The Magic of Earthfire, by Jxel Rajchenberg

Blog, Seen Thru New Eyes | November 14, 2011

Jxel

The Mayan people say that animals are our cousins, they are almost our siblings but we’re a little different, we have different languages, different habits, different ways to live. When you meet with animals as your equals, something in the way you perceive them changes – wolves stop being just wolves and each one of them becomes an unrepeatable being.

When you look into an animal’s eyes the same way you look into a friend’s eyes, a son’s, daughter’s, father’s or mother’s, then you start to experience that you are an animal as much as they are, you find yourself being an incomprehensible and mysterious part of nature as much as we think they are. When you look into an animal’s eyes and you can cut through the curtain of cultural constructions that we have been building for centuries, then the fear is gone, the danger is gone, the idea of a differentiation between man and nature just vanishes and a real encounter happens, then two cohabitants of this land and time are actually meeting and learning about themselves.

Jxel

The earth needs us to learn a lot of things that we have been neglecting for a long, long time. The change in human civilization that the balance of the earth needs is so deep that we’re even frightened to see. It deals with our idea of this place as ours. It deals with how much do we care about other beings and how much are we ready to learn from other beings. It deals with our ego.

When two animals are looking into each other’s eyes there’s not such a thing as you and me, as wolf and human, as bison and lynx. When two animals look at each other’s eyes with love and will to understand and learn, then there is not such a thing as killing, as abusing, as destroying, as slaving.

Jxel Rajchenberg is one of students that participated in the 2011 CalArts Residency program.

From my experience, the magic of Earthfire is to open the possibility to do so, it can happen that without knowing it you’re already in a very deep relation with some animals, not wolves or bisons or cougars but the particular cousin that unfolds inside each one of them.

• No Comments