Bombs continued to be heard. To a certain extent, it was even comical: playing hide-and-seek and suddenly hearing the roar and vibration that the explosions sometimes produced, and the fright that gave away more than one participant. We looked south and saw the mountain exhaling dust. And I don't know if I dreamed it or if it was a memory, but clean rivers existed too. When I tell this story, even the people of Santa Ana look at me with disbelief and make me think that maybe I dreamed it, but I do remember the rivers, especially the one that runs through Machete Street, the Uruca River. I used to swim there. Yoyo, my neighbor, took me there one sunny afternoon. A huge rock formed a small pool, and we would jump in. Santa Ana is characterized by a warm climate, so being in the river was quite refreshing. I have no scientific or technical evidence to corroborate this, but the water felt clean, its course was still healthy, my body knew it back then. When I returned to that river pool after a long time, I understood why no one believes me. The pool no longer exists; its bed was dredged to prevent “accidents” on the properties of condos and houses that occupied its banks. Access to this stretch of the river is only known to those of us who still visit, homeless people and other animals trying to cross one of the few passages connecting the mountains of the southern Central Valley with the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, an interurban biological corridor. The polluted watercourse begins to fade from people's view, hidden behind fences and walls, and so too the stories that were lived there disappear. Walking along the banks of the river in this area is to put yourself in the skin of a marginalized being, it is an act of empathy—the security guards of the housing developments have called the police on me for simply being there. Eventually, a heron gives us a slap of reality. They roam and will continue to move around there, even if we constantly try to deny their existence through urban planning, even as we progressively turn rivers into sewers. During the rainy season, the river sings and echoes through the canyon system that borders houses and neighborhoods downstream. They compete with the noise of engines, but if you listen carefully, you can still hear them conspiring with the life that flows through them. There is possibly more hope in conversations with rivers than in conversations about rivers. The demoralization of realizing the injustice—and that we are complicit—is too great for some neighbors. We look for external culprits: it's the immigrants from the slums, it's the agrochemicals thrown away by those who farm upstream, it's the condo buildings that modify the riverbed and constantly dump their dirty water into the river, it's the municipality giving permits... We don't understand why we carry this burden of guilt in our bodies. We forget that the city is an ecosystem, that it is a permeable system in constant negotiation with other forms of life, that we are the same water that Theia brought, that in our eukaryotic cells also live the Corrogres, the Oro, and the Uruca. It is the weight of the deep history of life. It is a burden we do not want to carry, and there are thousands of distractions that tell us that there is always something more important than this flowing of life. The enchantment of progress only calls us to look forward and to forget our surroundings, our bodies, other bodies, and our response-ability within the ecological crisis. At times, I forgot that I was captive and complicit in the urbanism that took shape in Santa Ana. Lots of signs. Lots of noise. Little connection. All very fast. Everyone on autopilot. I didn't pay attention to the withered rue. The suffocation made me look towards the mountains. The wound in them that appeared (before the giant advertising billboards) when you drove down the highway—it was worthy of a postcard. Now you can't see the wound, nor Santa Ana. 

If every day we embrace a destructive and exclusionary worldview in the way we produce and inhabit urban spaces, then we can also find ways in our daily city life to embrace other ways of existing and responding to the conflicts produced by modern urbanism. Perhaps accepting the uncomfortable idea that conflict is a condition of chaos—the order of existence—will ease the burden we carry. Philosopher Baptiste Morizot talks about repopulating our lives, “in the philosophical sense of making visible that the myriad forms of life that constitute our environments are not a backdrop for our human tribulations, but rightful inhabitants of the world, because they are the ones who create it through their presence (4)." I perceive that repopulating involves sharpening our capacity for attention in order to recognize that other forms of life accompany us, with their own trajectories, relationships, and desires. In order for situated political actions to emerge, capable of subverting the order and hierarchies among the inhabitants of the territory, human and non-human, and thus transforming the conflict. Perhaps these actions can also be understood as rituals that constantly remind us of the presence of other forms of life, the trajectories of the territory and how our lives encounter them, and give them a place in our ever-entangled daily lives. We are called upon to become those waves of action that disobey the border with the ‘other side’. Erasing that border is a way of enabling horizontal conversations with the more-than-human on common ground—so that dialogue with the territory and its inhabitants ceases to be a constant reaffirmation of the distances we impose through development and progress.

One morning, we heard more explosions than usual. Tear gas grenades fall on students protesting against the landfill that the government decided to put in the district. Blocked streets mandatory holidays apathy violence anti-riot police sirens union defense democracy. A united people who did not allow that landfill to be built is a memory that inhabits me and fraternalizes me with those who fought to take care of my home. It was a struggle for the health of the population and the landscape, to prevent bad odors and the spillage of polluting chemicals on the land and rivers, to take care of the ecosystems. Today, the landfill, does it not exist? Walking through the landscape, it appears scattered in the streets, lots, streams, and rivers, the landfill that we thought we had avoided 30 years ago. And it is not the invasive garbage of “others,” it is ours. 

The bombs change format. The explosions were relentless, but the subtlety of indifference is just as effective. Morning runners and cyclists continue to pass by the corner of the abandoned house lot, which was overgrown with trees. From one day to the next, the trees ceased to exist with superb effectiveness. All that remained were a couple of signs from realtors and an empty frame. The harsh sunlight on the flattened and “cleaned” land that had been there for the last 20 years. We erased the shadows from the landscape and sent them to the drawer of memory where they all become light. The cleanliness hurts me, the order hurts me, it hurts me to see the athletes passing by without acknowledging the pain. I miss the chaos. Pragmatism breaks the skin of the landscape. When I contacted the authorities to try to make sense of the felling of more than 10 trees—three of them possibly centuries old (according to calculations I can make with my age)—they replied that everything had been done according to the law. I am alive at the beginning or end of an era, in a transition, but where to? I asked myself as I looked at the branchless bodies still standing of neighbors I used to see every day, why did I never tell them how much I appreciated their existence?

Our limited ability to make room for the grief we experience when the landscape in which we live and grow up is transformed abruptly or gradually is evidence of a deeper collective disconnection and wound. Every time we are indifferent and try to block out the pain, anger, and sadness that comes with witnessing injustice, that wound becomes bigger and deeper. We are making it our last priority without realizing that this is the world, this is the time we got to live in, it is now that we must act, not later when “things settle down,” it is now that we have to make other worlds with our tears. Experiencing my father's decline and eventual death from a terminal illness is very similar to witnessing the ecological disaster we are unleashing with real estate and urban development in Santa Ana. It is like watching a loved one slowly die, and there are so many forces driving them toward that fate that it seems that all I can do is, as I did with my father, accompany them. To try to give the land and the non-human beings that still roam it those passages and avenues of hope that can prolong their existence for one more day... just one more day. Losing someone close to you to a terminal illness slows down the process of bidding farewell, it gives you ‘time’ to prepare, but it doesn’t cease to affect you during and when they finally die. Although I was never diagnosed by a doctor, several years after my father's passing, I realized that I had gone through a depression after his death. In that sense, depression is similar to History: we don't know that we are going through important periods until years later, when we look back and find out about the processes we were immersed in as societies. I wasn't aware of the transformation and possibly didn't perform the necessary rituals to mourn his passing —patriarchy is also a burden I carry. During that period, I doubted myself, my abilities, who I was, and my role in this world. I think time and my family healed me; I never expressed it. I doubt that grief has a fixed time frame. It lives with us. Trying to eliminate it is a way of responding to that idea of permanent happiness that capitalism sells everywhere. I have learned to find peace in grief, not just to make peace with grief, because I feel that it will always inhabit my body. Giving space to grief for what is lost due to the violent ways of making cities today is a subversive act that can give us a little bit of peace in the face of injustice, but it can also give us the space to dare to reinvent our role as a species in our common home. If there is grief, it is because there was a death. If there was a death, we need rituals to honor that lost life. It helps us make sense of our existence, now without that being. Under this logic, rituals that honor the grief over the unfair death of a river, a mountain, or a species becomes a denunciation against the colonial and capitalist paradigm that organizes this society. Subversive rituals that emerge from love and empathy for a territory... for the “other” that also constitutes us. I wonder if at another time in the short history of our species, performing rituals for the landscape has been as important a political act as it is now. I don't even know if the prevailing common sense would allow the human beings I love and admire to listen and approve of what I am proposing. At the same time, it is very likely that ideas like these will put me at odds with the current interests of the entire human community of Santa Ana. A new city design that is not based exclusively on market demands implies a change in mentality and, above all, a new set of values, which means rethinking the materials we use, the processes, and the study of new urban planning models that work not only from a functional perspective, but also from a social perspective (5)—that is, that prioritize the wellbeing of everyone. An ecological and radically democratic design that enables the participation of all stakeholders—meaning open, always inclusive. A complex challenge, without a doubt. Paradigm shifts often occur over periods of time that are beyond us, although sometimes they also happen abruptly; no one can predict them. I would like to be living in one of these moments, a shift toward ways of being that expand our consciousness and enrich the experience of all forms of life on Earth, not just humans. That produces societies that prioritize caring for life over any other interest, that build ecosystemic cities that free us from the structures of inequality reproduced by the capitalist system. While this happens, I resolve to take care—accompanying, feeding, cleaning, holding, mourning—of everything within my reach. By taking care, I sow the peace of Santa Ana.