At the End of the World…
Ushuaia or the town at the end of the world...
On this night prior to the full moon, water from the heavens has cleaned up all the dust outside.... Little drops shine all over... and it is under a heavy sky that we leave Ushuaia this morning...
My heart is as heavy as the cloudy roof... I think about the past few days here and I don't even know how to express all that happened, all that I felt, all that these majestic lands at the end of the world have shuffled within.
Ushuaia is pronounced “Ussuaïa”... In the indigenous yamana language, it means "the way of the Sun."
The yamana were the coastal tribes of Tierra del Fuego. They lived from fishing and hunting sea lions for their meat and their fat. They lived naked... the sea lions' fat was applied to their bodies as a protective oil.
They were nomads and owned handcrafted canoes made from panels of bark of the trees softened and sawn together. They had acquired such a mastery in canoe construction that they could assemble and dissemble them in the blink of an eye.
The bottom of their canoes had a layer of clay and sand so that they could light a little fire in the canoe… That would seem just a big "no no" these days... yet their canoes were their floating home... and fire one of their most precious ally after their canoe. Having a canoe meant survival for them.
Women were in charge of paddling, men were in charge of fishing and hunting, and kids were the fire keepers. Everyone had a well-established role.
They lived in small communities, in dome-like huts that they would build from branches. In a "one room fits all" model :-) They always had a little fire running.
From the sea, navigators could see the smoke and dots of light... this is what made them give the name "Tierra del Fuego" to this faraway land at the southernmost tip of the American continent.
The story of the yamana tribes then becomes pretty much the same as many native communities...
Westerners see them as savages who should be "educated" meaning christianized... One of our guides said: "westerners did not consider the natives to be even human. For them setting foot somewhere and claiming the land like they were the first ones there was just normal. The natives were just savages and animals."
And indeed, some quotes from their journals are quite shocking... and made my hair rise… Some depicted them as "the most insignificant race of human kind" - Darapsky - or "subhuman beings without a spiritual life" as per Darwin in 1853...
The arrival of the explorers was the beginning of the end for the yamana tribes. The Europeans, very surprised to see them living naked in such an environment provided them with clothes. The lack of hygiene and filthiness from the clothes transferred diseases to the natives, who were not at all equipped to face those.
Living naked, and being nomads, their bodies were always cleaned naturally by the rain, their little dome-houses made from natural material were also cleaned naturally by the elements.
As more vessels and westerners arrived in the area to hunt for sea lions and look for gold, bringing diseases, alcohol and competition, they deprived the indigenous tribes from their natural food resources, and the wood they used to build their canoes.
Their spiritual strength and life force connected them to nature and its cycles in major ways. The arrival of foreigners to their lands slowly led to the loss of their identity and extinction.
The last full-blooded and last speaker of the millennia-old ancestral yamana language, Cristina Calderon left her body and earth realm in 2022. She was 93 years old. With her, a wealth of knowledge and wisdom is gone. Luckily, before she transitioned, she had managed to create a dictionary with words translated from her native tongue into Spanish.
This story touched me deeply...
Because the stories repeat themselves endlessly... because man does not learn from the past... The past exist so that we may learn from it… So that we may grow from the lessons and the challenges... and the stories... yet we don’t...
Tierra del Fuego and the story of the yamana have touched me to the core. There were other tribes in Tierra del Fuego, more inland ones but it is the voices and spirits of the yamana that reached out...
At the end of the world, the doorway to Antartida or Antartica, people from different parts of the world have settled over the years.
At the end of the world, on “the way of the Sun”, the jaw-dropping vistas of color-shifting leaves and tall peaks find their way to your inner Sun... they nourish your light with their majesty and their unshakeable stature.
Pachamama, Paparaharaha, Mā existed before we came into form and matter... and they will still be here long after us... They do not need saving... they only need us to find our way back to our pure essence... the essence of Love.
Because when there is pure unconditional love, there is no fighting, there is no will to control the world and others.
From Love, only beauty arises...
From Love, there is surrender...
From Love, we all dance in the eternal flow of Life, in Unity…
Thank you Tierra del Fuego for all your priceless gifts and messages. We might never see each other again but you are now part of me like I am now part of you... Your heavenly waters dance in my cells, your precious air fills my lungs, your beauty and magic dance in my heart of hearts.
Forever grateful… Namaste!
