? Why am I here? Of course, I am not the Great White Saviour. But is there some part of me that wants to be? I have nothing to offer but my self. Marcia is clear, and she has shared with others: Emilie doesn’t come to bring projects, or money. Yet there is something about me being here – for me, and for the community. What does it mean that someone sees, someone notices, someone listens? I lie and think and toss a little. The rain comes down in steady soft waves along the roof and, in a while, it is not quite as dark as it used to be.

At last it is five or so, and we get up. The day starts. Children are sleepy, still staying close to home, and to mothers. The women go into the wet side of the house. I am starting to figure it out. The front of the house is the ‘dry’ part. Here people sleep, sometimes in a separate room walled off, and in the back is where the cooking and washing happens, in a room still up on stilts. The back food-area is divided too, the preparing side, and the washing part -- where dishes and fish, and root vegetables and even babies are rinsed and scrubbed -- and then out on the very edge a fire, on a bed of sand and stone. The back area is open to the sides and the bright green everywhere of growing things. This room is where the action is, at least in the daytime. Grandmas and mothers and aunties and kids are all here. Another hammock and a few small stools are occupied, so I sit on the floor. I like it better here than on my own on the other side of the wooden wall, where I spent the afternoon reading yesterday. Plutarco comes in with a mess of fish, and Marcia’s peeling green bananas. For now, we drink sweet hot coffee and eat soda crackers, while the fish get cleaned.

I’m starting to understand food here now too. All meals seem to be: a starch and a protein. Starches so far have been: yucca, taro, purple yams, and green banana. The first three, and the last too sometimes, are prepared boiled. Twice we have the bananas fried, once whole, and once squashed into disks, patacones. The protein we eat are: best bacon ever, eggs, lots of fish, boiled or fried, beans, and once, chicken – but we’ll get to that part later. Everything is so good. Then there’s the fruit: sugar cane (peeled, sucked and chewed, spitting the hard, twiggy-part out), green coconuts (drinking the fresh water first, then eating the thin, slippery bits inside, after cracking open with a machete), guanabana, grenadilla, cherimoya, pitaya (weird yellow blobby thing with black spots, mushy white and melting inside), lulo (only for juice), papaya, maracuya (passion fruit? eat together with crunchy seeds), bacao which I thought was cacao, and is indeed a relative (very strong smelling and tasting, bitter crossed with sour, inedible for me– I give to happy, receiving children), bananas and plantains, which I only see cooked and green, and my favourite: zapote --pumpkin orange, sweet and slimy, with two fat, long, slippery brown seeds. The zapote is given to me as I walk along the raised cement platform, by a young man rushing by with two of them. He stops when he sees me, and hands me one of his treasures. The fruit is all gift. People come by the house to deliver, or call me into their house, across the wooden plank. I receive everything, try everything, like everything, (except the bacao).

Doña Cecilia, particularly, likes to come by. She talks to me, and she asks me questions. And she invites me to her house. “My house is really clean” she says, and she shows me around the yard, back a bit from the cement platform and along another platform, this one made of wood. Her yard is a little bit drier – at least for now—as it is farther from the slow mud-brown river that rises up every twenty days or so and floods under the closer houses. She shows me where she has a raised compost pile. She shows me her flowers, her fruit trees and her medicinal herbs -- she and her husband, Bejerano, are healers. “This one is for stomach upset, this for headache, this for ojo, this for sadness.” She takes me – and a whole handful of children -- up a narrow path that leads even farther away from the river. We should have gumboots she says, eyeing my flip-flops skeptically. We wander up the squashy path, until it is apparent that it just won’t work. The earth is just too soft. I am ankle deep in mud. Farther up, she points, we have our plantings, the yams, and papa chinas (taro) that we have been eating. And she tells me more about how terrible it has been since the fumigations.

The Colombian government, with the full support of the USA, and its ‘war on drugs’ has engaged in extensive spraying for years. The chemical defoliant, glyphosate – the main toxic component in “round up” was repeatedly sprayed in aerial raids on coca plants and -- according to residents of the Naya river basin -- everything else: food crops, houses, animals and even people. In 2015 the government promised to stop fumigations by airplane, after the World Health Organization declared that glyphosate was a proven carcinogen. However, the threat of the resumption of spraying remains, the latest possibility being the use of drones to deliver the poison.

“So many things have just dried up,” says Doña Cecilia, sadly. “No pineapple at all. Nothing is growing in some areas.” People have told me of strange diseases, not known much in these regions before. Marcia’s mother had to endure the choppy boat ride to Buenaventura, and have a large tumour removed from her neck.

We go back to Cecilia’s house, and Don Bejerano shows me his carvings: a sweet little turtle, a bird, and a gorgeous walking stick, carved with a couple of birds, and just below the handle, a man, holding a staff of his own, and a mochila, a woven bag.

Doña Cecilia worries at the fire and brings me my first fried fish of the day. It is delicious and crispy with salt sizzled right through. I pick at it and eat it delicately, saving on the side the bones thinner than a needle. Her grandson comes by, and Doña Cecilia sends him up a palm tree to get us a couple of fresh coconuts. He sheds his shoes and shimmies up fast but stops about two-thirds the way up. He yells something down to his grandma, and then scoots down quickly.

“There’s a new wasp’s nest up there!” they explain to me, laughing. We’ll have to wait for our drinks. Back to the fish.

As we share stories – I tell them about my red-headed grandson, and my black shaggy dog – I can feel the threads begin to connect us. Doña Cecilia tells me about her son, who died, about how heartbreaking and constant is her desolation. Once, she says, a long time ago, she tried to live somewhere else, her husband is from the Chocó region, but she could never get used to not being on the Naya. She wants to tell me her story of the displacement in 2001.

It was further up the river, in the Afro communities where the worst violence took place, by some estimates between 40 – 130 civilians were killed over a few days, many brutally, with excessive violence. Bodies were dissected with a chain saw. Quickly, the information flew down the river: leave, now, get out. And everyone did. It was a massive exodus of boats, big and small. Some went into the town of Puerto Merizalde, to stay with family, many went into hiding along quieter branches of the river. And others went all the way to Buenaventura. The whole river was almost drained of people. Doña Cecilia says, that at first they refused to go. Neighbours came to inform them, and everyone bundled up their few things, and fled. Then at last Doña Cecilia and Don Bejerano, and their children climbed onto a boat. They made it down river, to a branch along the mangroves where they hid for five days.

Then they decided to go back, no matter what. So, they returned to Joaquincito. Five families came back together. They stayed in one house, afraid of the paramilitaries, who were hunting up and down the river. They stayed and ate what they could.

“The worst thing was listening to the dogs and the chickens die. We had nothing to feed them, and almost everyone had gone. They didn’t have time to take their animals. The animals cried and cried from the pangs of hunger, and finally they died. That was the hardest. The Sisters (from the order of Mother Laura) heard we were starving and brought us a little bit of food, dried rice and beans, and we held out for a few weeks, but in the end, we had to travel down to the city, to Buenaventura, where for two years we lived as refugees.”

We sit together for a while. I am thinking about the recent deaths, the murders on the river, the on-going deaths, the attacks on leaders of all social organizations. Back at the conference in Medellin, we named and prayed for the over three hundred leaders murdered since the signing of the Peace Accords, two years ago. We sit and then I go back, with the flock of children, to Marcia’s house, well, to Plutarco’s house. We eat more fried fish, soft and salty, which never seems to be too filling. Marcia’s sister-in-law drops by, with a young woman -- her daughter-in-law -- and her brand-new baby grandson. We chat for a while, and I hold the baby, and then, when it seems polite, hand him back to his mother. The women consult for a while in Siapidaara. I smile nicely. Marcia comes up to me, and asks me quietly, “They want you to baptize the baby.”

My heart thuds. What to do? What would Richard Leggett do?  Richard was my excellent liturgy professor at Vancouver School of Theology, and I would trust him to be both pastoral, and within the bounds of acceptable church practice. I know I can do the former, and don’t always trust myself with the latter.

The only important question in this instant is: What would be of assistance to this family? What do they really need? I don’t worry that much about correctness within the church, but care everything about wanting to do right and honest with this family. Baptism is a mark of belonging, of being. Of course, all creation, and every creature, especially this perfect little one with dark hair and black eyes, lying in my arms, is loved, adored, treasured by the One who made us. But baptism is a way we humans turn and shout yes back to God. There is no priest or pastor who ever visits this community. And me? I am, now, a friend.

I say yes, let’s bless the baby. Let’s get some water. They bring me some clean water, actually from the big jugs of filtered water left for me by the prepared WOLA people. We pour a bowlful of clear water. We gather around, the children and the women. I hold little Liam Mejia. We pray together, and I hold him tight in my arms. May the Creator of Heaven and Earth ever hold you close, little one. May you flourish in love, in this place. May you grow to the fullness of your life. May you play in this river for many, many years. May the fruit be abundant. May the pineapples return.

In my heart I pray that the wolves of greed and violence that surround this community may be held at bay. I pray that the Naya won’t be invisible to the world. That the Afro communities standing for their right to exist, to live, to flourish, may be allowed to exist as signs of the bursting through of justice. And that the Indigenous communities may be left to practice their knowledge, their time-out-of-mind knowing of things that matter. So many things that we have forgotten. Liam is asleep. He moves and stretches a little as the water pours off of his head, onto the wooden floor, through the cracks, and back to the water below.

Earlier in the day, as I peered out of the wooden morning window and out along the cement walkway, I saw a woman carrying two unfortunate upside-down chickens. They seemed to have given up, no squawking was happening as their tails pointed to the sky. Uh no, I thought. Too much. Has Marcia asked for them to be brought to me here? I am being a nuisance. I nodded as the woman approached, and then sighed in relief as she walked by our plank, down one, two, three doors, and up to another house.

But now, after our blessing, I’m told that there is a chicken soup coming back to Plutarco’s house. The chickens had been killed to celebrate this impromptu baptism. And so, again, we eat, I am served a big bowl. Liam sleeps and we eat. Later I spy his mother with a whole group of young women and men out on a raised platform playing soccer with a squashed, wet ball. Every few minutes the ball flies off into the mud and the water on the ground. Then it starts raining. No one stops playing, laughing, shouting, and the game goes on until the sun hovers over the western river.

Just before it goes down, Marcia and I go along the cement platform, then along the wooden walkway to the holy river, to her most holy river, her cho nara weda tooja beda, her ancestral river, made by no human hands. Here we sit and dangle our feet into the warm water. Tomorrow, before dawn, we will be going out to the open sea, through waves rolling bigger than our boat, to Buenaventura – one of the most dangerous cities in Colombia – she with Plutarco to settle things, to fight with the municipality, me to catch a bus back to the Convent of Mother Laura in Medellin, and a plane back to Canada. We feel sad already. I know I go with my heart made bigger; my life somehow different. Marcia, who knows why she reached out to me, what she saw, what she sees?

This is how two women become friends.

I fall asleep

on the circle

of sand

by the rocks of the river.

And when I come up again

I stay

for a while

with my eyes

   closed. Be-cause

Maybe here

I will find

you still.

And here you are

more than beautiful.

Perfect, actually.

Mostly because

at last you know it!

But who am I fooling?

A bird makes promises

                  the river cannot keep.

When I open

my eyes

it is awful still.

And you are dead

                  forever.

Here in this time —

your family wails

for all we have lost

and you have lost

your grandmother

your auntie – me –

and that one

our dearest friend.

At least we stood

time and time

before you

we held you

we danced

and declared you

treasure.

Along the path way

   back

two white feathers

   fall.

Not from eating

but from molting.

                  Not from murder

                     by self or other.

But because the world

was made that way.

And that’s what feathers do.

Here, no eagle swooped

or knife cut

only time

eased forward.

And so,

we go.

The salal berries

are ripe early

this year.

   And there are many.

   For you.

   We have

all

the time

in the world.

Recipe: Wild T.C. Jam

Go to a wild place in summer. Bring a gift for the land. Find a berry plant: hint, they love the sun. Make sure you ask an elder which berries are edible. If you don’t know DON’T eat ‘em.

When you find an edible variety of berry plant, ask permission to pick. Today I gathered: salal, red huckleberry, Oregon grape, thimbleberry, Himalayan blackberry (an invasive, but yummy). I mostly picked salal. Only pick some. Leave most for the bears and birds and other critters and humans. Thank the good earth and the glorious plants.

Take the berries home. Put them in a pot with a little splash of water. Cook them very, very slowly. Today I mostly had salal berries, which have thick skins, but not that many seeds. I pushed about half of my cooked berry mash through a strainer. With the ones left in the pot, I swirled them with an immersion blender.

Cook everything together again. Add sweetener to taste. Sugar, honey, alternatives. T.C. was diabetic, so easy on the sugar. Or look for a fridge jam recipe made with chia seeds, yum.

Cook on low/medium-low for a long time. Things you can add: a shake of cinnamon, a lemon —its juice and its rind, a small sprinkle of salt, a splash of balsamic vinegar (especially if you put too much sugar in — oops). An important addition: I don’t use pectin, so I chop up an old apple, (any apple will do), and pop it in. Apples have natural pectin and will thicken your jam.

When your jam is ready it may still look runny. That’s because it is hot. The way to test for doneness: grab a small plate. Plop a splooch of jam on the plate. Draw a finger through the blob of jam. Does it stay in two puddles, or does it want to be a one puddle on the plate? If that latter, cook more, repeat until the sides stay separate. Experiment. If it is too runny, you have made fruit sauce for pancakes or yogurt!

Can as usual (I’m not teaching canning here, but if you want to learn how, visit me. Bring your fruit and some jars and some sweetener.)

Make bread or biscuits. Also not teaching here but would be happy to if you came to my house.

Eat jam. Share with housemates.

Have a garden party. Love each other.

Trade with or give to friends, relatives, and neighbours.

Keep some for winter.

The far-right front-runner in Colombia’s runoffs this Sunday, Abelardo de la Espriella, is a cartoonishly opprobrious character, a shady lawyer with one foot in Miami. Donald Trump didn’t hesitate to very publicly back him. (Manuel Pedraza / AFP via Getty Images)

On Monday, June 8, I received terrible news from my friend Rosa, a youth activist and the founder of three community gardens in the impoverished neighborhoods of northern Bogotá. Thugs had destroyed one of their spaces, the Pollinators’ Garden in Suba.

Emboldened angry men with machetes, shovels, and axes chopped down tomate de árbol and avocado trees, multiplying banana fronds and fruit, lavender, rue, kale, oregano, basil, and many other vegetables and herbs. I wept when I saw photos of the dry brown earth where once I had walked with her and her friends through the overflowing, tangled green.

“They weren’t afraid of anything,” said Rosa (whose name has been changed for anonymity). “They did it in broad daylight.” I commiserated. “It’s as if their guy has already won,” she added.

Colombia’s second round of elections this Sunday will steer the country into one world or another: a feast of hatred, exclusion, violence, or a continuation of an imperfect progressive experiment. After the first round, on May 31, Senator Iván Cepeda of the leftist Pacto Histórico had 9.64 million votes, and lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella, a newcomer to politics with neofascist aesthetics, unexpectedly pulled ahead, with 10.31 million votes. The candidate in third place, Paloma Valencia, a traditional conservative originally favored by former right-wing President Álvaro Uribe, was eliminated.

The results shocked the Pacto’s many strategists and activists. Cepeda and his vice presidential candidate, renowned indigenous leader Aida Quilcué, also a national senator, had led the polls by a significant margin right until voting day. The next morning everyone got to back to work: labor and climate activists, Afro-descendant and indigenous leaders, feminists and queers and all their allies. The question will be whether the Colombians who brought the country’s first left-wing government to power can secure the future of their progressive project.

The far-right candidate, Abelardo de la Espriella, is a cartoonishly opprobrious character, a media-loving stuntman with dual US-Colombian citizenship. There are videos of de la Espriella bragging about blowing up cats with fireworks. He is on record for numerous vile, misogynist, and homophobic remarks. As a lawyer, he has represented dubious figures known for drug trafficking and paramilitary violence. He has lived in Miami much of his adult life. On slick social media spots, he presents himself as El Tigre (the Tiger). He has the parallel stripes of many of his kind: Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, Javier Milei of Argentina, and Daniel Noboa of Ecuador.

The Pacto candidate, Iván Cepeda, is a measured man with a philosophy professor’s air. For twelve years, he has been a senator in the Colombian legislature. His father, Manuel Cepeda, was also a senator. Cepeda Sr was assassinated in 1994, as part of a countrywide murder campaign targeting leftist politicians that, according to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, eliminated some six thousand leaders and activists in less than a decade. Iván Cepeda became the founding member and most persistent campaigner for victims of state-sanctioned violence during the late years of the long, bitter civil war. He was himself identified as a legally recognized victim in a successful suit that in 2025 brought former president Uribe (temporarily) to justice. Aida Quilcué is also a victim of state violence. In 2008, government soldiers shot her husband to death. Six soldiers were later convicted of the assassination.

The Pacto Histórico was formed in 2021 and a year later won the presidential elections, bringing a leftist president to national office for the first time. Gustavo Petro, a former guerrilla combatant, proved to be a lively, energetic president, not afraid to take on Donald Trump and his cronies.

There have been great achievements during the four years of the Petro government: pension and agrarian reform, laws to make free university tuition permanent, protection of critically important bioregions, especially in the Amazon, and the launching of a solid international movement to divest from fossil fuels. There have also been disappointing setbacks: health care improvements were snarled in congressional red tape, and Colombia still set records for the assassinations of territorial defenders. Petro’s promise of “Total Peace” remains distant, as remnants of the guerrilla forces and many paramilitary and drug-trafficking bands still terrorize the countryside.

Closing the Ranks

The Pacto had invited me to Colombia to monitor the elections as part of the Unified International Observation Mission. Hopes were high that the Cepeda–Quilcué ticket would take the election in the first round, passing the 50 percent threshold.

On May 29, there was a cocktail party for the foreign observers’ team in the basement of a swanky hotel. I got there late. My taxi had inched through the choked streets of Bogotá, as the sun went down on an imperfect, trash-strewn city. Arriving, I found myself with a who’s who of international progressives: a leader of the Spanish Podemos; members of both the UK House of Lords and the House of Commons; representatives from Sinn Féin, the European Parliament, and the Communist Party of Portugal; and leftists from most of Latin America and the Caribbean, including Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Brazil. Everyone knew: this election in Colombia was about more than one country’s political future. Trump’s knife was out, carving up Latin America, treating the region once again as his to run or ruin. He despised Petro and was determined: Colombia would be his.

What clearly happened was major manipulation and undue influence from forces outside of Colombia.

On May 31, late afternoon, the end of Election Day, the Pacto people crowded into another hotel room, a giant one. They were agitated, excited. There were no numbers yet, but it was reported that more Colombians than ever had voted. I had been pulled by one of the Pacto’s enthusiastic young volunteers through an unbelievable crowd, squeezed in between guards and a door, slapped with a thin, qualifying security bracelet, and then released into the cavernous room with all of the faithful — to wait.

The national television station RTVC was on live. Every few minutes a low, somber gong would sound. The analysts would pause, and the announcer declared the numbers of the latest poll counts. At once, it was clear: Cepeda would not claim the presidency in the first round. De la Espriella was out in front and never slipped behind, even as he never inched above 50 percent. The mood in the hotel room stayed loud, but more serious, determined not to leave without an all-out struggle.

Our group of observers declared that there had been little or no violence at polling stations (a great improvement). There were six hundred or so minor incidents of intimidation — vote buying, electricity cutting, and snarling the vote. There were irregularities — improper wearing of party colors by poll attendees — but no major visible fraud.

With almost all the votes counted, Cepeda and Quilcué appeared before the raucous crowd. Passions were high. Cepeda spoke: “It’s time to close ranks. We have three weeks left to fight for Colombia.” Aida spoke: “This is a fight for Mother Earth. For all life.” The crowd cheered wildly, then filed out, energized, ready.

The next morning, the international observation team met with Pacto officials for a post–first round autopsy. On election night, Petro (and then Cepeda) had claimed there had been a massive fraud. At this meeting, that was laid aside. What clearly happened, however, was major manipulation and undue influence from forces outside of Colombia.

We were witnessing the unfolding of a carefully crafted plan with deep roots in the Trump administration. Newly minted US senator from Ohio Bernie Moreno, born in Colombia, with deep ties to the conservative, monied class, was on the ground, orchestrating the public side of Trump posturing.

The Pacto had been victims of a massive disinformation campaign on social media and beyond. Right-wing fearmongers practiced every tactic, trotting out old tropes: The communists are coming to destroy the country. They will take away your small businesses. They are atheists. De la Espriella’s team, taking a page from Bukele’s master class in manipulation, had created two troll centers. By the Pacto’s estimates, more than a hundred thousand false accounts had been put into quick operation, spreading stories and sowing doubt.

“We played a fair game, campaigned in the old-fashioned way,” said Pacto Senator Alirio Uribe:

We had teams in every department, rallies in every major city. Tens of thousands of volunteers, youth, community leaders, activists. But in the end, we sagged. We don’t have the same means as de la Espriella. His campaign centered on hatred, violence, vulgarity, and threats. We just won’t go there.

“Colombia is a country facing the impact of Trump policies in real time,” said Ana Cristina, a Pacto activist. “Neoliberalism is dead. We are facing neofascism. Their plan has been laid out clearly. We just can’t quite believe it.”

The Donroe Doctrine

On June 2, President Trump weighed in on the Colombian elections on his Truth Social platform. “Abelardo has my Complete and Total Endorsement,” he wrote. He does not name Cepeda but calls Abelardo’s opponent a “Radical Left Marxist.” Trump said he was on the Tigre team “because of [de la Espriella’s] tremendous accomplishments in life, and his political support for me, personally.” More ominously, the meddling in Colombia is part of a renewed and reinvigorated US imperialism in the Americas.

In September 2025, the US military started its campaign of blowing up boats off the coast of Colombia, in the Caribbean and in the Pacific. At the same time, Trump declared that drug cartels would be identified as foreign terrorist organizations. Next he began to refer to President Gustavo Petro as an “illegal drug leader” (much like he did with President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela). Then in December 2025, Trump released his National Security Strategy (NSS), calling it the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, or the “Donroe Doctrine.”

The meddling in Colombia is part of a renewed and reinvigorated US imperialism in the Americas.

The 1823 Monroe Doctrine outlined that the United States — not yet the strongest player in the continental Americas — would not meddle in European affairs. In turn, Europe would leave the Americas alone. The first major change to the doctrine, the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary, states that the US can interfere when and where it wants to, in the continents of the Americas. Which it promptly did: an invasion or occupation here, a covert regime change there, murder, and the training of murderers, disappearance, destruction of leftist and popular movements, from Guatemala to Chile. In almost every country, every region of the Americas, it has propped up local armies and oligarchs for the past 120 years.

“American policy should focus on enlisting regional champions that can help create tolerable stability in the region, even beyond those partners’ borders,” reads the new NSS document.

Quickly the plan turned to action: the invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of its president and his wife; the strangling of Cuba; the ongoing attacks on small boats. Trump allies in the region were emboldened: Milei in Argentina (who received a $20 billion “financial support package” from Trump), Bukele in El Salvador (ever tightening his grip on the small Central American nation, sending jurists, journalists, and human rights activists into exile, and accepting $5 million from the United States to receive “foreign hostiles” into his nightmarish mega-prisons), and Noboa in Ecuador (who directly intervened in the Colombian election, promising to punish the country with tariffs if the Left carried the day). Newer politicians — also from the far right — include José Antonio Kast from Chile, whose father was a member of the German Nazi Party, and who holds up high the until recently disgraced banner of Augusto Pinochet, and Honduras, where Trump had — also unabashedly — put his thumb on the scale of last November’s presidential election in that country, making sure his man, Nasry Asfura, won.

On March 7, 2026, all these and others, an unsurprising group of far-right Latin American leaders, met in Florida with members of the Trump team, including Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and recently disgraced and now reassigned Special Envoy Kristi Noem. At the gathering Trump signed into being the so-called Shield of the Americas, also known as the Americas Counter-Cartel Coalition. The primary stated goal of the shield: combat drug-trafficking. In the actual sights of the shield are the progressive governments of Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil.

What makes the stated anti-drug goal of the Shield more than farcical — an outright outrage — was Trump’s pardoning of Juan Orlando Hernández in November 2025. Hernández, the former president of Honduras, had been convicted of trafficking more than four hundred tons of cocaine into the United States and sentenced to forty-five years in prison. At the time, Attorney General Merrick Garland said, “As President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández abused his power to support one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world, and the people of Honduras and the United States bore the consequences.” So much for Trump combatting narco-terrorism.

A World to Lose

Colombians of the Pacto and beyond are giving it their all in the final round of elections on Sunday. They are also preparing for resistance in the event of a change of fortunes. They have been in the opposition most of their lives. For the first time, they have a lot to lose.

My friend and her associates in Suba organized a wake for their ravaged garden. People brought candles and poems. “I can understand organizing to fight crime. To fight the drug dealers. But who organizes a campaign to tear down food and flowers?” Rosa asked.

“Who is it that hates this life so much?”

April 30, 2026

The Road to Santa Marta

Daniel Maestre invites me to sit across from him beneath a giant mango tree. The wide branches above shade the whole area beside the kankurua, the sacred house. Three months ago, arsonists destroyed the original kankurua. The new house is almost finished; Daniel and his companions have framed the circular structure and built the rafters. In a few days they will thatch the roof and fill in the walls with mud.

Under the thick tree, with the occasional thud of a falling fruit, we say two prayers: the first to release all the harm and hurt we may carry: fears, resentments, anger. We turn and leave these in the earth. Then we call up the memory of our ancestors. All those named and unnamed, human and other, who have come before us, those who stood on this holy land, cared for its waters and its living beings, fast and slow. From insect to ancient stone, everyone is noted.

Only then we pray for those about to gather — government officials, religious and community leaders, environmental activists. The city of Santa Marta is around the other side of these tall, snow-tipped mountains. The Sierra Nevada, so called by the Spanish invaders 500 years ago, is the last reach of the spine of Abya Yala, the northern-most tip of the southern continent. This place is known to the Kankuamo, the Wiwa, the Arhuaco and the Kogui, the four Indigenous nations who have lived here forever, as the Heart of the World. In a few days 55 countries and 1500 people will come for the first conference planning the transition away from fossil fuels. The world is burning. The seas are rising. The ice is melting. Life is dying.

“To end the wars, to end the greed, the violence, the suffering, we need to go and do ceremony in all the sites of wrongdoing,” says Daniel, who is from the Kankuamo nation. I nod. I’m not sure I understand everything he is saying, but there is something deeply right. How many meetings have there been? COPs and others, how many studies, campaigns, conferences —and still the destruction carries on? Can we do a ceremony of healing and repentance: in the Niger delta, in the Ecuadorian Amazon, in the reeking tar sands in northern Alberta? His words root in my heart. I give thanks, as I take my leave from him, his wife Cenexan, their children, the community on the banks of the Rio Seco. The giant mango trees, the well-cared for dogs, the angry duck with a red bill. The kankurua under reconstruction.

Early the next day I leave Valledupar (which I discovered to my surprise is the accordion capital of the world) to circle the mountains heading to Santa Marta. I take the wrong bus and find myself on a local chiva, going to Santa Marta indeed, but roaring then stopping for again and again from place to place. Instead of four hours it takes almost eight. We visit every little dusty town and wander up the plastic-littered road through the banana plantations. Ordinarily I would have loved this: eating snacks sold on the side of the slow highway, spending time chatting with folks, bumping along, seeing things. But my team is waiting for me in Santa Marta, and my phone is dead. I cause some considerable distress for which I am sorry.

These are anxious days in Colombia, one month out from presidential elections. Colombians will decide: stay with the current government, the Pacto Historico, and keep on this path, healing deep hurts and overturning traditional power. Or back to the strutting, the threats, and the violence of the strongmen that held power for decades (centuries) before.

Dusk settles. My bumbling bus skirts Colombia’s largest coal export terminal, then at last we arrive at the station in Santa Marta. Right away I am in a cab off to the planning meeting. An ever-growing group of us, from many international and local faith networks, have been working for months to create this event to run alongside the governments conference: an inter-faith gathering for the just transition away from fossil fuels. It hasn’t been easy. Many, many zoom meetings. Missed communications, confusions, misunderstandings. Details. How to bring us all together? Where to hold it? Who to invite? Who will catch the costs? But in the end, it works. Seven or eight of us key organizers are here the night before. Our conference will have Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, Indigenous and Afro-traditions all saying what matters most is being together to fight the root causes of the climate crisis.

The View from Faith

This is about change at the cosmological level. How do we see ourselves as human beings in the universe, and how are we going to act? Nothing less. Christian organizations and networks, from the Catholic Church to the ecumenical World Council of Churches, the World Lutheran Federation, in addition to representatives from a wide range of faith traditions, have been going to international gatherings, the COPs and beyond, declaring that we have something particular to say, something to add to the discussion, or even to provoke the discussion to go further.

The irrefutable science is here: human actions are causing the climate crisis. The technology exists to transform our way of living on the earth. What then still needs to happen? Political will? A wider consensus? The catastrophe that is upon us is one of human decision, driven by a tiny groups’ insatiable greed. All faith traditions are unified in our challenge: human lust for material accumulation must not be the driving principle of our species. We will vigorously and directly challenge this cornerstone of our current global culture.

Pope Francis’ encyclical, Laudato Si’, came out in 2015. It was an offering — a radical shift for the church, inviting Roman Catholics — and all of us — to transform our way of relating to the created world. Laudato Si’ names the Earth as our Common Home, a living communion emanating from the love of God. Francis declared what Indigenous communities have known forever: the earth is not a product to be bought, sold, carved up, exploited. The whole of creation is sacrament.

In further meetings, particularly the Synod on the Amazon in 2019 (which I attended, as an observer), Pope Francis invited to world to fall in love again with the wonder of our world, its waterways, and its peoples. His second creation encyclical, Laudate Deum, published just before the Amazon Synod, declared the climate emergency the result of structural and planetary sin. A kaleidoscope of crises caused by human actions. Fossil fuel production, and consumption, are the main drivers (!) of climate change.

In the decade since its launching, Laudato Si’ has moved off the page from a document to a movement. Other movements have taken up the call: the World Council of Churches, in 2025 declared a decade for climate action, the Tapiri gathering at COP-30 in Belem, Brazil, centred the voices of those who have pushed to the edge. Communities of faith have put the fight for the life of our common home at the heart of our vision.

One Day in Santa Marta — and then More

In Santa Marta our one day gathering brings together the voices of youth, elders, Indigenous leaders, bishops, lay women. I am given seven strict minutes to speak. I say: when Jesus cleanses the temple he shouts, “You have converted my Father’s house into a marketplace.” We are here to declare: Our Mother, our Grandmother, our house is the whole world. It is not for sale. The mountains are not for sale. The rivers are not for sale. The oceans are not for sale.

The best part of our gathering — it was organized 90% by networks of faith from the Global South. Not the north. Not the faith NGOs. Christian activists, Buddhist monks, Indigenous leaders, mostly Colombians.

At our gathering we hear that one individual will go forward to the summit with officials from the Colombian government. My name is suggested; I won’t let it stand. But after the vice-minister of the environment, visits our meeting things change. We are given space for four of us to go forward. Two Catholic laywomen and two ordained women from different traditions, Presbyterian, Anglican. It turns out we are a perfect team. Superheroes with different qualities. Sulman is detail oriented; Rev. Neddy is a theological powerhouse; Madeleine has a framework of how these big meetings work. She speaks treaty language and has a deep understanding of the push towards creating a binding document. Then there’s me. I bring a commitment to meaningful language around our world and the role of the holiness imbedded in our work. In Mad Love with the World. We should have capes. The four of us, and other women from the Bambu collective, eco-feminist theologians, from Panama, Chile, Brazil, huddle in a room, load ourselves with coffee, and work on a collective statement of faith communities.

The next day we head to the university, and into the summit. The four of us, the inter-faith delegation, are in with the social movements sector. We meet all day. Stories after stories of communities rising to defend the Earth. Then we choose one woman — a Colombian anti-fracking activist — to be our representative at the full inter-governmental meeting over the next two days. Then we choose one technical support person, an Indigenous leader from the US. And we select 12 observers. It can’t be me, I think, until my three fellow compañeras, give me a sharp nudge. My hand goes up. There we go. All four of us will be at the high-level government conference.

The next two days whirl by. Countries give three-minute presentations each. Some are brilliant — Panama, I hear the voice of Jocabed Solano, Guna activist and ferocious eco-feminist theologian. Some are heart-breaking — Tuvalu, in the Pacific Ocean, facing the rising seas. Some are disgraceful — Canada, busy building hydro-electric dams, and ‘moving’ towards phasing out coal. Nothing said about the recent pipeline promises across the country, or the fracking chopping up the earth in northern British Colombia.

In the end Santa Marta was another meeting. Different from the endless turmoil of the fossil-fuel lobby-embedded COPs. In the end hopeful, necessary. But not revolutionary. Not yet. I am afraid we will burn up before we figure it out. Or sink beneath the waves. But what else can we do? Keep fighting.

La Reposta Somos Nos

On the last night before part of our delegation returns to Bogotá the Muisca elder, Blanca Nieves, leads some of us to the ocean. Earlier in the day we had held a ceremony, inviting us all to pray, with earth, water, wind and fire. But we had no fire, no candle, matches, lighter. (No one smokes anymore!) So, we did without. Not this time.

On the beach, in front of the stretch of hotels, we lay out the elements. We stoke a roaring, dancing fire. We pray. Blanca has us turn and face the ocean. “Our mother’s uterus,” she says. “She calls and calls us into right relationship. To love one another. To care for the little ones. To tend the earth. To honour the water. To live differently. To calm our hearts. To end our greed and grasping. Amen.

La Reposta Somos Nos. La Respuesta Somos Nosotros. We are the answer. Or we could be if we return to our mother’s womb.

As we kneel around the fire the beach police come. Roaring over on four-wheeled sand machines. No, no, no fires here. We explain. To no avail. Didier, a Muisak leader takes charge, calmly, of police-people relations. Yes, yes, he says. We move to push the coals deep, and to cover the flames with sand. We all sit quietly. The police leave. When we were sure they had made their way back to tourist protection, we uncover the flames and finish praying.

Amen.

Interrupt

Someone

please

   take President DJT

to the river

to Seymour River,

Mill River

or — even to the Potomac

anywhere where

the salmonberry

  bursts

from flower

dyed dark pink

 something the forest has

never seen anywhere before.

Then, over the months, come back, to watch the petals

fall.

Something in the middle stays!

Plumps

to yellow-orange-pink, well, salmon —

having pulled from the riverbank

all the fire from the fish

who swam up

and died there.

Someone — anyone —

                  take him to

where he can breathe

lie down on the moss

listen to nothing

but the rumours

of being okay

with the coming

then the going

of life

of love

of fame

and of money.

                  The water doesn’t mind, or care.

Bring tea

                  in a thermos

                  and tin cups

                  and to dip, hard cookies

                  that won’t crumble

                                    along the way.

Bring a dog —

if you have one —

big or small

   doesn’t matter.

But one who remembers

   what it’s like

   to run in the forest

   and bark at the leaves

   going on down the stream,

                  one by one.

Let him

   stay as long as he wants

   no one

   brought a watch

   and if the sun

   goes down

   we know the way back

   anyway.

Then take that man home

and tuck him in

while the rest of us

make jam

for the children.

Murder Most Foul

His cry

   splits the sky

     in two.

Watch it crash

on the shore

without ceasing.

What is dead

   cannot be undone.

What we do is forever.

His wail

                  wakes every thing alive

now on alert

watching

him.

His wail

                  washes out

with every wave

coming back in

cold, desolate.

And he,

most undone.

My boy

with four-long years

in his body

with his two hands

each

with five fat fingers

in one heedless second

dropped a stone on a thumbnail crab.

Now he lies

flat out

on the wet sand,

a self-known murderer.

With him I have walked

one kilometre an hour

stopped at everything

every trunk and its ants

every pond and its delight

   of stone and flower

every worm on every sidewalk

that must be moved

to safety.

Even an already dead wasp

receives its proper burial.

What now?

A path different forward?

                  Dead cats?

                  Steel bullets?

                  Missiles, secret drones?

Watch.

My son, his father

– a slug-saver himself-

lies out on the sand

with his boy.

Together they cry

and thus save the day

and humankind.

(Which far off, out of sight is still killing.)

But here,

   on this beach,

   the waves wash

   right.

Teacups in the Garden on Mother’s Day

I am mad at everyone

   but

not wanting to be seen.

   I leave

and make my own way

with a chicken sandwich, and apple  

and a thermos

   of tea

   on my bike

   which I love so much —

Because then I don’t owe

   any thing

     to

   any one.

Not even the Earth.

She doesn’t care

   about days

   and ways.

She doesn’t listen to

   our plans

and supplications,

but prepares

to brush us off.

The Garden

     is just

      lit up with green

    so fine.

It is best this day

     to be alone

    to drop a stone

   into the pool with

     lily pads.

A stone which leaves

     no ripple.

Today, mother’s day, is

     her birthday

     which every year

      I mark.

Today she would have been

     67

Not an eternal murdered 26.

Today I come

   not mad anymore

   just alone.

In the path by

   a bench

   someone has left fine

     china tea cups.

Three of them with dimpled plates

    plus two

    more

    orphaned saucers.

They’re full of water,

    from the pond?

    for the birds?

I stop and eat my snack

   and decide to clean one,

   the smallest,

   with yellow roses,

   with my shirt,

   for my drink.

As I drink

   I notice another one has gilt

   that says

   “mother.

On a whim

   I take that one

   to the pond

   and send it afloat

   a top a lily pad.

I blink

   and

the saucer sinks

leaving Mother stranded

   on a round green leaf.

I am embarrassed.

I look around.

Have I sunk

   someone’s party?

For a while I try

   in vain

   to get the saucer

   from the muck.

My sleeves are wet,

   the stick, pointless

   then suddenly

I put the cup under water too

   and watch

   as in an instant

   it goes down.

I wonder what else

   lies in here

   beneath the green, green

   water.

Lily, Lily, Lily, Beatríz?

I stack the surviving china but

the yellow one I wrap up

   in my sandwich bag —

   I take it home.

Poets

I am stuck

   beside an endless train

   hypnotizing as it

passes passes passes

warning bell

     telling us

     just in case.

If I were inside

   it would

shift — that sound

ting ting ting

dang

   dang

      dang.

Yet from here it

     marks the constant

     time, unchanging.

Who built these cars?

Who knows -still- how to make them go?

Who painted them

     then who tagged them

    with colour

     and

     shape so rough

and

delicate?

     HERE

right here

are the marks

   of poets

without

   jobs

or

   scholarships

or

   endownment

or

   grants

not

   whining

   just

   saying.

At first I can’t read

     their bulbous letter

     not meant for me.

But for each other,

   the other poets

   in the trainyard

   who look at them

   with admiration

   and with envy

party to the secret.

Rockit.

   Eat my words.

I have been absent for several months. With good reasons. My last check in was in Hyattsville, Maryland, with beloveds under attack from ICE. Then I was in M’nisota, just before they fell under attack — and courageously rose up in resistance. I was so very proud and moved to stay with one of the leaders of the Singing Resistance, before they were called into action. What a show of love and power, organization and care for one another, they displayed all winter. All that isn’t over yet.

I was so happy that before the fray hit the fan my friend and I were able to have a three-day fun holiday. We went to the zoo, the movies, a cat-cafe, a couple of bookstores, a couple of parks, and out for dinner once or twice. PLUS forty people came out to a report back from COP, and a selection of a reading from my poem, Leaf on Drum River.

Then my friend popped me on the midnight train across the north of the country, and two sleeps — and a bus ride — later I was back at the station. My son Axel and his kids picked me up, and drove me home to my Patti and the dog. I was sick with an awful cold by then. So I slept for a week. Then it was Christmas. The Sunday before Christmas I announced to my beloved parish of St. Barnabas that I would be resigning on March 1rst, after almost 13 years of loving ministry in New Westminster. Then came a flurry of tears and goodbyes, packing and cleaning. March 1rst was a big old love fest.

March 2nd I went off to the Penny Lou Cottage on Bowen Island. The idea was to spend a month putting together a book about the pilgrimage…. however …. I was summoned to Rome (!) Actually invited, to the inaugural meeting of the Platform for Mining Divestment. Yep. We launched it. Right in the Vatican press room, with all sorts of great people. Then I went back to try and write. It didn’t really work.

On April 11th I headed south again — to Colombia. After COP30 didn’t rise to the occasion, or even remember that the whole climate crisis circles around the burning of fossil fuels, Colombia and the Netherlands, and 80 other countries proposed to create a new movement forward. A meeting was called for late April in Santa Marta, Colombia. Since December I have been working with various faith-based networks on a parallel support meeting of spiritual and religious groups in Santa Marta. That is happening on Friday. I am almost there on site.

In the meantime I have been in Colombia for 11 days, visiting communities of resistance from the mountains of Antioquia to the valleys beneath the Sierra Nevada. I have been writing. I have my first Epistle to drop tonight.

So THANKS for waiting for me to catch my breath. And WELCOME to all the new subscribers. Thanks for coming on board as we exercise our Mad Love for the World.

see you later tonight — there will be mules!

love, Emilie

I had said I wanted one day to ride a donkey. For biblical reasons, comfort reasons, even just to be funny — who knows? I haven’t yet been on a donkey — but I got to ride a mule. Even better.

Profe Jorge, humble agronomist in a weathered t-shirt, and a stiff, dusty black fedora, takes the lead on his mule, Chibolita. He holds onto my beast, el Moro, with a thin rope. El Moro wants to push ahead, but I pull the red thick rope — that one is your brake, said Don Alejo, our mule man. El Moro drops back behind, resigned, obedient, surefooted. The river appears around a twist down the rocky road, and in we wade, clop, clop, until the water reaches the bottom of my gumboots and starts rising. My feet laugh, kicking in the stirrups at the loud, urgent water. Something floods me: delight, terror? That kind of scared when you know — probably — it will all work out fine.

We are coming down, the four of us, from a two-day visit to the Chontadura Alta Indigenous Resguardo, four hours by foot, two by bestia, up and down and up again, high into the hills of Western Colombia. There is Profe Jorge, Yolanditha, a community leader from the CONPAZCOL network — Yoli and I had just met a few days earlier, and were fast becoming best friends, Don Alejo, a local campesino elder, with hard creases baked into his face, and me. Along for the ride, for the love, for the community.

Yoli, with human rights activist, Edwin Mosquera, had picked me up at the bus station in Medellin. We spent the night in the CONPAZCOL compound, me on the side of a slidey sofa. We were up at dawn and out the door. Edwin took us five hours by curvy paved road up to the last town, Frontina. There we had breakfast: beans, meat, cheese, arepas, patacones, eggs, coffee, chocolate. Then Edwin turned back to Medellin. Yoli and I packed into the front seat of a chiva, an open-air bus — seats but no sides — painted with rebellious joy, colours to match the flowers hiding in the forest, an incredible machine. Where no normal car could go, or a soft bus, this thing ploughed ahead with a roaring motor that would impress — if one were to be impressed by such things.

From Frontina we bounced along dirt, mud and rock, claiming to be a road, eight more hours into the green, green mountains of Antioquia. Flashes of flower spotted the forest – sun yellow, brighter-than-pumpkin orange, purple, white, cloaked in beauty, in life and water, covering a history of violence. Two of the tremendous tires on the chiva blew out along the way. Huge, coiled snakes once deflated, the inner tubes were rassled to the ground by a crew of six-or-so soiled men. They all seemed delighted with their important work to do. The driver led his crew, throwing tools and himself, around and under the bus.

It didn’t matter how long the day would take. We laughed, poured off the chiva and lolled about. The second flat happened close enough for us to climb a hill in the rain and take shelter in Doña Marta’s best-chorizos-in-the-whole-wide-world shack. We went out back to the smoke house where they glistened by their hundreds all in a dangling heap, ready for slicing and frying. Served with hot agua de panela. The rain crashed down on the tin roof and evaporated the world around. The chorizos spat and sizzled. What more could a person ask for?

At last, the tire was set again. Yoli and I squeezed back in beside our hero, the driver, who yanked the gear sift and twisted the steering wheel. A cut on his right arm dripped blood as if to prove his commitment to the mission. Chiva, the only way into and out of Blanquita Murrí, except a determined 4 by 4 or the motorcycles that whizzed on by when cracks opened between the mud and the rocks. And a confident mula here or there.

We arrived hours later than planned, but waiting was my friend Candelaria, also a community leader from CONPAZCOL. We had met last year on a night bus to Buenaventura. She had sung the skipping song about Simon Bolivar, that ended up in my Epic Poem, Leaf on Drum River. I couldn’t believe she had waited in town for us. We hugged but right away I was whisked off. I felt bad leaving, after she had staked out and waited for hours, but I couldn’t do much. We headed to our destination for the night: La Casa Madre. The Mother House, the place of peace.

—-

Civil war tore apart the Colombian countryside, byways, towns and cities for more than half a century. In 1948 reactionary forces assassinated progressive presidential candidate Jorge Eliecer Gaitan weeks before Colombians surely would have elected him to national office. The fighting that broke out after his murder was beyond anything Colombia had yet suffered. Simply called La Violencia, between 200,000 and 300,000 people were killed over the next decade.

In 1964 the Rebel Armed Forces of Colombia rose up, battling for power. Other left-wing armed groups also appeared including the ELN, formed in part by liberation theology Christians. In 1968 Roman Catholic priest and sociologist, Camilo Torres, took up arms. He had promoted the concept of Amór Eficáz, or effective love. He underscored that poverty was structural, not pre-ordained or accidental. He denounced the disparities that clove Colombian society and came to believe that nothing except revolution would change the country. But he wasn’t much of a fighter. Some say he couldn’t muster the will to pull the trigger on his gun; he was killed in combat during his first action. The army carried his body away hiding it and moving its location for almost sixty years. This past February his remains were finally returned to the organization in search of disappeared people. Until then, Fr. Torres, Camilo, was one of 100,000 Colombians who simply vanished during the civil war.

The war was never just between leftist guerrillas and a national army. Other armed elements emerged over time. Especially vicious were the right-wing controlled para-military forces, most often regular army combatants in civilian clothing, directed by ever more powerful illicit actors. Over the decades the coca business mixed into the power and money struggles. Cocaine became a huge source of revenue for all the different blocks and small-time coca leaf farmers were tangled into the fray.

Attempts at peace came about over time, but nothing stuck. In the early 1980s truce talks convinced the FARC to turn themselves into a legal political party. They formed the Union Patriotica and quickly began to win power electorally. Then between 1986 – 1990 a ferocious campaign of extermination was unleashed against the UP. Paramilitary forces hunted down and wiped out top national leaders, dozens of mayors, and thousands of grassroots activists. The Union Patriotica was effectively beheaded. FARC sank back into the jungles and mountains.

By the 2010s talks began again and in December 2016 the FARC and the Colombian government signed a Peace Accord, laying to rest the longest running civil war in Latin America. Over a million people had died in a hundred years of clashes. Half a million had been uprooted from their homes and displaced, mostly within the country.

Disarmament, reintegration of fighters and rural land reform were the foundation of the Accord. Other non-signatory players, the remnant of the ENL guerrilla group, the paramilitaries, the drug barons and their entangled forces all continued to circle, snapping at power where they could. It is estimated that still a third of the Colombian economy is tied up in illicit shadow organizations.

This leads us to the Mother House of Peace in Blanquita, Murrí. Murrí, in the high, remote western mountains in the state of Antioquia, had been a region controlled by the FARC. After the 2016 accords community leaders emerged and reemerged, creating the Interethnic Council for Peace. Interethnic because Indigenous, Afro-descendant and campesino communities overlapped. It was essential that they come together and co-create a regional plan for community thriving. Circling still were the para-military groups and their shadowy bosses, threatening violence always, and sometimes enacting it.

—-

Yoli and I spend the night on mattresses on the floor, with mosquito netting, and a light blanket. When the morning sun sneaks in between the wooden slats of our shelter I push my body out of bed, untangle the netting, and stand up. Roosters and dogs have been racketing for hours already. The sun shines through the clouds and the clouds are sprinkling. A fat rainbow covers the Casa Madre.

The structure is a huge, open-air circle. A tough high metal roof, and little cap on top the roof, rest on a complex network of fat interlaced bamboo posts. A cement floor smooths the ground. Piled on one side are plastic chairs, maybe sixty or more. About ten plastic tables. Wire and metal posts rest in a heap. There are banners and signs everywhere, pointing to workshops and community gatherings. Thanking sponsors and supporters: the embassy of Great Britian(!), the International Lutheran Church, Fellowship of Reconciliation. When the Madre was opened friends came from every region of Colombia and from as far away as Finland. Everyone brought seeds and little plants, which are in the ground around the compound as a sign of hope. At the opening ceremony CONPAZCOL leader Phanor welcomed each visitor. Phanor, an Indigenous leader from the Wuila region in southern Colombia was assassinated three years ago. A youth movement, Phanor es Semilla carries his name.

Profe Jorge has been up for a while already. We had nodded at each other last night. Doña Maribel, the actual mother of the Casa Madre, had given us hot drinks when we arrived and we had all been introduced: Profe Jorge, visiting agronomist, and activist from Cajamarca. Roberto, a loud, happy campesino, a local guy, ready to tease and to work. Promising to marry me off to some likely man in the community. I sighed, pointing to my wedding ring. Doña Maribel, survivor of the civil war with her two sons, Juan and Oscar, now padres de familia. This family has donated their extensive land, the property of their grandparents, and their grandparents before them, to the Casa, and live still at the entrance, with dogs, geese, and chickens, and a mother cat and a kitten. Oscar’s three-year old daughter, Maria Belem, was zooming around still. Her mother, Sandra was busy catching her and carting her off to bed. Belem delivered heartfelt wails in protest. We all talked until drooping. Then to bed. And to rise.

Jorge has his gumboots on now. The two varieties of footwear in this region are gumboots and flip-flops. I soon find out why. After breakfast at Maribel’s fire, we pull on boots. We head out to inspect the property. CONPAZCOL and Jorge’s group, Semillas de Agua, have created a youth agro-ecological school here. They meet once a month, or sometimes more, for three days and work on four projects: fishpond construction, small pig raising, bees for honey wax and pollen, and vegetable gardening.

We visit each site. Especially the many fishponds, set into a swampy area. Shluck. Shluck go our feet. Little mojaras and tilapia and bigger ones, and biggest ones still. Ready for snacking. Up to the pig pen. Roberto is washing it out. The pigs are really cute. Their noses schnuffle and wiggle. I didn’t know their noses did that. I am looking at them sweetly, yet also, guiltily, wondering which part is the ham, and which part the bacon. Yoli and I have a laugh later as we confess we had both been thinking those two sides of the situation.

Jorge is working with the kids on a project of turning the pig poop into methane gas, to power something else in the compound. It seems a couple of the youth are interested in the conversation around energy transition. That could work here. One solar panel would be fine for a family: light, washing machine, maybe even eventually a non-fire pit cooking construction. So much sun!

The vegetables are growing in tall bamboo trestles: tomatoes, chilli, onions, herbs, lula (a fruit for delicious drinks) and other items. Back behind the Casa is the beginning of a greenhouse. Plans are afoot for reforesting, trees, flora, and orchids.

The kids from Blanquita will come on Saturday. Today we are having a quieter time of rest, and preparation for the hike (possible mule ride) up to Chontaduro tomorrow.

The day is quiet, peaceful. I slouch in the hammock under the metal roof of La Casa and rock with my feet, pushing on the floor. Yoli is writing reports on her laptop around the curve of the house. Suddenly she’s standing. Happiness in her voice.

“Hola don Alejo!” she’s crying out. I turn my head and see an older man. Immediately I bounce out of my sleepiness. I come over. Don Alejo must be in his seventies. He wears a wide-brimmed straw head, a button-up shirt. Dusty worn blue jeans. Machete tucked into its case on his belt. He answers loud and singing. “Hola!”

“I have sweets because life is bitter,” he says. He is holding a bag full of green plastic wrapped lollipops. I take one, reluctantly. I know I’m about to get a mouthful of fake colour, and spun sugar. My surprise: just a mashed glob of coconut and unrefined brown panela with a stick in it. No hard gum in the middle! Sweet, nutty and chewy. Yum. I could eat these all day. It turns out I will. I get handed one at every opportunity, by Don Alejo, then by Yoli. I start hoarding them in my mochila.

We talk. Don Alejo talks mostly. He has a lot to say. A whole life of living in the war. Of surviving. Of trying to do what he loves. Take care of his land. His beasts. His wife. His kids. Trying to learn: he knows a thing or two about Marx and Lenin! I can tell what side was teaching here.

“I was never a fighter,” he assures me. “But I was a miliciano. It was hard. Six kids to feed and me working every day for the causa. We did our best. Take care of our people. Take care of our land. That’s all that matters,” he says. He pauses and lowers his voice. “I was a signer of the Accord.” I nod, duly impressed.

This is a man who knows more than most about what matters, and about who matters. He says, with deep regret, that the doctor has ordered him to slow down. “My ticker isn’t working like it should,” he says, massaging his chest. “I’m not supposed to get too happy. Or too mad. I’m not supposed to work very hard.”

I look at him, his face, at the noble wrinkles baked in there by sun and suffering, by joy and hard work. There’s no way he can slow down much. We change subjects.

“I’m coming with you tomorrow,” he says. “And I’m bringing my mula.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” I say. I’m embarrassed. I was sort of joking when I said I wanted a donkey. I didn’t mean to make a fuss. To stand out. To be needy. I can walk for two hours. Or more. At least I can in the cool forests of Canada.

“I’m not worrying,” he says. “I’m bringing the mule. You can ride it or not. We can cart supplies up. It is an act of gratitude. For you.”

I hang my head, blush, a bit ashamed. I’ve done nothing but show up. I’m not bringing anything; I’m not leaving anything. I won’t be fundraising back home. I’m not teaching great skills like Jorge, or keeping track of projects, like Yoli. I don’t have a deep analysis or plans of action, like Maru, Enrique and Edwin, from CONPAZCOL. But I guess showing up is something. And for some reason I just can’t help loving everyone madly. They notice. I get loved right back.

Gracias, I say. He and Yoli talk a lot more, about who’s who. Who’s sick. Someone named Don Hugo, Modesto’s father. It is coming to his end. Who’s creating trouble in the countryside. Who’s selling their land in a one off to the miners. I listen, and after a while, retreat into my own brain, my memories, my love of this country, Colombia. My love for the continent Abya Yala, Guatemala, Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, Panama, Brazil, Peru, Argentina, Ecuador. For all those who have stood up and fought the monsters. The monsters of Canadian mining companies, and of the narco-terrorists. The students and the professionals, the poets and the priests, the nuns and the Indigenous leaders, the Afros, and the river people.

I think of how now, again, grotesquely, repugnantly, viciously, the United States of America and their loco, enfermo presidente, has threatened — and acted — shitting all over this region— and elsewhere. Tío Caiman, los Gringos, los Yanquis, los mismos de siempre. He has no idea that the people hold the answer. How to live. What to do. They are furious but stubborn.

Don Alejo and Yoli chat, and Jorge too. Oscar comes into the circle for a while, putting down his machete. Roberto is back in the bamboo grove by the river. He walks by cheerfully every half an hour or so with another long, sturdy log. I wonder what he is up to.

At last, after much talk Alejo leaves. We eat again in Doña Maribel’s kitchen. I wash my undies and a shirt and leave them to dry under the roof of the shelter. The shower is delicious. One high stream from the faucet. Cold water. Brush teeth. Look for stars. Notice fireflies. Rejoice! Bed.

November 23, 2025

Well, this is truly heartbreaking. Horrifying. All the videos I have seen, the fragile humans on the ground, hauled away, in handcuffs, lives smashed wide open. Here it is. Now I am sitting with the survivors, the terrified.

“Eight kidnapped,” says Padre Vidal. He can’t believe that his ministry has turned in to this. Coming from war, living in another war here, caring for the victims, planning, plotting. How to stand up and be strong when those around him are terrified? About eighty have just left and gone back home, he tells me. The choir leader, the lady in the kitchen, two workers in the daycare. Mothers have been left with children and no way to pay the rent. Vicitims of human trafficking, who have no resources at all arrive on their doorstep.

Here they are. Padre Vidal, Angelita, his wife, and all the others, Deacon Sally, the women living in the parish house, the children, always with that business of being busy, of building the kin-dom here and now. Living day by day, listening, waiting, making pupusas, distributing food, fixing the furnace, finding a way to get a disabled girl to school, because her mother is too afraid to go out. Such cruelty turned against these people — who have done nothing!

Tears burn behind my eyes, and fall down. I try to hide them. Is this my suffering too? Ever since I was here earlier in the year, I have been thinking about these beloveds. Holding they in my daily prayers. Caring about them, knowing their stories. Listening, listening, no offers of false hope.

I arrive late on Saturday, walking right into the Vigil of the Eve of the Reign of Christ. They stuff a bun with beans into me, and then we’re into the church. This is precious. Lay people have written reflections, one after another, they read, and offer their faith to us all. Lovely hymns, the choir all dressed in red. But I am so tired, I excuse myself after the first hour, and find a bed in the busy house. I think I have bumped another son out of his room. There are photos of a boy, first baby, then toddler, then little boy, with Father’s Day cards, and toys, and an enormous bed with a dozen or so pillows. Wow. Fluffiness. I sleep. Sometimes I feel like I’m still rocking on a train- or maybe a boat. Not a bus. Buses don’t rock. They just swoop.

The next day is the Reign of Christ, the last Sunday of the year. Of course P. Vidal has asked me to preach and I am delighted. First in English, then in Spanish. What is a King? Who has power? What kind of God is our God, who is the maker of heaven and earth, but who refuses to use that power to save himself, or anyone else — yet in the end saves us all? Not a magician, not a shape shifter, no need for displays of grandeur. Here at San Mateo the Reign of Christ I notice has already broken out among us.

There are the usual 30 people for the 10 o’clock Mass (in English). For the 12 o’clock Mass (one of three in Spanish) there are several hundred, but down by at least a quarter. “People are afraid,” Padre Vidal says. “They don’t come to church. They watch on-line. Or they’ve just gone back to their home countries.” English-speaking neighbours come and stand before the locked doors. They patrol the parking lot.

I preach, and I also say most of the Mass. I did participate in quite a bit of church activities along the pilgrimage, especially in Manaus with Iuri, the Anglican priest. But this is my first full Mass in almost four months. “In memory, in memory of me.”

For the distribution of the elements, the bread and wine, Deacon Sally and I go down to the floor. Fifty children come first. I can’t stand it as little face after little face turns towards me: some are shy, some defiant, some hopeful. Each and everyone of them more precious than words can say. Then come the adults. Women who have worked, caring and cleaning. Men who look in shock, so vulnerable, so innocent. I’m just so darn sorry for their suffering. If I could bind up their wounds, I would. For now I just try to put out as much love as I can, that they may be shielded from further human cruelty. God knows if that’s any good. I firmly forbid myself to cry.

The service carries on. We pray for birthdays and anniversaries, for hopes emerging, for fears unfolding. We say goodbye to some who are returning to old homes this week. We pray for those disappeared. We hear about the posadas this year (no going outside from house to house. All will take place in the sanctuary of the church buildings.) Then we go down to feast in the hall. This happens every week.

After this, I just get sick. Really sick. Cough, cold, stuffy, headache. I sleep for days in my borrowed bed. The women ply me with medicine and teas. They all come by and bring me sweaters and a big parka for the next phase of the pilgrimage (Minnesota!). “You’re going to need this, Reverenda,” they say. Hats, gloves, socks. I’m ready. But I am leaving with a shredded heart.

Here is my article from April:

https://livingchurch.org/church-life/building-a-wall-of-faith/

“When global institutions fail it is up to civil society and the smaller countries to intervene.” Pope Francis

So, all the hoopla is done. The cab drivers are back to hunting for scarce fares in the streets of Belem. The fire (literally) is out. Everyone is heading home (like me) or home already (like mostly everyone else). The reports were given, the data analyzed, the positions declared, the poem read. The dance, the prayer, the song was offered. The suffering exposed, the fear revealed.

The fight happened. Did we win or lose? Did the earth win? Did the Indigenous communities succeed in having everyone listen? Where are we? And where are we going?

Did we pull the earth back from the edge? Not exactly. Did we think we would? Not really. Was it a disaster. Definitely not. Here is an analysis that has helped me understand what happened, offered by the Argentine Spanish priest, Fray Eduardo Agosto Scarel, advisor to Pope Francis in the writing of Laudato Si:

COP30 was a bittersweet moment. At the beginning of the second week the host government Brazil put forth an initial proposal that was truly prophetic: recognizing the rights of Indigenous peoples, the importance of the Amazon river and basin, and the need to address the ecological debt caused by historical omissions.

Brazilians offered the global Mutirão (work party, proposal, collective effort —word and concept in Tupi and Guarani — minga in Spanish) with concrete plans for a new world order based on structural justice. It was a strong attempt to lay down a framework that would have marked a solid turning away from fossil fuels.

The final document mauled over by the group of the whole (together with their fossil fuel lobbyists) was completely defanged. There was an erasure of any mention of a fossil fuel phaseout — in exchange for a vague wording around “carbon neutrality” — by 2050.

The final document fails in two senses:

1. This erasure of the explicit reference for the need to transition from fossil fuels.

2. The failure to secure sufficient financing (an estimated 1.3 billion dollars annually) in order to support the countries and regions most affected by the climate crisis.

Exposed in the COP gathering (which relies on consensus of the parties) was the underlying failure of the process, where one petroleum producer was able to cancel the ambition of the whole planet.

Thrillingly, an alternative has emerged:

Scheduled for April 2026 in Santa Marta, Colombia, a bloc of 80 countries, led by Colombia, Great Britain and the Netherlands will meet to create a Fossil-Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. This will be the beginning of the real work towards a just transition. Santa Marta could be checkmate, says Fray Eduardo, for the fossil fuel bloc.

Pope Francis said in Laudate Deum, “When global institutions fail it is up to civil society and the smaller countries to intervene.

If these countries can produce an agreement which would halt new exploration and begin to coordinate their own exit from fossil fuels, they will provoke a massive contradiction in our world-wide, on-going addiction to petroleum, gas, and coal. Powerfully, Colombia itself is an oil-producing country. Colombian leadership is crucial. They will model what sacrifice could look like and seek creative solutions, while not leaving behind the working people and communities who depend on the fossil fuel industry.

So, all eyes on Colombia: 2026.

In addition, here are my non-analytical highlights of the gathering:

1. Colombia. It was a great privilege to be associated with the Colombia COP delegation, through our earlier meeting, and on-going connection with Vice-Minister Tatiana Roa, and her staff. We were aware of the challenging work they were undertaking. They fought hard, especially at the end, to keep fossil fuel language in the final COP document. They lost that one, but it was a thrilling counter move to announce the Santa Marta conference next April. This is the greatest hope for high-level real change on the climate crisis.

2. Indigenous leadership. Evidenced by multiple delegations in every part of COP30. In the high-level meetings, (Brazilian Minister of Indigenous Affairs, Sonia Guajajara), and many others inside, and outside in the justified protests for full inclusion (the Flotilla Amazonica and others). The presence of Indigenous leaders in the Tapiri (the ecumenical and inter-religious gathering), in the green zone (official part of COP, open to all, not accredited) and in the Peoples’ Summit offered the perspective we need in this time of transition. La Reposta Somos Nos, We are the Answer. The best short statement.

3. Bishops of the South. The three Cardinals from the South, and their no words held back declaration: “A Call for Climate Justice and the Common Home.” Liberation theology is back in force, and here it is: radical economic and energetic transition, an end to green-washing and false solutions, attention to the global impoverished nations, and their right to the fullness of life. Christians everywhere can sign on to this theologically sound document and use it to challenge the false gods of greed and violence.

4. The Tapiri. A deep, two-year project organized and hosted by the Anglican church within Brazil and a two-week program as part of the Peoples’ Summit. The same morning I tripped and twisted my ankle, and I couldn’t understand anything official, and the Blue Zone was totally overwhelming, we arrived at the Tapiri and the Aotearoa-New Zealand leaders were holding the space in prayer. It was a physical, tactile, body-prayer, with singing and chanting (in Maori). I knew then that the Creator of Heaven and Earth loves us all, and my stress vanished (the ankle was bound up later in the Blue Zone).

The Vigil for the Earth, also organized out of the Tapiri and then in procession to a local square (watch out for the white cranes that run the place, and drop bombs on unsuspecting people). At the Vigil, I ran into my old friend, Juscelio, who I had met in Rome at the Amazonian Synod. There was much praying, singing, declaring, and then in the end, samba! Samba dancing (badly and with a busted ankle) next to the Primate of Brazil. That was a great moment.

5. The March. On Saturday the 15th an uncountable number (tens of thousands?) marched in the absolute baking sun. Abilio and Sulman were flowing with a giant blue river as part of the Laudato Si movement, but I wanted to see more things, so I wandered. Wow! It was like demonstration/carnival . . . Costumes and puppets and signs. Capoeira, dancing, singing. It was so good to be together.

6. The Poem. After all the travelling and meeting, the listening and sharing, the different beds and food, the faces and the stories of heartbreak and survival. Writing this poem across the weeks, finishing it while rocking in a hammock on the Amazon River. Working with Margarita and making it sing in Spanish. I can’t believe we did it. Thanks to the Colombians who thought this was something worth lifting up. I can’t believe that I read a 40-minute long poem, in Spanish, at COP30. It was the best way to translate and carry the story of love I have shared over these months.

So, COP ended. I finished my pilgrimage to Belem. I wrote the poem. I read the poem. Then I left. On the road home now. Does a pilgrimage end at the pilgrimage site? What about the going home? It feels long, drawn out. But it would be worse just to leave the meeting and wake up in Vancouver. This journey home feels right and necessary. I caught that dratted cold that the Sister in Belem had. So, I am sleeping, drinking tea, masked and trying not to breathe on all the people in this busy household.

Tonight, I climb about the night train to Chicago. Then to Minneapolis…and, I can hardly believe it. By this time in a week from now, I’ll be home.

Then to start thinking about Santa Marta

!

November 19, 2025

I make a new best friend on the way up to the Blue Zone. The cab driver and I mostly understood each other. I forget, and then remember, the word for ice cream. If I were here for a few months, Portuguese and me could get along. It is very exhausting trying to make sense of the world in a different language. Alas, and Hurray, this is the end. Tomorrow I leave for Miami, then Amtrack to D.C. Some time with Vidal and the San Mateo community, then on to Chicago, and Minneapolis/St. Paul, my parents’ hometowns. Then on the Empire Builder (ugh) to Seattle. And then home. Chaucer doesn’t say a word about the road home. The point was to get to your pilgrimage destination. But I also have to get home. I can hardly wait.

Today was another day in the zone. Coughing a bit, but not too bad. I try the Portuguese pavilion for coffee. Very good. I head to Room 5 and the Canadians. I am so impressed with these folks, and their handle on the whole proceedings. What to expect. Where to push. What to do. Here is who we need to connect with…CAN-RAC. Here are the best daily updates: Eco . . .at climatenetwork.org.

We are at the mid-point of the last week. Today is the turning point, say the facilitators in the Canada situation room, the day to get things done. Big things today, then wrap up tomorrow and Friday. Lula is coming this afternoon, and the Secretary General of the UN, Gutierrez. There never was an announcement from the Colombians about transitioning away from fossil fuels. It maybe that Petro’s promise prodded Lula and the Brazilians. Lula wants a big prize. He wants to be seen as a bringer of big change. Never mind that he just signed away petroleum concessions elsewhere, not too far from here. We shall see what happens to wrap things up.

BAM will be the word from COP30. Watch for it. Belem Action Mechanism. There has to be a way forward. Watch for CAN-RAC and for next steps on how to take action in Canada.

Samuel, from A Rocha, is here. We wander away together. He has arranged for me to give an interview to someone working on a podcast for Christianity Today. We are going to the big globe, my favourite place in the Blue Zone. We have a good talk as we take the kilometre-long journey to the cold, white, globe area. I confess to him that I am confused, and that I have been confused since I arrived at the conference.

“A-ha!” he responds. “Right on schedule. Especially for your first COP.” (I don’t know if there will be another one for me.)

“I never knew where to be, or what to do,” I tell him. “I’m not sure I contributed anything.”

We find our interviewers, and a kinda quiet spot. We talk for an hour. They are from the States. They are worried too. Their government sent absolutely no one and denies that climate change is a real thing.

I share the story of the people I met along the way these past more than three months. Joy and suffering. In the end it is “A Reposto Somos Nos”. We are the Answer. The communities know what to do, and they are doing it. They know the way. Indigenous presence may have been higher at this COP, much higher, but have they been there in the centre of every decision? I don’t know. I know we have much luta (struggle) ahead of us.

“Being here at COP has been for me, at least, symbolic,” I say to Samuel as we head back into the blue.

“More than symbolic,” he answers. “You have opened pathways for love. Symbolic, and also real.”

Saying goodbye to Samuel, and with promises to reconnect in Vancouver, I wonder again about my journey. What was I hoping for? Did I reach my goal? I never had a goal. Except to journey, to listen, to write, to fall in love, to stand with those who have never forgotten to love this earth. To learn, humbly, and not extractively, from them. All that has happened.

I run for the bus in the rain. I ride for a long while surrounded by petroleum lobbyists (they had paper fans with that printed on it!) They were laughing loudly and talking (I don’t know what language.) They seem to be having a grand old time. I hadn’t taken the bus back to the Sisters yet, and I wasn’t sure where I was going. The bus was travelling more or less in the right direction, but suddenly it turned and starting sloshing through the rain away from where I needed to go. I jumped off.

It was still pelting down. Thunder, lightning, sheets and sheets of ran. THIS is what they mean when they say “tropical downpour”. I skipped into and stayed in a bus shelter for about half an hour, waiting for the deluge to diminish. Across from us was a big park filled with dripping trees. With me were about 10 women, all Belem folk, no doubt. We got chatting (as best I could), and laughing, which is good in every language. “A Reposta Somos Nos.” Laughing, wet, friends. I think we’re going to be okay.

CHURCH

It is the anniversary again. Of course it comes every year. I never forget, even though I never shared my living time with them. Around the world, I know, people are remembering, lighting candles, saying their names:

Ignacio Ellacuria, Segundo Montes, Ignacio Martin-Baro, Amando Lopez, Joaquin Lopez y Lopez, Juan Ramon Moreno, Elba and Celina Ramos. Six Jesuit university professors, their housekeeper and her daughter. Murdered in the early hours of November 16, 1989, by members of El Salvador’s elite army unit, the Atlacatl Battalion — also tied to the assassination of Monseñor Romero in 1980.

I think this quietly, as we head over to the Anglican Cathedral, the Ecumenical space for this year’s COP. Under the leadership of the Most Rev. Marinez Bassotto, the Brazilians organized a series of ecumenical and inter-religious gatherings around the country over the past year and a half, and called them Tapiri, a north-east Amazonian indigenous concept of a place of rest, a temporary shelter. All in preparation for COP30. Today will be their last gathering.

The Anglican cathedral is small, dignified, pleasant. The church arrived here over a hundred years ago, to serve the English-speaking ex-pat community. It has evolved, taken on national leadership, identity and issues. Now it is a small, thriving, active, inclusive place to be a Christian. I am happy here. I love my Roman Catholic friends. Indeed, I work mostly with them and have for decades. Their church is so huge, and powerful. When it steers towards holy things like radical inclusiveness, justice, care for the poor, and for creation, I am completely aligned. When the Men get paraded out, and the women are either absent or silent, when lgbtq2s+ matters are ignored, I just walk away. Not my battle. Not my problem.

Sometimes it can be hard to manage both these things. Here at COP too. When the cardinals from Asia, Africa and Latin America make their prophetic statement about realigning our entire human civilization to raise up creation care as our centrl goal, I am with them. I appreciate their power and voice, their ability to mobilize and to stand, radically. When I see the erasure or plain ignoring of women —me included — I shake my head. Dr. Emilce Cuda, the highest-level woman in the Papal team here at COP just drives her bus straight through the dust. She just takes her space. She says she doesn’t have time for the struggle for women’s inclusion in the church — that struggle belongs to others. I don’t have time for that either, but for different reasons. This is a long story about why I am SO happy to be in the Tapiri.

We are gathering for the final prayers. Everyone is invited. People from everywhere read, pray, sing, cry, hug, give thanks. We muddle through Spanish, English, Portuguese. The creation of the Tapiri space has been transformative for those connected to it, and for those, like me, just visiting. Its a place where, if things aren’t exactly the way they should be, there is space for that struggle to happen.

I am embarrased to say I started to cry when we held hands and sang, “Todu esta interligado como se fossemos um, todu esta interligado nessa casa comun.” We are all connected, we all belong in this common house. I learned this song at the Amazonian synod. When Pope Francis and Edna and others planted an oak tree, when I first connected with the people of this elemental river. This river which can never be really known, is the treasure, so profound, of its holy people who have cared for it from time out of mind. And now it is under threat by the greed and violence of forever.

One statement says everything. It is actually the words I have been seeking along the whole pilgrimage: A Reposta Somos Nos. We are the answer. Yep. We could all stop talking and go home if we let that be true. We don’t need to talk for two weeks. The communities are the answer. They know what to do. They have always known. They need to be left alone. The pillaging needs to stop. That is our only job.

We go to more meetings. More melting in the heat. More talking. We, here from Nigeria, the Philippines, South Africa, India. Then Sulman, Abilio and I walk home to Sisters’ place in the dark evening. The streets are cobbled and tricky. The buildings are old, dignified and decaying. Cats and rats slink in the shadows. The street dogs are all resting in some corner or another. Tomorrow will be another day of scrapping. I am tired. I am weary of all this talking. And listening. A Reposta Somos Nos. La respuesta somos nosotros. We are the answer.

Amen.

NOVEMBER 17, 2025

BACK TO THE BLUE

Monday morning. Week two. Sulman is sick. Abilio has been sick. Sister Maria Carmo, our host, (a medical doctor) was sick my first few days here. It is making the rounds. I have been saved so far. Sulman stays to rest and Abilio and I head out to the Blue Zone.

There are now rows and rows of military and anti-riot police at the entryway. Huge, heavy guns. Impossibly young men, fingers ready on their triggers. Full uniforms, and protective gear over all their clothes. Good God they must be hot. Helicopters fly overhead. Moving into the cordoned off area its like a war is underway. I wonder who the enemy are. I head to the Canadians meeting. Good updates all around. Abilio heads to more Bishops and Emilce meetings. I join him after we are done. It may be the last time I see Beth and co. I think they leave tomorrow. So do the SICSAL Colombians. Hmmm.

I am supposed to be reading a sliver of The Poem in English at a Vatican-sponsored event this evening. Gulp.

It feels tense, not just because of the police/army, but because there is a war going on in here. How are we going to push this thing forward? Tomorrow there is also supposed to be an announcement from Colombia: they will be moving now into an active and fair fossil-fuel transition. Brazil is annoyed. Colombia stole the show. The Colombia announcement may be postponed. Brazil may join (though Lula just gave some concessions to Big Oil to tear apart a part of the Amazon). Something is happening.

Little old me in the meantime. I’m not sure what to do. I don’t really belong in these halls. There aren’t a lot of poets here. I don’t know where I should go.

I kind of can’t stand it. I would rather be fishing with Mago. I’m glad I came to see what I saw, to say what I did, to witness to this process, to fight for more. But in some way, I don’t know where to throw my shoulder.

I go and sit under the globe, my best thinking place.

My favourite moment: Abilio are looking for the green zone, the other half of COP, where you don’t need credentials. The English reading is to be here, we think. Well, rushing down the halls we see a very distinguished Indigenous woman sharing a moment with an older also very distinguished gentleman. They appear to be excited, lots of gestures. Portuguese-speaking. She is Sonia Guajajara, whispers Abilio, Brazilian Minister for Indigenous Peoples. The fellow seems overwhelmed. She heads off with her entourage. I move up to him, and we chat, in English. He is Carlos Nobre, co-chair of the Brazilian Science Panel for the Amazon. He has been working on protection of the Amazon his whole career.

”Wow,” he says, shaking his head, almost in tears. “I’ve been having meetings for 42 years. This was the most important one.”

We are rushing. The Green Zone. Something completely different. Like a giant market, with conferences happening, also things for sale on blankets on the ground. Booths. Action, movement. No suits. Or even business casual. We haven’t got time to stop. A very helpful young man tries to help us. Nope. We need to be going to the Amazon Museum. That’s downtown.

We swim through the throngs, miraculously find a cab, and are off. We find the museum and make our way up to the Vatican event. We wait with the crowds for the herd of cardinals. There is to be the premier of a video clip from Pope Leo, directly for COP30. Then the handing over to the museum of a beautiful rainbow-coloured fishnet that was a gift to Pope Francis during the Amazon Synod. I remember the net.

The cardinals aren’t here yet… they will be an hour still, we are told. Come see around our exhibits. We go. They are wonderful. One of the co-curators of the museum is the Indigenous anthropologist . . . At last the cardinals arrive. We watch the video, the net is delivered, and then we are rushed out as another event is scheduled. I quietly put The Poem away.

We head out into the night, and home. I am more than tired. Now I am coughing. My throat hurts.

TUESDAY. NOVEMBER 18th.

Sulman and Abilio leave at 5am.

I am sick.

I sleep until 10.

I do laundry and string it along the Sisters’ balcony.

I go out when it gets cooler to buy some fruit and I get wet in the warm rain.

Tomorrow will be my last day in Belem. I will go for one last shot at the Blue

.

November 14, The Poem.

Nothing happened this day. Except I read The Poem. That happened (!) After the days and nights of writing it out by hand with the giraffe pen I received as a gift from Heidi in El Paso, then typing it up on this little device. Then bashing through it with Margarita. Then doing that again in Spanish. Writing in hammocks, swinging on boats, in small rooms in the different houses of hospitality, thinking about it all the time. Listening to the people, receiving their words. Holding them with tender care, with grief, with hope, with fierceness. This day it became real.

Of course, that’s not all that happened, or didn’t happen, on November 14th at the Conference of the Parties, in Belem, Brazil. We arrived at the usual gate at the Blue Zone. You have to come through a first gate (minimal security, everyone gets through) and walk for a kilometre or two to the main entrance. We arrived at our usual time. I wanted to get to the meet and greet with the Canadian minister of the environment. 9am. (Thank heavens for Beth Lorimer of KAIROS, she has kept me in the Canadian loop. I am so pleased to be somewhere in the vicinity of her and her people, Silvia and others.)

But just after the first insecure gate, a massive bottleneck was piling up. It took a while to figure out, and even later to get the fuller picture. The Munduruku Amazonian people had blockaded the entry. They are standing for their land, the water, their river. And end to mining and mercury poisoning. Against the use of their river for commerce. Against predatory tourism. Abilio moves forward to catch the story, sees some of the group, and a friend or two forming a cordon around them, as they moved off the blockade and into a meeting room offsite. The Brazilian ministers of Indigenous affairs, and of the environment, and the president of COP were to meet with them later this morning. My hat goes off to them. This should be their meeting entirely.

Once inside I have missed the meeting with the Canadian minister, so I head down to catch my first of the daily meetings with the Canadian crew at the talks. I know no one but Beth, but these seem to be the real veterans of the meetings and the COP process. They have a lot to say. Mostly disgust with our own government. Carney didn’t show up at all. The minister and her assistant are leaving today. There will be no high level Canadian participation. Yuck anyway. There is NO hope for them to be standing high for actual change. Then I hear the most disgusting news of all: there is one fossil fuel lobbyist inside this meeting to every 25 people. They are here, green-washing, obfuscating, pulling it all down and apart, nicely, in suits, basically killing us all.

I am not up for heading from meeting to meeting today. And I’m not going to pay another $25 for a sandy salad. I have a cheese sandwich, and I know where to get free good coffee (almost everywhere). I sit under the giant blow-up rotating earth for a while. I end up meeting briefly with Martha Jarvis, our highest level Anglican at the meeting, and I also translate between Abilio and the head of Franciscans International: the first time an Anglican has held this role! But then I head back to a corner to eat my cheese sandwich and read over the Spanish poem.

Abilio and Sulman have helped get it in shape, Gerardo has made posters of the story, with QR codes for the full poem in Spanish and in English. We have these as little slips of paper to hand out. I sit and look up and watch Antarctica with all its ice still intact slowly rotate above me. Every once and a while Australia rolls by.

Abilio and Sulman check in with me occasionally, and skirt around to their own meetings. I just can’t. I close my eyes and see Willivaldo in Juarez, Sister Marleen in Guatemala, don Gilberto in Jericó. I see Fray Manuel in front of me on the motorcycle (where is the most polite place to cling to a Franciscan monk while dipping and zipping through the streets of Tabatinga?) I see Iuri and Isabel, and doña Elsa who fried the fish that Mago and I caught in the river. The lawyers in Oaxaca, the buscadoras looking for their children across Jalisco and further, the sisters everywhere who made this work. The brave people, the sad people, the ones working like mad in their gum boots or their flip flops to make enough to eat this day and the next. What are they all saying?

Life is wonderful and hard. The world is fragile, and it can be unforgiving. People can be vicious and cruel, and also generous and forgiving. Dogs are good. Cats too. The planet is indescribably beautiful: there are parrots and tiny frogs, flowers and fruits beyond imagining. There are snakes in the jungle and crocodiles in the river, even when you can’t see them, and also dolphins and white cranes. There are tiny yellow birds, and hummingbirds. There are nuns and brothers, priests and bishops, there are gifted Indigenous knowledge keepers and fighters and preservers. There are people whose ancestors were terrifyingly brought to these lands as slaves, and have held on, despite the absolute worst human cruelty, to their sense off the world. There are people of the river making things work. They live in houses that guard a scent like protection and safety. They can tell if you are fake or phony, or if you think of them as attractions, curiosities, or if you are engaging in extractive tourism.

All this I carry to the mike in the Colombia pavilion. There are 29 pages of this stuff. I bought some fresh white pants to wear. I haven’t really eaten, but I’m feeling nauseous anyway. We start late. The Vice is there, and then not, and then there again. It is a long time for her to sit. The wonderful Julianna, a Colombian Mennonite who has been working and praying for our planet for decades comes and brings a big group of youth. Martha Jarvis is there. The Venezuelan Presbyterian pastor is here. A bunch of Colombians. Amy, the scientist from San Francisco. She is in the first part of the poem.

I’m reading in Spanish, and my Spanish is far from perfect. Margarita who knows the language inside every corner of it, who has been translating me for 33 years, has brought it into beauty. I read. Declaim. My throat hurts. Can I do it? I must. Could I cut something? I worry about the students who are reading along in English on their phones. They would get lost if I jumped around. I don’t break for a minute but breathe and read. I could never look at a recording of myself though. Ugh.

Anyway, it is done. I am done. I did it. All you, my beloveds. Here we are. I promised and longed to bring you all with me here. I don’t know if it will make a snake of difference in this faulted, fierce faculty. But here we are, are, standing and speaking. Amen.

(After this I am whisked away to sit on a panel about Laudato Si, and The Letter, a movie made by friends of Pope Francis about the encyclical, and the real-life situation of five young people. Precious. And on the panel with me are none other than Lorna Gold, original coordinator of the Laudato Si movement, Yeb Saña, Sulman and the head of the End Fossil Fuel movement.

I’m so hungry now. That cheese sandwich was a long time and one epic poem ago. Fortunately, there are events happening all over the city, even in this very building, a beautiful old theatre. We are invited to go and grab ourselves a drink at the fun bar. The staff are just clearing away from the previous group, and I notice a bunch of pots heading to the kitchen. I chat with the staff, and they make me a tasting plate of THE most delicious vegan food ever. Yum. Home. Bed. Again, I fell asleep before my head hit the pillow. Because tomorrow: The March.

NOVEMBER 15. The March.

I am still limping, but I’m going to march, because I have to. I pack water, and more water, snacks, and sun protection of various methods. My ponchito from Leticia is a perfect shade maker. Sunscreen. We head off to the day. Immediately there are thousands of people. I’m sure many from the blue and the green zones, but this is a cuppolo de los povos event, the summit of the people. Parallel to the official UN conference the Cupolo has been organizing hundreds of meetings and workshops. The venues aren’t close to one another, so we haven’t really been traveling between the two. We are spending time mostly in the Tapiri, the ecumenical interfaith gathering set in the lovely Anglican Cathedral, in its rooms and in the courtyard, covered with a enormous tarp. Ah the blue zone. Glad to have escaped you for a few days.

Meanwhile, back at the march, everyone is here. All the people I know, and tens of thousands of lovely like-minded strangers. Indigenous people from up and down the Amazon, and all over Brazil. The Landless Workers are here, and something I haven’t seen before: the Landless RURAL workers union. There are, Iast my imperfect count, three enormous snakes with people inside — like in a dragon, or lion dance for a New Year celebration. I mean, many sections, a person in each section, holding their part up. Moving takes coordination. It is beautiful. There are jaguars, some painted paper maché masks, others, contraptions made of woven straw, with a person inside. The Laudato Si movement has a 300-metre-long piece of blue satiny material, dozens of the faithful hold up the sides of the river as it flows through the crowd. Every colour, pattern, style of dress, all set for the melting heat are present. Vendors of snack, water, beer, fruit. A giant celebration of life.

I lose Sulman and Abilio a few times, but I’m not worried. My phone has been on the fritz, but two things work still: whattsapp for messages, and my map app. I just join the flow, marvelling at the beauty of our humanity.

There seems to be no stage. No endless speeches by people, on themes we have all heard before, and have been talking about all week. Just a beautiful display of how lovely we can be. I come across one collapsed person. I offer water, but volunteer medics have it all in hand. I remember to drink. Two story high globe rolls by, on wheels, but also on ropes held by human hands.

There is a deafening two story high truck as well. With dancers and music to fry your brain completely. Ah— I get it. This is Carnival. Our earth Carnival. I’m not sure how people can dance up there in the heat. No shade, of course. I find and lose Abilio and Sulman. I can’t keep up with their marching river. I move to a shady spot and watch the wildness.

Capybaras for Climate Justice. Clowns too. Paper Chico Mendez face masks with the eyes cut out. Slightly creepy. Placards with Sister Dorothy Stang, US sister who martyred here for the love of the forest.

I am catching my breathe, and suddenly someone I don’t know says in English — “Emilie?” “Yes,” I say. It’s Samuel! Samuel Chiu of A Rocha in Surrey. He’s the one who got me an official badge to get into the Blue Zone, and one for Sulman too. And he wrote to them when I was worried that they but Emilie and not Emily (that’s what the passport says). He is amazed. I am too. 70,000 people. And here we are. We trot along together. I love his team. They have t-shirts that read, “I follow Jesus and I refuse to appease fascists.” Sounds about right.

We huff along for quite a while, and then at last, we reach the end. Not much of a bang, but not exactly a whimper. More of a let’s find shade and sit down. Let’s take a thousand pictures. I find my friends, and we head over to plop down on a platform. Groups are all around. Indigenous circles. NGOs. Snacks are offered for purchase. Beer, pop and water too. We listen to a hypnotizing drum and cry, repetitive, almost a lament from one group. Then the tell-tale sound of the call of the birimbao. Capoeira! We amble over to the circle. Couple after couple, bow to the birimbao, and then head out to play around the circle. Joyful, elegant, powerful, fun. We stand mesmerized for a long time, until Sulman calls a taxi.

We are heading back to Tapiri. Hurray! Iuri and Isabel are here! They are leading a sacred mistica. We join, tired but so happy to pray together. After that we all get acquainted. There will be a SICSAL group in Manaus. I know there will. We head in and have lunch in the little restaurant, tucked right into the church. Wow. This is a good model of community engagement and maybe money-making. Plus, Days Five, Six and Seven COP30

November 14, The Poem.

Nothing happened this day. Except I read The Poem. That happened (!) After the days and nights of writing it out by hand with the giraffe pen I received as a gift from Heidi in El Paso, then typing it up on this little device. Then bashing through it with Margarita. Then doing that again in Spanish. Writing in hammocks, swinging on boats, in small rooms in the different houses of hospitality, thinking about it all the time. Listening to the people, recieving their words. Holding them with tender care, with grief, with hope, with fierceness. This day it became real.

Of course, that’s not all that happened, or didn’t happen, on November 14th at the Conference of the Parties, in Belem, Brazil. We arrived at the usual gate at the Blue Zone. You have to come through a first gate (minimal security, everyone gets through) and walk for a kilometre or two to the main entrance. We arrived at our usual time. I wanted to get to the meet and greet with the Canadian minister of the environment. 9am. (Thank heavens for Beth Lorimer of KAIROS, she has kept me in the Canadian loop. I am so pleased to be somewhere in the vicinity of her and her people, Silvia and others.)

But just after the first insecure gate, a massive bottleneck was piling up. It took a while to figure out, and even later to get the fuller picture. The Munduruku Amazonian people had blockaded the entry. They are standing for their land, the water, their river. And end to mining and mercury poisoning. Against the use of their river for commerce. Against predatory tourism. Abilio moves forward to catch the story, sees some of the group, and a friend or two forming a cordon around them, as they moved off the blockade and into a meeting room offsite. The Brazilian ministers of Indigenous affairs, and of the environment, and the president of COP were to meet with them later this morning. My hat goes off to them. This should be their meeting entirely.

Once inside I have missed the meeting with the Canadian minister, so I head down to catch my first of the daily meetings with the Canadian crew at the talks. I know no one but Beth, but these seem to be the real veterans of the meetings and the COP process. They have a lot to say. Mostly disgust with our own government. Carney didn’t show up at all. The minister and her assistant are leaving today. There will be no high level Canadian participation. Yuck anyway. There is NO hope for them to be standing high for actual change. Then I hear the most disgusting news of all: there is one fossil fuel lobbyist inside this meeting to every 25 people. They are here, green-washing, obfuscating, pulling it all down and apart, nicely, in suits, basically killing us all.

I am not up for heading from meeting to meeting today. And I’m not going to pay another $25 for a sandy salad. I have a cheese sandwich, and I know where to get free good coffee (almost everywhere). I sit under the giant blow-up rotating earth for a while. I end up meeting briefly with Martha Jarvis, our highest level Anglican at the meeting, and I also translate between Abilio and the head of Franciscans International: the first time an Anglican has held this role! But then I head back to a corner to eat my cheese sandwich and read over the Spanish poem.

Abilio and Sulman have helped get it in shape, Gerardo has made posters of the story, with QR codes for the full poem in Spanish and in English. We have these as little slips of paper to hand out. I sit and look up and watch Antarctica with all its ice still intact slowly rotate above me. Every once and a while Australia rolls by.

Abilio and Sulman check in with me every once in a while, and skirt around to their own meetings. I just can’t. I close my eyes and see Willivaldo in Juarez, Sister Marleen in Guatemala, don Gilberto in Jericó. I see Fray Manuel in front of me on the motorcycle (where is the most polite place to cling to a Franciscan monk while dipping and zipping through the streets of Tabatinga?) I see Iuri and Isabel, and doña Elsa who fried the fish that Mago and I caught in the river. The lawyers in Oaxaca, the buscadoras looking for their children across Jalisco and further, the sisters everywhere who made this work. The brave people, the sad people, the ones working like mad in their gum boots or their flipflops to make enough to eat this day and the next. What are they all saying?

Life is wonderful and hard. The world is fragile and it can be unforgiving. People can be vicious and cruel, and also generous and forgiving. Dogs are good. Cats too. The planet is indescribably beautiful: there are parrots and tiny frogs, flowers and fruits beyond imagining. There are snakes in the jungle and crocodiles in the river, even when you can’t see them, and also dolphins and white cranes. There are tiny yellow birds, and hummingbirds. There are nuns and brothers, priests and bishops, there are gifted Indigneous knowledge keepers and fighters and preservers.There are people who’s ancestors were terrifyingly brought to these lands as slaves, and have held on, despite the absolute worst human cruelty, to their sense off the world. There are people of the river making things work. They live in houses that guard a scent like protection and safety. They can tell if you are fake or phony, or if you think of them as attractions, curiosities, or if you are engaging in extractive tourism.

All this I carry to the mike in the Colombia pavilion. There are 29 pages of this stuff. I bought some fresh white pants to wear. I haven’t really eaten, but I’m feeling nauseous anyway. We start late. The Vice is there, and then not, and then there again. It is a long time for her to sit. The wonderful Julianna, a Colombian Mennonite who has been working and praying for our planet for decades comes, and brings a whole big group of youth. Martha Jarvis is there. The Venezuelan Presbyterian pastor is here. A bunch of Colombians. Amy, the scientist from San Francisco. She is in the first part of the poem.

I’m reading in Spanish and my Spanish is far from perfect. Margarita who knows the langage inside every corner of it, who has been translating me for 33 years, has brought it into beauty. I read. Declaim. My throat hurts. Can I do it? I must. Could I cut something? I worry about the students who are reading along in English on their phones. They would get lost if I jumped around. I don’t break for a minute, but breathe and read. I could never look at a recording of myself though. Ugh.

Anyway, it is done. I am done. I did it. All you, my beloveds. Here we are. I promised and longed to bring you all with me here. I don’t know if it will make a snake of difference in this faulted, fierce faculty. But here we are, are, standing and speaking. Amen.

(After this I am whisked away to sit on a panel about Laudato Si, and The Letter, a movie made by friends of Pope Francis about the encyclical, and the real life situation of five young people. Precious. And on the panel with me are none other than Lorna Gold, original coordinator of the Laudato Si movement, Yeb Saña, Sulman and of the End Fossil Fuel movement.

I’m so hungry now. That cheese sandwich was a long time and one epic poem ago. Fortunately, there are events happening all over the city, even in this very building, a beautiful old theatre. We are invited to go and grab ourselves a drink at the fun bar. The staff are just clearing away from the previous group, and I notice a bunch of pots heading to the kitchen. I chat with the staff, and they make me a tasting plate of THE most delicious vegan food ever. Yum. Home. Bed. Again, I fell asleep before my head hit the pillow. Because tomorrow: The March.

NOVEMBER 15. The March.

I am still limping, but I’m going to march, because I have to. I pack water, and more water, snacks, and sun protection of various methods. My ponchito from Leticia is a perfect shade maker. Sunscreen. We head off to the day.Immediately there are thousands of people. I’m sure many from the blue and the green zones, but this is a cuppolo de los povos event, the summit of the people. Parralel to the official UN conference the Cupolo has been organizing hundreds of meetings and workshops. The venues aren’t close to one another, so we haven’t really been traveling between the two. We are spending time mostly in the Tapiri, the ecumenical interfaith gathering set in the lovely Anglican Cathedral, in its rooms and in the couryard, covered with a enormous tarp. Ah the blue zone. Glad to have escaped you for a few days.

Meanwhile, back at the march, everyone is here. All the people I know, and tens of thousands of lovely like-minded strangers. Indigenous people from up and down the Amazon, and all over Brazil. The Landless Workers are here, and something I haven’t seen before: the Landless RURAL workers union. There are, Iast my imperfect count, three enormous snakes with people inside — like in a dragon, or lion dance for a New Year celebration. I mean, many sections, a person in each section, holding their part up. Moving takes coordination. It is beautiful. There are jaguars, some painted paper mache masks, others contraptions made of woven straw, with a person inside. The Laudato Si movement has a 300-metre long piece of blue satiny material, dozens of the faithful hold up the sides of the river as it flows through the crowd. Every colour, pattern, style of dress, all set for the melting heat are present. Vendors of snack, water, beer, fruit. A giant celebration of life.

I lose Sulman and Abilio a few times, but I’m not worried. My phone has been on the fritz, but two things work still: whattsapp for messages, and my map app. I just join the flow, marvelling at the beauty of our humanity.

There seems to be no stage. No endless speeches by people, on themes we have all heard before, and have been talking about all week. Just a beautiful display of how lovely we can be. I come across one collapsed person. I offer water, but volunteer medics have it all in hand. I remember to drink. Two story high globe rolls by, on wheels, but also on ropes held by human hands.

There is a deafening two story high truck as well. With dancers and music to fry your brain completely. Ah— I get it. This is Carnival. Our earth Carnival. I’m not sure how people can dance up there in the heat. No shade, of course. I find and lose Abilio and Sulman. I can’t keep up with their marching river. I move to a shady spot and watch the wildness.

Capybaras for Climate Justice. Clowns too. Paper Chico Mendez face masks with the eyes cut out. Slightly creepy. Placards with Sister Dorothy Stang, US sister who was martyred here for the love of the forest.

I am catching my breathe, and all of a sudden someone I don’t know says in English — “Emilie?” “Yes,” I say. It’s Samuel! Samuel Chiu of A Rocha in Surrey. He’s the one who got me an official badge to get into the Blue Zone, and one for Sulman too. And he wrote to them when I was worried that they but Emilie and not Emily (that’s what the passport says). He is amazed. I am too. 70,000 people. And here we are. We trot along together. I love his team. They have t-shirts that read, “I follow Jesus

We huff along for quite a while, and then at last we reach the end. Not much of a bang, but not exactly a whimper. More of a let’s find shade and sit down. Let’s take a thousand pictures. I find my friends, and we head over to plop down on a platform. Groups are all around. Indigneous circles. NGOs. Snacks are offered for purchase. Beer, pop and water too. We listen to a hypnotizing drum and cry, repetitive, almost a lament from one group. Then the tell-tale sound of the call of the birimbao. Capoeira! We amble over to the circle. Couple after couple, bow to the birimbao, and then head out to play around the circle. Joyful, elegant, powerful, fun. We stand mesmerized for a long time, until Sulman calls a taxi.

We are heading back to Tapiri. Hurray! Iuri and Isabel are here! They are leading a sacred mistica. We join, tired buy so happy to pray together. After that we all get acquainted. There will be a SICSAL group in Manaus. I know there will. We head in and have lunch in the little restaurant, tucked right into the church. Wow. This is a good model of community engagement and maybe money-making. Plus the food is delicious (though laced with shrimp).

That’s it. Another day done.

Tomorrow — church!

(AGAIN — no time to proofread! Apologies for errors large or small~!)

the food is delicious (though laced with shrimp).

That’s it. Another day done.

Tomorrow — church!

(AGAIN — no time to proofread! Apologies for errors large or small~!)

Finally, this is a hard poem, about hard things: the devastation of climate violence, and human violence to humans. It is all connected. This poem describes many struggles and much suffering. Also, our only hope: each other. I will spend this winter annotating the poem. I will create an edition that has the words as they are here, and then a second copy, with the shared words attributed to their speakers, and the struggles identified. For example, the section about Buenaventura describes the work of the people of CONPAZCOL, the main group working for the defence of land and land defenders in Colombia. And so much more.

To the people that made the pilgrimage possible: four months, ten countries, 25 communities, activists, leaders, thanks for your love and your support along the way. We have the POEM in SPANISH, we will get this introduction done next. We are waiting for the Portuguese version. That will come soon.

In the meantime, here you go.

I dedicate these words, and my life to my five grandchildren: Oscar, Addison, Alexander, Axelito and Violet.

LEAF ON DRUM RIVER

1.

It starts with the drum

tum, tum,

starts with beat, heart,

the blessing

the sending.

Through his song, his drum,

she sends me.

No, it starts before the drum.

When you come into the world

red hair

little fox,

I light a fire.

Another says, come!

I say, yes.

_____

“Hello beautiful!

I’ve heard rumours

they ended Border Patrol.

Now there’s love patrol,

mostly women.

They unblocked the dams.

opened the rivers. Did you know?

Panama Canal has been filled in again.

We’re back

to sailboats!

Trump has confessed his crimes.

He is in a

retirement centre — a

a place for healing

With his friend,

Uribe.

They are only allowed to

look after the plants.

They aren’t allowed anywhere

near the chicken coop.”

___

Ha, ha, says

the lady in the garden.

We are out picking dinner.

“Marjorie gave me this one

and that.”

For sixty years

she has had this dirt

under her nails.

My grandmother to her

and her to me.

She held my little hand as

I now hold hers,

folding our fingers around the

stem, and leaf, and seed.

Ha, ha! she says,

and she and her moth-loving old man

put me on the train.

The train goes, and

goes and drum beats

with the track.

Spike by spike,

some man

broke his back

to make this train river.

I sleep

through times of trees

- for a hundred years.

Redwood, aspen

clinging to the shaky mountains.

I wake up

to death.

Martinez.

Someone has vomited all over

this earth,

where the golden land

was cleared

and its people

hunted as sport.

Now too

into the Bay

poison

is leaking.

Men are hunting men.

The taco shops

carry on

because what else

can they do?

All the joy

is gone.

The corn

turns to sawdust

in the mouths

of the sad men

who still come here

because people gotta eat.

Further down in the

Mission

Calixto fights back

with linoleum

carved to red and black words

thick

and

reassuring.

We are right.

But I

hate it

that we are some of us

dying.

Different men and women

meet with me in the pit

of the cathedral.

“We know where the empresas

have hid the bodies,”

they say.

“We have been saying so

for thirty years,”

they cry,

looking at

their fingers

grown old.

___

In LA

an urgent couple

kneels quickly

at a shrine to Guadalupe

who knows why?

Dear God.

Dear God.

Dear God,

what shall we pray for?

Her tattoos quiver

scars now

pointing straight to prison.

The train station

casts its own shadow

and sucks me in.

Blue city at night

dawn at desert red and

tun, tun.

Promise and threat,

to be understood.

Not to die here,

water, wander,

water.

Could I suck

the tears of every mother?

Sew up the holes

in her body?

How long

would it take to name

everyone

who died here?

Not flesh but

bone

when the tun is gone.

Train quivers in the heat.

El Paso

Going from where to where?

This is already Mexico.

She picks me up

with dandelions in her arms

and they fly

from her to me.

Resista! Resiste! Resist!

How is it done?

the young ask.

This is how, we say,

like this, and this, and

this.

In the centre

of the sidewalk

shoot up.

Who the hell cares!

Be wild, abundant, absurd.

They go out the next day

to look for the dead.

We stay

and care for

the hurting ones instead.

2.

Todo es diferente

en la frontera

en la frontera

en la frontera.

Come, together,

change, heart,

desert, oasis.

El desierto nos da vida.

Life.

People, move.

Monarch, orange.

Promise, pollen.

_____

Footsteps ring across the long, long, bridge

The Wall is nailed into the desert, on either side,

disappear.

Wall. Women.

Pink cross.

Dead names.

Juarez.

Santa Maria, ilumina mi camino a casa.

“To face a hail of bullets,

a rainbow of peace.”

“Life is a rock

tough —

but hopes

for a turnaround.”

The women are dead —

but not all of them.

A. escaped

is hiding here.

Where she can eat and

someone for real loves her.

Up/Down over Death Valley

along the line

that won’t be straight

gasps the river

Bravo.

Here for centuries now

a sliver not a roar

and the road that leads to no where

stops.

Young men,

the thin

one they call El Mono,

refuse to lie down.

They build a place for

poets

out of garbage.

They remember.

They teach remembering.

Boys and dogs

stray in

hoping this time

they won’t

be kicked.

But loved

and inducted

into the Resistance.

Lucha and siesta

say the walls.

Malditos, malditos, malditos

those who get

fat

eating

the

poor.

Oak trees grow

on the white hills

protecting the

living and the dead.

3.

On we go now

over the bloody desert,

into the mountains

where a small man

dressed in white

waits and plots

to burn the church down.

He lives as if

The Founder

meant us to be this way

laced with hope.

The men,

once young,

who love each other

come.

“He lifts us up,

from the shock of our humiliation.

And so, we batten up our lives

and bring each other in.”

____

Her shock of hair

refuses to follow any rule.

She will live in beauty

though she catalogues

the list of women killed,

one by one.

Tum. Dead.

“Come,” she whistles.

Fran follows

the paid men too

armed but less dangerous than Fran.

“Come.”

She fills her jeep

with followers and friends

the men behind.

We tour the town.

We overthrow the bitter and sour.

We alight in site after site

where the man in white —

her best friend —

has laid his palms of peace.

Then out we bounce

to the dry, dry earth.

Ola raza del rancho!

He stamps through the dust,

each print behind

the rooted promise

one ancient bean

one kernel of corn from before

one eternal chili

rescued from oblivion.

She matches him.

Singeing hot bread from the very clay

she feeds the earth.

We go to the hills

in search of water.

We stop.

We hear.

We follow ‘til there she is slender, a skeleton.

“Padre, Padre

tell me what

they have

done to River?

Why doesn’t she

sing

anymore?”

On the Mesa

we follow

until we

make land.

And there it is!

Water turned to blood

tossed across the green trim lawn.

No es sequia,

es saqueo.

This isn’t drought, isn’t drought.

This is looting.

4.

Tun.

The heart goes

anyway

into the cave of night

while possum creeps out and the abaniquilla

waits

beneath the mesquite bush

for the first

sun of morning.

___

He rushes

in —

the old duende —

and picks us up

in his car

strung from wire.

“¡Buenas días gente de bien!”

He shouts

and doesn’t stop

until the whole good book

is spoken

for.

“This River

— who never hurt anyone —

is almost dead.

This River, my actual brother,

has been kicked

beat

shot

shat upon

this river

annihilated by foreign men

who came, who come – thieves

to raze our Holy Creation.”

Nothing left.

Nothing breathing

just the brown foam

that forms from her dying mouth.

The otters gone.

The zanate gone.

The fish gone.

The fireflies gone.

Yet this duende, this tutifruti

plants tobacco and fruit trees

and holds forth from

his mischief chair

inciting others to life,

to plant

to green.

“These little trees

all the while

were listening

were holding

us with their

scent,

their colour,

their texture to be read.

Despite everything

this faithful ugly river

makes noise

along the rocks.”

_____

Elda

Jonathan

Augustín

Fausto

José Luis

Cynthia

Diego

Knife. Strike.

José Mauricio

Cesar de Jesús

Emanuel y Abraham, brothers

Ricardo Javier

Ruby

Fatima

Calvario.

Juan Francisco

Davíd Ernesto

Luz María

Jaime César

Daniel

Miguel Ángel

Jorge Adain

Jaqueline

Araceli

Eliseo

Ignacio

Cristina

Ramón

Fermín

Mara Angélica

Lorena

Juan Manuel

Juan Pablo

Antonio

Henry

Wilberth

Osvaldo

Alma de Jesús

Hagan esto en memorial mio.

In memory of me.

Me.

Newborn breath, on mother’s breast

turned to

Dust. Shovel. Bones.

before all these the drum is silenced

——-

Meanwhile,

in some other weird world,

still this world,

they have reinvented

the dire wolf.

Running free,

in a pit.

Made to dance

on a sparkled drum.

A wily plan

to rake in some dough

with

no forest, nest, cave, stream, God,

in sight.

Just men,

and a dirty glass dish.

The poet who tells us this,

drives us to the night bus

which stamps and steams

like a dragon

and charges off

from the city

to the city again.

5.

Water high and

water low

we roll

into the city, city, city,

the great city

the grand city.

Built on water.

Made of water.

And now what?

Cuauhtémoc

could not hold

his feathered stand

past the pestilence

of the stinking men.

But in the secret coil

stashed in blood

he waited

and springs

time

in time.

We gather in the house of the wise

who see the shape

and stars of things.

In this hall the Red Bishop stood

and jTatic

and the White Bishop

and then me.

The hated and the hunted

will take a day of rest.

My compadre even,

with his wife, children, newborn daughter

chased by the war

the camps.

They slept on these streets

when the ground hit the ground

and brought everything down.

Then they came here.

The nuns gave him —

a marimba!

which he took a thousand miles away

wrapped in towels, like a refugee child.

She lays the world out

in straight lines

and I see

who we are

and where we are going.

To the wrenching back

time and again.

Down the way

lives an old fox.

Having outsmarted all the rest

he lives in a den near the coyotes

if not in peace

than in satisfaction.

He’s not done yet.

6.

Doña Lidia stirs the fire

spins the water.

Doña Lidia

makes the universe,

grinds the corn,

forms the dough,

flattens the disk.

Doña Lidia starts the fire

toasts and grinds

the bitter burnt seeds of cacao

she adds the invaders’ panela.

We drink.

Doña Lidia takes the

tomate,

chile,

chapulín,

chile,

tlayuda,

frijol.

Corn,

blue and white,

yellow and black.

Cheese.

All these feast:

the hungry

the wise

the three times grateful.

The trolls meanwhile

sit under the bridge over nothing

planning who to kill next —

man

or woman

in the valley

or in the forest,

in the mangrove

or on the highway.

They suck the water up,

tie false bells on their toes

to make music.

They make the children

jump and dance

for rotten apples.

But look!

Here comes Doña Josepha Sánchez and with her many many more.

The women who sing back the water.

The ghost of Toledo

holding steady the hand

of today’s linoleum carver,

building a wall of intent.

The trolls evaporate

having no stomach

for a battle they can’t rig.

Look, says Saul,

we who have shared this air

we are a part of one another.

You stay with me.

I go with you.

I go

with them all.

7.

Pulled home.

Here smells right.

Tongue folds softly.

On the bus

in the street

they don’t know

I have loved this earth

to death

black

brown

red.

Buried here

bodies deep

mountains ground

los tres ombligos

of my three sons.

Like nothing

I rest in the house

of the red-haired one

and the black haired one

until they send me

across the lake.

There, I run through rain

to sit at the table

of satisfaction

of friendship

of lucha incansable.

Out of Tolimán

comes a Juracán

— how dare you —

500 years old,

time marked in lines

down his slope.

If you didn’t know

you might think

he’s laughing

and he might be

because

that’s one way to win.

Tonatiuh grins

poking at the lava.

“Hey, I could sell this stuff!”

Not knowing

there’s one thing

more dangerous than Juracán

— his daughter.

We sit in the room

packed with pine

tying our belts

together

against the storm

when in walk

the true

sons and daughters

of The Lake.

“Our Grandmother,”

they start.

We all listen.

“Will no longer be abused.”

Tonatiuh

would not think

this possible

that down the count of time

— beyond his comprehension —

these men and and these women

would stand here

their birds woven into one.

8.

There’s an old nun

and an even older priest

who took it seriously

when He said,

“Go into the world.”

They came

and never left

and never left off loving

even though there were so many dead among those they loved.

She takes the wheel

and around and down

we go

through the corn

reaching to every corner

as it always has.

We skim the city and

up and out again

to her little parish house

on an old peach farm.

I rest

while doña Toña

comes and goes

selling cheese.

“I sleep here now,” she says,

“So that Sister won’t be alone

now that Yolanda is gone.”

They call, they call

across the hall,

is any body listening?

We are we shout

until they’re out.

We run through the streets

announcing our liberation

and demanding theirs.

Vamos patria a caminar,

yo te acompaño.

9.

Let’s go.

By night bus we go North to

the very heat of jungle

where they buried Maria

under a ceiba tree

so she could be with her muchachos

forever.

Her tear

that said yes

when all was lost.

They were inconsolable then

those tough men.

Only the women could go on and on

like Juana

lost in the trees

for 30 days

with two little ones

and the army

on her scent.

The women in the end with aguante to

bear it all

the infidelities

ravenous betrayals

still to carry the wood

to find a way

to make a fire

to cook the corn.

We go

— with a good laugh —

to Coronel Arbenz’

Beer & Pizza place.

These young men

who came back

from Sacramento

where they weren’t wanted.

That odious hatred.

Here — paradise!

Building

the un-imagin/able

in their LA Dodgers hats.

Two things

hold the whole horizon up:

The Red Museum

which layers the frail strings

of a thousand stories.

Plus His Paintings

that make you

sit down.

The Morning They Left For the Capital.

One look

one raised hand

measures the quantity

of our unmitigatable grief.

Then there’s the bosque

and don Pavel

who yells because explosives

blew his ear drums out

a thousand years ago.

No matter.

He knows it all.

Each leaf.

Each twig.

Where the water hides

and how to get it.

Where the black

ceriguates circle in the high leaves.

He takes us to a board swing

wide and far in a broad ceiba.

First he

then she

then me

we all come long

and sail out again

everything

having been restored.

10.

“Rose and gold is the riverbank

the riverbank rose and gold”

left alone.

The river lifts the soil

and brings it – free –

to the sea,

where it can sink and start again.

He, Our Father, stands over

the whole country

in its agony promising

—if not glory —

then at least

pan para los pobres.

He cannot be willed

to be silent.

Not then.

Not now

in the hour of our death

or our detainment.

That other one

who thinks he’s

born of royal blood

has already forgotten

— if he ever knew —

the joy in surrender.

In dresses

that do not match

my friends

make firm

their feet

and dance.

They know this world is beautiful

and that poetry, like bread, is for

everyone.

11.

There is a wall of women

standing in the way

in the mountains

of the Sierra Madre.

Touch a soft girl

or a fragile boy

in the way of horror

and they will take you down.

Berta’s sisters

lost their fear

a long time ago

or at least they hold that fear

together.

We resist

by occupying

the public space

they say

and do.

Purple flowers fill

the car

when we break

through the jam

and make it to the house

where all fell down

in grief.

We can’t fix this

neither they,

nor I

nor the dog.

But we sit here

in one room

empty and full

and that lasts

for awhile

more than we can know.

Coming back down the mountain

we find a tiny wooden woman.

Who cares if she’s a virgin!

She’s there to join

the line.

12.

Gold. Copper.

Canal. Bananas.

Coca. Money.

Money. Money.

Dollars. Dollars. Dollars.

Stack them high.

Stack them wide.

Stack the Spanish coin.

Stack the Gringo buck.

Fire the gun.

Wipe the flag

through the mud.

Yellow fever

black bodies

blowing up

all the way

down

down

to silver town.

Who cares?

No one here

matters

not one red cent.

Except

here come the boys

who have eaten their fear.

They don’t

care

if you rip the flag

down a thousand times.

They die

under bullets

but some don’t

and then we get

a union out of it.

and a fight that will come back and back.

The mine circles down

and down

through the bones

throwing the banana workers and all the garbage in behind them.

Until it fills and the people stand on top

and stop everything.

Then the men built from paper

take away

even our teeth,

put us to work building a hollow tower

so high it knocks the sky down.

Then another and another until they needle the clouds.

Poking the rain,

and the wrath.

Below, the boys gather again.

13.

Green, green,

forest green,

jungle green,

city garden green,

mountain green,

leaf green,

river green.

La Gran Colombia

witnessing

down the

centuries.

Not idle dreams.

But distilled hope

made sword,

made fire,

centre of the standard

bearer

of men who, sí, knew

what it meant to be

noble

and stuck

with it

time and again.

“Mi cuerpo es bien chiquito

mi lengua no me da

querido Simon Bolivar

quien me dió la libertád.”

How many times

betrayal?

How much blood

caked on son’s bodies,

spread on women’s legs?

To what end?

Do these profess a program too?

Or fear, vengeance, hatred,

money, power, greed,

lust, despair,

stuff that makes sick the whole created

world?

Yet, in the smallest

corner

of Buenaventura

among the boats coloured in defiance

one woman,

then another,

says no.

They sew together

the sail

the shroud

the veil

then rip the others

down.

Now the women call

to one another

when the street grows dark.

Children play

dogs slink — ever hopeful.

Old men slap the table

with a perfect hand.

And the drum goes without stopping

long into the night, tun, tun.

One, two, three times

ripped to pieces

from the land

these ones

come, to the city,

then go again

to live in the

grass

while armies

circle round.

Here, one, two, three times

they will not lie down.

They will speak.

They will dress.

They will play.

They will sing.

They will plant.

They will heal.

I sit with them, in the dust,

untangling threads,

and laying them out again

in a decent row.

In all

the history of the world,

these things last.

14.

While up and through

the coast

up, up the river, follow,

the road

another man and another

and still another

knows the difference

between a law

made in stink

and one made

for hands that plant.

When the moon strikes high

they come and undo

the drills,

the death,

and their dog

—without doubt

their very best friend —-

bites the man without mercy.

Quick in his palace

quiet

one man fights

too.

Disguised in an

old cloak

he is in fact

one of them

— and when he must

he shows it.

Zeal consumes him —

“You WILL NOT turn

our Father’s house into

a marketplace.”

With a tongue made

of cords

he throws them out

into the rain.

En cambio we take tea with him

in the wooden hall

with a carved roof

and set the game

right.

All that night and the next and

the one after that

the whole valley drinks

from the mountain.

15.

Young women

and men

hands shake

stand straight

learn to speak

learn to love the earth.

Speaking loud.

on their way.

Sister

Sister

Gutter

Sister

Byway

Sister

Settlement

Sister

fighter for all the rest.

Sister water water water.

Look, how pleasant it is,

when the water runs down her hands? When the water waters the banana trees.

When the water washes a baby,

and then that baby laughs.

We as witnesses to it all.

From north to south

the city rises

in harsh layers

high, high above

where the cleansing vulture

glides over the putrid world,

the dead

the heaps of wasted rot

above ravaged rivers

and the bones of nothing.

Here a small woman

came

who was not afraid

to collect the dead

on her doostep.

In she walked

and in she stayed

year after year

living as if the children

were aleady beautiful.

And they were

just like that

picking up the

pen the

brush the

guitar.

Playing the world

something other

than brown and grey.

16.

Even higher now,

beyond breathing,

mist hits rock,

soft leaf sweet talks the water from

the air.

Snake become woman.

Woman becomes snake.

Snake becomes rock.

Rock becomes water.

She slips down,

holy, guarded,

making a fragile pact

which we

have always broken.

Indignation gathers,

water pools,

we fight the mountain,

the mountain pulls us up.

At last at the holy place the

lake

made of water from the mist.

First, we hang our heads

and pray.

With sorrow, with shame, with promise and again,

the names of the ones

who did this all will rot,

like their bones,

and be removed from between our teeth

where they still make us bleed.

17.

Three sisters

work

and want

the world

to realize what

it’s done.

To see

that healing,

can be teased back to life.

That war can be bound.

That everyone is welcome at the table

to

taste and

see the

firefly lights

the way

to bed

calling the

other ones

from the poisoned river

to hang on.

They’re coming.

Mandarins and oranges,

lemons and bitters

throw every seed they have

into the earth which brings up

such reward that

clapping hands cannot hold.

Cacao,

toasted, ground and spun

into water, hot.

Served. Nothing remains

but to put your head down,

and thank God.

Here.

Water. Safe.

Bird. Safe.

Forest in flower.

Dog laughs.

We do too.

18.

Querida Amazonia,

what could ever be said

or sung,

woven

or carved,

made

or unmade

by human hands

to tell

of your glory?

Could you be

mapped

marked

caged or

mined

turned into a tourist park

a coca plantation,

burned,

cuckolded?

ALL

the rivers come here.

Black.

Brown.

The milky way.

The sky rivers down.

Every tributary.

Every word.

Every vein.

Every tear.

Salty.

Sweet.

All water everywhere.

Even the stolen water

the dirty water

the mercury

cyanide

rare earth

petroleum

fucking gold for our finger rings.

All the lies all the lies all the lies.

Lie in this river.

Talk Talk Talk

curdles the milk in

their lost mother’s breast.

Life or Death.

These I lay before you.

Choose life

at the meeting of the hopeful,

that you and your children may live.

Listen.

All our

consuming

shitting

killing

ends here.

Listen.

Quiet now,

here

like everywhere

speaking

singing

declaring

standing by those

who have the right to say.

Listen.

19.

Early in the morning

after sweet coffee and bread

we go out in his boat

to the river.

First up to his father’s holy land,

Deus Provera.

The grass is high,

the water is down,

the fruit trees have thrown

their glory to the ground.

Genipapo. We fill our arms.

Then we follow the path

past the anti-iguana nets

to the watermelon field.

A neighbour has stolen one or two.

Soft prints in the grass reveal.

Nevermind, he says.

Deus Provera.

Parrots have left us one yellow mango

and left quite a mess on the ground.

They laugh as they flee their

guilty tree.

We laugh too.

He takes the one mango for his daughter.

The platanos too are ready.

When our hull is full

of fruit

we head back down

to where the water stands

still for a while.

Once.

Twice.

Three times he casts the net.

Then again,

the fourth time,

he pulls up full of silver.

My hands with his

untangle the bounty.

Pacu.

The river is generous.

The silver scales

stay on my hands

and feet for days.

Glitter for the remembering:

Life was asked for, and given,

with the knowing

that the river will always say more.

Tun

.

Wednesday, November 12

Thursday, November 13

Note to self: no coffee after 1pm. I don’t know why I have to keep learning this lesson. Yesterday there was free good coffee at a dozen carpas. I didn’t have that many. But maybe four. Bad idea. At midnight, 1am, 2am, no matter how many sheep I counted, no sleep. I did come up with some other great ideas, though. How to share The Poem. In which language. Sulman has a young volunteer back in Colombia who is formatting it, to make it look pretty. Abilio is busy networking — where else might we be able to present it? Yikes. I’m just trying to keep from being overwhelmed here.

Right now Marina Silva, the wonderful Brazilian minister of the environment, is talking in one of the carpas (tents) in this gigantic airplane hangar. Michelle Bachelet too, the former president of Chile. I can hear her voice. Portuguese (of course). “Children. Necessary. Now is the time. And more.” Very passionate sounding. Lots of clapping. I decided not to muscle my way in. Too squishy. Too hot. Abilio and Sulman are in there. I will get a full report.

Yesterday evening just as I was leaving to catch a bus to find my friends, I was met by a group of protestors, moving quickly through the street. It seems they later broke through security and occupied the site. There might have been about 50 -60 folks, maybe half of them obviously Indigenous. (I did notice one Ricardo Flores Magon flag.) The Rev. Shaneequa Brokenleg wrote a very thoughtful comment on the situation which I will repost. One quote for now: 

“I know some will say that protesting isn’t the way to do things. But I wonder what would any of us do if our homelands were disappearing, our sacred sites desecrated, our food and medicine threatened, and our children’s future was being destroyed?”

Today there was no sign of the disruption. 

We were up fairly early and out. Again we were heading first to the Anglican cathedral. Today there was a full day of activities at the Tapiri. First, as we make our way in, friends from other circles. This one we met in Brazil 10 years ago, this one a Vancouver friend. The Anglican cathedral is spacious and breezy. Small compared to a Roman Catholic Cathedral. They have set the Tapiri up in the back yard, under a giant canopy. It is warm, hot, but there are huge fans whirling on overtime. The breeze is nice.

We meet with Yeb Saño. He was recently named head of the world-wide Laudato Si movement. I ask how he feels about the global gathering. He shakes his head. “I have been to 22 COPs,” he says. “I have no faith in governments. Even less for business. Lies and manipulation. Here is where hope lies,” he says, waving his hands around the space. “People gathered.”

We are quiet and absorb the stories of the many. Of violation and struggle, of hope and despair. As we wrap we gather with the Canadians for a moment. Development and Peace. Catch up. Old stories of Abilio in Toronto, and then, whisk, off to the Blue Zone.

I’m afraid to admit I had a bit of a personal meltdown (discretely) back at the official gathering. It is so big, so complex, and I’m not sure if there is much hope there. I remember the first feedback I had. “Ah— you’re going to COP-OUT.” Yep. That is the feeling of many. Why do we even bother? Even Cardinal Barreto, from Peru, who I met at the Kairos, D and P meeting in Calgary in June. He wasn’t going, he says. But an Indigenous women leader said, Go. So he did. We are here because there has to be some way to resolve this global problem. The cop-out isn’t these people, most of them, the ones rushing back and forth down the aisles. It is somewhere else, up where the decision-making meetings are happening. Apparently 1 out of every 25th person is an extractive industry sector lobbyist. Sigh. I look up and count 25 people in 20 seconds.

The highlight for the day: we go for lunch ($25 salad anyone!) in the Blue Zone cafeteria with Fray Eduardo. He is one of those gathered upstairs. He is a red-headed Argentine who now lives in Spain. He is a parish priest and also serves as an adviser to the Spanish Council of Bishops. Abilio whispers to me: Fray Eduardo was on the inside of the Papal Encyclical, Laudato Si. A special consultant to Pope Francis, he was the one to line the words up in this prophetic document. Care for our Common Home.

The document became a movement. 

After melting down, I went to sit by myself (as much as one can), under the giant revolving earth. This travels from COP to COP, I am told. It is soothing to sit under the slowly moving planet, our Island home. Just sit and breathe.

In the evening we head over to the Peoples’ Summit. Here in Belem there are so many layers. We arrive as the celebration is starting. Loud but wonderful music. Everyone is dancing, or at least swaying. I’m so tired. At last we head home.

And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.

Thursday began bright. Until I was happily practicing my Portuguese with the fellow at the door of our appartment building, and somehow didn’t see a step. This was a total pancake. Flatt on my face. I twiisted my ankle, but nothing too bad. Later in the Blue Zome a handsome fellow from the Cruz Roja tended to me. It melt nice after three months of pilgrimage to have someone fussing over me. I even insisted on putting the sock back on my annointed and bandaged foot.

We walked, as we have every morning, to Tapiri, in the Anglican cathedral. Every time we go there I find more people I know, or more people I like. This is where I feel right. We are welcomed with coffee, cookies, bananas. The Dean, and poet and artist, Ives Gabara, hovers making sure I am all set up. He prints off a bunch of leaflets with the QR code to The Poem. In English and in Spanish!

Best of all, the Aotearo/New Zealand folks are here, and we start the day in prayer, in Maori and in English. This is something sacred and precious. My whole self feels realigned with the world. Especially an embodied prayer. And the Rev. Susan Wallace’s words. This is what I love, real connection and beauty. What a gift. Then we roar off to the Blue Zone, where I get bandaged and cared for.

But now we are into the meat and potatoes of COP. We head upstairs, to the freezing zone. Fray Eduardo has organized this, and then left others to carry it into community. I’m not going to try and explain it all here. When I have more time, I will write about how I have incorporated this into my eco-theology. Here attached is a good article outlining their work.

https://maryknollogc.org/2025/09/01/global-south-bishops-call-for-climate-action-at-cop30/

The (freezing) room fills with power and warmth. Three Cardinals: Jaime Spengler (Latin America), Fridolin Ambongo (Africa) and Felip Nei Ferrao (Asia), speak with one voice. The prophetic voice from the global south. Their collective discernment. This isn’t about changing a few policies. It’s about changing ourselves. Millions of people are living the catastrophic consequences of climate change. The time for false solutions is over. COP-30 is not an event. It is a moral turning point for humanity.

This writing as the imprint of Fray Eduardo. He is not in the public view, but we can see how critically important he has been. We greet also my acquaintance, Dr. Emilce Cuda, the Secretary of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America. Dr. Cuda, theologian and strategist is invisible to many, and central in this whole work. This is the room where it happened. I was privileged to be a witness.

Famished, again, we take a bus back to centre of Belem. Grab lunch and then head again to Tapiri. This time I make new friends with Bishop Huberto of Porto Alegre. We chat for a good while… he says as a Bishop he loves “crazy” priests. I think he might have been talking about me and my pilgrimage! At any rate, he takes us upstairs, where all the Anglicans are sequestered, drinking guava juice and eating baloney sandwiches.

The final action of the day, we join a walk and a vigil for the Earth, led by none other than my best friend from the 2019 Amazonian Synod in Rome, popular educator, Juscelio Pantoja. We process to a lovely local park, and we experiment with all kinds of ritual and prayer. It is night now. This is the first vigil where we are all up dancing (with my bum ankle). The Primate and the Dean, and the rest are all bringing down the stars. I am so happy. So in love with: these people, this earth, this river. I pray for the whole lot of us. Tel us prevail. Let us win now, or soon, once and for all. Let this sea of people, these ones from everywhere, may we hold treasured the voice of those who have been excluded. May our voices ring.

We walk home to our place, led by me, and I get us lost. The day ends with 10 kilometres paraded (in total, all day). My poor ankle.

Love,

Em

p.s. I don’t have time even to proof read this, so please forgive all errors, large and small.

See you soon.

November 11, 2025

My day started at 5am, because I knew that was when Sulman and Abilio would be arriving from Colombia. I have been managing on my own since I arrived on Sunday, two whole days. But it is so much. Three heads looking at several thousand activities are better than one. Plus my credit card seized up in Manaus, and I have survived by begging, borrowing and transferring money to Beth, from Kairos, who is here, who ran around town looking for a working ATM. So, now I have money AND friends.

They arrive at around 9, with delays, and waits and customs and taxi rides. Then there’s getting them settled, and breakfast and finally, we are out the door on our way to the Anglican Cathedral. We can walk there. I am pretty excited. It is less than two kilometres away. It is late morning. We bake, melt, the usual. When we get there — joy! Right away I bump into Ives, the Cathedral dean, also a poet and an artist. He is ushering folks in. The Cathedral is hosting the Tapiri, a vast inter-faith gathering that will unfold over the next four days — layered on top of the people’s summit that starts on Wednesday, the green zone of COP (non-credentialed) and the blue zone (credentialed) of the actual COP summit, and dozens, if not hundreds, of side events.

We are glad to make new friends — and I reintroduced myself to the Lakota-priest, the Rev. Shaneequa Brokenleg. The Rev. Dr. Martin Brokenleg is the Rev. Shaneequa’s uncle.

“Where did you study?” I ask

“Vancouver School of Theology,” she answers.

“Shut the front door!” My mother-school.

“At first. But then I had to go elsewhere so I could be ordained in the US Episcopal Church. But VST Summer School was the best. My people. My way.”

“Wow,” I say. Lucky me. The Rev. Dr. Martin Brokenleg had been my preaching professor, pastor care professor and the supervisor on my Master’s Thesis. (2009 — on the nature of Sacred Land and the (terrible) Goldcorp mine in Guatemala —see my previous post: Turning Away from Judas’ Silver.)

We chat some more. The Rev. Shaneequa is the Episcopal Church’s Staff Officer on Racial Reconciliation. She lives in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I can’t believe we’re together here.

We connect with other active Christians. We practice our Portuguese. Fr. Ives offers to photocopy the flyer with the QR code for The Poem. We head across the street for lunch. Then we gird our loins and head to COP.

Through a small miracle, we had acquired two blue zone badges for Sulman and I. I wasn’t sure I wanted one. Not being the kind to be official, and all that. But Abilio encouraged me and a Colombian Mennonite friend contacted Samuel from A Rocha in Surrey BC(!) and somehow with much fussing and correcting of my name through the official channels we are registered. Sulman, the co-secretary of the global Oscar Romero Network and I (co-president of the same) have our passes. Abilio no.

Abilio, other than being my younger brother, is also a Great Colombian Activist. Dangerous enough to be targeted, wily and lucky enough to have survived the waves of repression. We lost him from SICSAL (he was our previous secretary) for three years when he was snagged to work with the Colombian ministry of the interior (under Petro, of course.) This year he retired from the government, and came back to work with us. We had tried to get him a pass, here, and there, but it never came through. We chat as we head in, who needs a blue pass anyway? There’s SO much going on.

I had spoken with the Colombian desk inside (when they confirmed the reading of my poem) about securing a pass for him. They said they would talk with the Vice, but she was obviously loaded with activities. Sulman lines up, and Abilio goes up too, while I disappear inside to find someone from the Colombian pavilion to help. By the time we get back to registration, Sulman AND Abilio are walking in with passes. Saber what he did or said.

So we are in. We walk up and down, east, west, north and south. I am so happy to be with them. We are each other’s kind of Christian. Revolution till the cows come home. Overthrow violence, hatred, greed, war, capitalism, cruelty, horror, with our story (often cruelly twisted and muddied along the centuries) of absolute love, compassion, humility, action in favour of the most oppressed. I could just dance to be with them here!

After a while we are tired. We sit to recharge phones, refill water bottles. We have seen several dozen displays, spoken with several dozen people. These two hadn’t slept one minute on the plane over here, or since. I didn’t sleep much, because I was waiting for them, and writing to you. The energy of the streams of people is invigorating.

We are going through layers of schedules. We decide to divide. They both head back downtown to a church for a gathering of the Laudato Si movement. This is the global network that formed 10 years ago after Pope Francis’ encyclical of the same name. I want to hang with the Canadians. Our networks: Kairos (supported by the United Church of Canada, and ecumenical) and Development and Peace (Catholic oldies, the organization, and goodies). They are hosting a panel on the Bishops of the Global South and their critically important joint letter to COP30.

I am in the right place. This document is a watershed piece of work. Bishops holding nothing back. Three continents speaking with one powerful voice. Cardinal Pablo David of the Philippines starts us off. Super typhoon slams the archipelago. Hurricane devastates Jamaica. Warmer, stronger, longer, larger. The least responsible for climate change are suffering the most. Droughts, cyclones.

This is not just a political or economic crisis. This moral and civilizational. Those in the “global north” are invited to an eco-conversion. How are we going to relate, to each other, to God, to this noble earth? The climate crisis is based on broken relationships. How are we going to change these. Incremental change are not enough. As a church we have a voice, we are called to call for an end to the myth of limitless growth, of faith in extractive industries as a model for human living. We stand for an equitable energy transition rejecting false narratives and false stories of carbon offsets, “green” mining. The poor are not an afterthought.

Hermana Rosita Sidasmed from northern Argentine takes the mike. Her work is in the northern region of Argentina, El Chaco and the Guaraní Aquifer. The area has parts of Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay and Paraguay (See Grandin’s America, América and the Chaco War). The Aquifero is the second largest body of fresh water in the world and is under attack from every angle. Sister Rosita works with indigenous folks, campesinos and neighbourhood committees in defence of the water. Denouncing false solutions. Standing with the people. Green economies (land) and Blue economies (water) still operate with an extractive logic. This has to end. Our gospel rejects the logic of these false solutions. This fight is existential. Without grasslands, without water, without the earth — there will be no life.

Sister Immaculate Tusingwire, of the Medical Mission Sisters (Uganda) speaks next. There is an oil pipeline — the largest in the world. It is 80% complete. They fought for years and now have lost. The rural communities will lose everything. Losing the battle, people have also lost hope. (My heart sinks and I shed a few tears). The Bishops’ letter gives hope, she says. We have to be wary (she adds her voice to all the others) of false solutions and dangerous distractions. We are working towards a true solution, a massive change needs to happen.

We wrap it up, more voices. Filipina activist Lidy Nacpil from the Asian Peoples’ Movement for Debt and Development, let’s the world hear: We will not be silenced!

Canadian Catholic bishop, Jon Hansen of Mackenzie-Fort Smith (Northwest Territories), offers a summary, adds his peoples’ voice. Forest fires. Smoke. Melting tundra.

We leave the freezing air-conditioned room and head into the warm night. I finally figure out how to hop on a COP bus and head downtown to meet Sulman and Abilio. There is a giant dinner underway, sponsored by Laudato Si, Brazil. We eat, laugh and share our days. Leaving, I bump into Joanina, from the Itinerate Group, based in Manaus, and active all over the Amazon. We cry for joy and embrace. We were together in 2019nin the Vatican, at the Synod on the Amazon, now six years ago, just before the pandemic. We celebrated with Pope Francis and planted an oak tree in the Vatican garden. I tell her — your group, Fernando, Francisco, and you, all the rest —dancing, praying, eating, laughing together in Rome — that’s when I first fell in love with the Amazon. You, I tell her, are probably the reason I am here. Love.

November 10th

COP30, Belem do Para, Brazil

Well, here I am. After years of planning. It is completely overwhelming. I am feeling a bit lost and disconnected, and I’m really glad Abilio and Sulman (colleagues from SICSAL - Colombia) are coming tomorrow in the early hours. Los canadienses have been spectacular. There is a team from KAIROS, the national ecumenical organization, and I met some Mining Injustice Network folk from Toronto.

I am staying in a nice apartment in the old part of Belem (about ½ hour from the COP facilities.) This morning I jumped in a cab and off I went. The driver dropped me about a kilometre or so from the site, and I joined the streams of people heading through the already baking morning sun. Just outside the giant building a group of young people were engaging in theatrical protest, many of them appearing to die dramatically, and others were covering them with white sheets. Then I saw a banner and realized — these were folks from the Mesoamerican Caravan. I had heard that they had been blocked from entering Nicaragua. I’m glad some of them made it here. I wonder where my friends from the flotilla are.

Inside, the lineup for registering was huge and snaking through the entire entryway. I’m very glad I got the tip of going a day early! I went straight through security into the great hall. Good heavens. I can’t tell you the size of this! Vast, long, wide, impressive, again, overwhelming. I entered and curious, walked along. First there were pavillions. By country, and by theme, I walked straight through, without entering the side hallways. I wondered where Canada was — and Colombia.

I walked for a long time. It seemed bigger than any airport I’ve been in. (Maybe!) Break out rooms, offices, press, all the way to the end where there was a roped off area and exhausted-looking security people. I guess that is where the bigwigs do what they do. Back down the hallway. It was like being a salmon swiming the wrong way. Actually there were streams of people going in every direction.

There are coffee shops, snack shops, and such. But you need a COP debit card, which you load with money, and then spend as you go. I got R150, about $40. That should be good for a while. I wander back to the displays. Find some young Korean women supporting fossil fuel transition in Asia. We chatted for a while.

Then I headed to the Azerbakjan booth. There were three young people there, one of them fussing with a small espresso machine. I learned (and forgot) how to say thank you in Azerbakjani. When I asked the young man if they drank a lot of coffee in his country he solemnly shook his head. “We drink tea.” The coffee was very good. I headed down the hall. Then I saw it — Colombia! I ambled over, and immediately heard my name. There he was, Jerson, vice-minister Tatiana Roa’s assistant.

”There you are,” he said. “I’ve been looking for you. When are we going to schedule the poem?” Gulp. We sit as he flips through a vast spreadsheet of activities. We choose a time and date. The poem: “Leaf on Drum River” will have its inaguaral reading (in Spanish) on Friday, November 14th, 5:30 pm Amazon-Atlantic time. I’m dizzy. We chat for a while, exchange whattsapps. He goes to look for vice-minister Roa, but she’s in a meeting. “Come back,” he says. “I will,” I say.

Now Beth, from KAIROS and I are playing text-tag. “Canada has a meeting every day at 10.” “I’ll head there now.” “It’s by the Artesinal coffee stand.” “Okay.” Somehow we miss each other, I stick my head in the door, say hi, she is out looking for me. I double back. We find each other. Then together we head out into the melting Amazon almost-high-noon sun. It is hot and half the river is in the air. We are heading to the Lutheran church, about a 20 minute walk away. On route we collect the rest of her team.

At the Lutheran church there is an important meeting: the gathering of interfaith leaders for the Talanoa Dialogue. We will meet and discuss how religious communities might be part of the challenge to the climate crisis. It is a lively group of some 150 people from many traditions and every continent. After prayer and presentations we divide into seven groups, three portuguese-speaking, three-english speaking, and one-spanish speaking. I go with the Spanish speakers.

For about an hour we: analyse the problem, consider solutions and really dig deep into theological, cosmologicial, practical problems and solutions: There are Monsters out there. They are real. We have to name them. Greed. Power. Violence. How shocking — and how sad for him — that Elon Musk was named a “trillionaire” this past week. We have to understand the systemic nature of this horror. It is the world completely off its centre. But the created world will fight back, if we continue to abuse her. We will lose. We have to change structural systems. This is a collective fight, not an individual battle. I mention the communities I had visited. They know what to do, they always have. And the y are doing it. We need to find was to protect these vulnerable ones.

We head back. After a fun sung grace, we head outside to the banana tree filled courtyard for lunck. A spectacular lunch. A thousand kinds of food. An enormous green salad. Beans. Lentils. I heap my plate. With me in the line is Ben, a Franciscan from Kenya who currently lives in New York. We become instant friends and sit together. Then an Anglican comes over — amazingly, he is the head of the organization Franciscans International, the Franciscan organization to the UN. An Anglican head of FI for the first time. Then other Anglicans join us. Martha Jarvis joins us. She is the . Then another young man. The Rev. Brokenleg. WHAT! The Dr. Rev. Martin Brokenleg was my thesis supervisor for my Masters’ Degree. He was also my preaching instructor. Lakota from South Dakota. Anglican. Fabulous man, priest and teacher. I can’t believe I’m sitting with his nephew melting in Belem!

Then the Franciscans kidnap me. They’re off to a meeting on challenging the extractive industry. Fifty folks, again from every continent. We hear testimony from: the Philippines, India, up and down Abya Yala: Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, around Africa, particularly Zimbabwe and Congo. These are stories I read all the time. Its something else to bear witness to the testimony directly from the affected people.

Here is a flash look at their history, and what they are organizing for COP30:

— at every World Social Forum, people and organizations from areas affected by extraction (metal mining, petroleum) came together. They realized that while global mining companies are organized, they were active locally, churches, legal organizations, so these activists formed: The Thematic Social Forum on Mining. They met in South Africa, then Co-vid. In 2023 they met in Indonesia. Their third meeting is — Here! As part of the Peoples’ Summit, happening paralel to COP30. This a pre-meeting for that.

I will try and attend that meeting. On Saturday.

The plan is to come away on Saturday with a declaration proclaming two things.

1. An affirmation of affected communities around the world and their right to say no.

2. Challenge the false narrative of a ‘clean energy transition’ which is a mask on the continued extractive practices drived by greed and devasting communities.

Whew. Busy days ahead. We wrap up and I head of with this new gang. I (as usual) have no idea where we are going. But I enjoy the chance to get to know Jen a bit more. We end up walking to the waterfront, and along the edge of the water, past markets and displays — lots of COP30 swag for sale. (I may or may not have bought five stuffed capybaras!)

I notice we have made our way to old Belem. I was going to try and figure out how to get back to the Blue Zone, but I’m zonked. And baking, or melting. I am not that far from the Sisters’ apartment. I peel off from the group and wander through old Belem, ancient buildings, colourful, crumbling boats. Lots of police and military.

The rain starts about 3 blocks from home, but I don’t care. It is cooling and refreshing.

Tomorrow is another day. Sulman and Abilio will be here.

Well friends, this is it. We are about to enter Belem. After three months, 14,000 kilometres, 10 countries, 25 communities, I am about to arrive. The Pilgrimage to Belem has happened. I have been on: buses, boats, trains, cars, a couple of planes. I’ve walked some, been on a dozen tuctucs, on the back of a motorcycle twice. I never did find a friendly burro for a little ride.

COP-30, the gathering of the world to hash out the what now of the climate crisis starts tomorrow. Somehow I secured a pass for the blue zone (decision-making zone), as an observer. My two colleagues from the global Oscar Romero Network (SICSAL) arrive on Tuesday in the early hours. There are layers upon layers of meetings, activities, prayer services, marches, meals, celebrations. The Indigenous leader I was chatting with yesterday, Ardaiy, says this is the watershed moment. I know many are on-board for real change.

President Petro of Colombia, and the Vice-Minister Tatiana Roa are leading a strong charge for an actual transition from fossil fuels. I don’t know of any other global leaders — not Lula, not Sheinbaum, certainly not our Carney — are going anywhere near that. We shall see.

I have written ‘Epistles’ and published these on my Substack as I have been able. I still owe you all two, or maybe three more of these: the Triple Border, Manaus, and The Boat Rides. I won’t be able to write these in the next two weeks.

I will try and write a short reflection on the day, every day, and get that out. Also: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. That is for photos or videos and quick updates.

The Poem is DONE! As part of the Pilgrimage, I collected verses, words, reflections from every visit. It now exists, though I haven’t sent it out yet. Together with my beloved Margarita Kenefic, Guatemala’s Homer, and a new friend, Brazilian-Argentine, Pablo Molloy, we are creating a tri-lingual version, Spanish-English-Portuguese. I will be reading this somewhere at COP (in Spanish). Stay tuned.

I want to thank everyone who made this Pilgrimage possible: my friends and co-conspiritors back in Canada, particularly Vancouver, all the hosts and organizers along the way, from SICSAL and beyond. This really was the work of hundreds. I have fallen madly in love a couple of dozen times. The stories of suffering and resistance up and down our beloved ABYA YALA are wrenching and infuriating and filled with spirit and hope. The knowledge of so many that we live in a blessed world, that all Creation are our brothers and sisters, that we can live well, in peace with one another, and with our Common Home — this is the fire that keeps burning.

To my Anglican church, Bishop John, Diocese of New Westminster and particularly to my dear parish of St. Barnabas, thank you for giving me space to undertake this journey. We are an imperfect tradition doing our very best to serve the Creator of Heaven and Earth. The core of our faith demands that we care for the widow, the orphan, the stranger, and that we live in right relationship with all creation. I treasure being a part of this work in progress.

To my wife, Patti, and to my best friend Margarita, who were party to my whining, discomfort, loneliness, doubt, fear, frustration — I love you so much. To my heroic sons, children of this part of the earth, and to their fine wives, you were never more than a minute from my mind. I couldn’t be more proud of the men you have become and the women you are.

To Oscar, Addison, Alexander, Axelito and Violet. I’m sorry I wasn’t there for two of your birthdays. I have missed you five more than anything and I can hardly wait for you to come over and make Christmas cookies with me. This fight is for you.