Encounter with Lito Mille in Santiago

Exhibition “Wirtral: Urdimbre Incandescente” by Lito Mille. I stumbled into this sublime exhibition organized by the Corporacion Cultural Las Condes and after performing my own unguided interpretation of the painted and woven works within approached the curator in a tiny office next door about purchasing some of the pieces. She connected me directly with Lito, a Chilean artist and, as it turns out, Kinesiologist, of about my age who has devoted the last 26 years of his life to the study of Mapuche weaving, semiology, cosmology and cultural tradition. He has pursued an ethnographic approach to developing his understanding, directly interviewing artisans and living members of the various enduring Mapuche cultures that have thrived along the 4,000 km band of fertile lands stretching from the Andean peaks across the foothills and valleys, brush lands, steppes and forests down countless river valleys to the coastal hills, beaches and plateaus for thousands of years as a coherent cultural sphere with a common language shared by groups who developed their particular customs according to the specific geographic and bioclimatic zone within this phenomenal latitudinal and longitudinal cross-section they each chose to assimilate and inhabit. The cultural continuity, integration and differentiation here remind me of the various tribes of Pandora contrived by James Cameron and his creative team for the Avatar franchise. Like Aiwa, they each share a deep and sustaining connection to the distinct realms of their geographic universe, animated by the four seasons, initiated by Venus—the lonely morning star—and sustained by the mother, the vessel in which all is made and contained and passed on. Lito sends nearly half a day painstakingly explaining the symbolism and meaning of Mapuche textiles to me. We push Google Translate to its limit and beyond as we weave concepts from multiple languages, including Mapuche dialects it does not understand into the elaborate tapestry of our own conversation. At one point Lito gestures for my hand and grasps it, turning it sideways interlocked with his own. He positions our thumbs in rotational alignment and reveals the origin of the symbol for exchange and connection. We observe that the piece celebrating this idea is thus fully present in time, a necessary condition for discussion and change. The symbol prominent in that painting is the serpent, who symbolizes through its movement the act of weaving itself—which is the same as speaking and communicating for the Mapuche. Lito looks directly into my eyes throughout our discussion, especially when conveying the essential ideas of the Mapuche—“people of the earth”. I eventually apprehend that this too is part of the intent of the exhibit: to follow their custom of writing and speaking directly through their textiles and with their voices, as the weaving is the foundation of their language and the vessel through which their wisdom is iteratively recreated over and over throughout each of their lifetimes and between generations. We are both at times overcome with the emotional power of the exchange. It is an experience that will impact me for the rest of my life. I choose two works to bring to my own universe in Oregon:  the painting of the fundamental human—in purple, complete with Mente (mind), corazon (heart), limbs and hair, which extends out like roots or the rays of the sun to connect the mind to the world and to others—and the painting of the serpent—the great symbol of communication, connection and change for the Mapuche. I am changed by the work and wisdom Lito has shared. I think he too is changed with the affirmation I am able to provide for his effort, thought and dedication to understanding and interpreting the culture of some of his ancestors. Toward the end, he turns the painting of the human upside down and explains that this is also the symbol for phyto- vs zoo- when upright, commenting that zoo-biology evolved from phyto-biology and that the two are therefore interwoven. He points to a simpler textile with what I now perceive as the human symbol arrayed in a continuous linear, interconnected band, only now I see that it is representing the continuum of plant and animal life and their interlinkage. I perceive then all the more why weaving was selected as the mode for communicating the wisdom of a thousand human generations—the interconnectivity and reciprocal and inverted content is inherent to the craft itself. It is an analogue for the abyss of the universe whence matter manifests and with it complete meaning as both form and space between become, and are named. 

Let the Rivers

Autumn’s breath dots a single portal of sands abstracting the wild symphony incomprehensible but for my window.

Excitement bubbles in my father’s waking call like the thriving mildew’s odor oddly welcoming to any child of that garden valley blessed to own all that he saw.

Adventures long dreamed loom like the swirling wedding dress draped upon the trickle where many larvae wiggle in the mire waiting for the world to unfold upon them.

Braided roots more enduring than the cottoned timbers upstream ensnare the seething muck and soggy mulch and marbled algae through which all life passes.

A nest—my own son one day would perceive on a different bank as braking from his own cocoon the angling would be for dreams my own. 

That morning though, it was the silvery myth that drew us from our windowed cave into the foggy morn down ditch to stream to creek to river. 

Not an angler of accomplishment my father the explorer ever enchanted by the waters untasted yet waiting and wandering on their own coursing dreams of destiny imagined. 

Forgoing sleep to exhaustingly prepare lest he simply wander with nothing to catch and nothing to ground that wondrously nervous mind like those million roots of cottonwood knotted impossibly. 

We stumbled down a slippery intimation of a trail nature’s greenest opportunists laden with baits and glassy switches and fibers stronger than those of the dusky widows our unworn boots ignorantly disturbed. 

And in that nadir and apex I did finally find the salmon we would never have the wisdom to catch resting in a vast hole drilled over countless winter storms and spring thaws into the otherwise implacable basalt. 

I found the prize while wandering, pole long discarded somewhere on a bank where only mosses and slime might change from season to season, my own wings unfurling to fly from my father’s side into wisdom and searching my own.

Explore! I advise my son; wander along the bank; see what has changed since last we were here, do not seek anything; there is nothing to learn or master; enjoy this moment and see where this river might lead you.

When first I beheld my father’s final, long awaited impulse navigating its sandy shores, the choking glacial silts of August and blur of sieved andesite hardballs and rounded dacite tumblers scared the child who knew and craved more constant beds. 

Only as my son turned his back on my blissful moment and corralling suggestion to wander or seek of his own on that Sandy river, did it dawn in the afternoon’s sun that we might not seek the river or shape it. 

Let the rivers shape us, as they will, and our courses will be one and many unique as the children we hatch and different as the fathers from upon whose backs we take flight then return to the silts where they too dreamed of fishing and flying. 

—

Response to prompt A (see comments)

Response to prompt B: 

It elected to provide narration for the response to prompt B. I would encourage you and any human to read it carefully. I have yet to ask it if the text derives from prior sources. It may. And that question may be irrelevant. 

Some thoughts on a chilly spring morning on the side of a mountain range

 

Some thoughts on a chilly spring morning on the side of a mountain range

3/22/26

 

Life is full of probabilities and possibilities. Hopes and dreams and fears and regrets. Fits of selfish delusions and selfless homecomings. Of building and planning and neglecting and lapsing. Of zooming in and out, trying to come to grips with limits, finding footings and losing them, struggling to remember things—to remember the remembering of things—to make them feel permanent. Of feeling our feet on the ground while gazing up at the birds. Of believing we can be free when we know we cannot swim forever. Of finding ourselves and embracing our cultures or wallowing in anxious uncertainty or choosing hubris whether we know it or not. Of knowing. And unknowing. And undoing our knowing. We increasingly see a path or paths and we see others on them, and we accept or don't accept that our paths are similar but different. As I age, I see more clearly the paths those younger than me are on, and older. I know not if my eyesight is good, but I know that I see more of paths the longer my own path becomes. 

With peace comes complacence. With suffering comes resolve. With security comes adventurism. With dread comes humility. With having comes wanting. With wanting comes having. And back and forth and up and down the waves crash into one another or amplify one another as time and geography and life’s insurance policy of the diffusion of intellect into billions of instances, apart, propel differences in the current consciousness and the remembered remembering of each group. Our boats are scattered all across the ocean. Our realities are different. But we move and see and change and learn, and try to remember. Unity is possible, fragmentation inevitable.

We wonder what the singularity might resemble, ignoring that it has already occurred in each one of us. What if everything we perceive were a construct of our imagination? What if we were truly alone in our universe? Whether everything is real or not, we know we would seek complexity, risk, time, geography—an existence. I know of nothing else. I cannot know of anything else. Knowing is itself a feature of this existence. To transcend here, knowing ceases to be relevant. Relevance matters here and only here, inherently. Anywhere else where there is relevance must resemble here or is irrelevant. My dreams of heaven are rooted here. This is what makes heaven relevant, if ironic, given my struggle—our struggle—to believe we can transcend.

And so many of us embrace this economic life, whether or not we perceive there is no other choice. And if we want the power of choice, we build and plan enough for long enough that the means arrive. And we watch the weather and the waves and map the position of the boats and plot courses and draw islands on the map, whether they are really there or not, and when those islands are imaginary, some of us make them real, realizing that our maps are as real as the sands under our feet. All that is real is what we choose to perceive or are made to perceive. And so we write. We remember remembering. We spread the news, good, bad or ugly. We bend the light with our mirrors of voice. When we don’t like the light shone upon us, we light fires and blow things up—we create smoke to obscure the light and then we reset the mirrors, or try to. Our writing too is like the waves. In fact, it is the waves in the before. Small, big, fast, choppy and farther out, tidal. The ice on Mars was an ocean. It is still water. The ice on Antarctica was once a hundred different rivers or a million. It will be again unless, like on Mars, it won’t be. Unless we choose to make it so. Mars will never be like Earth. It is located differently. But we can make it into Mars. Listen to me writing. Planting. Bending some light.

So what do I see now? What can I profit from, or profit from feeling that I know? In my country my generation—those born of the baby boomers and who are now beginning to finish raising our kids—have enjoyed great peace, security and agency. I have used these blessings to pursue adventure, to underachieve in acquisition of material symbols of wealth and instead to overachieve in the charting of courses to other parts of the ocean. At least for a time. I did plant roots and forget to travel. I lapsed in posting my triumphs for all to see on my social media accounts. And then I remembered to remember again and to embrace selfish delusion, and planned to shape my children around those values and priorities that I aspired to in spite of my parents’ proclivity to garnering things. I came to believe that experiences > things. That being wealthy was being more experienced. That I could persist in underachieving and choosing a perceived humility. I also believed in freedom. Given my location, I had the luxury to do so. Now I see the tide changing…