transcending time + space [the great cosmic mother]

@blkmoodyboi

For @fyeahmyths Springmythevent Day 2: South American Deity

~ Three Serpents (Tunjos).

Date: A.D. 10th–16th century

Place of origin: Colombia, Bogota and Tunja region, Guatavita Lake region

Culture: Muisca

The wetlands of Bogotá—humedales in Spanish—are one of the most important and biodiverse ecosystems in Colombia’s sprawling capital city. They are the backbone of many conservation efforts as they contribute to the improvement of water and air quality, mitigate floods, and provide habitat to endemic and migratory species.

The wetlands are the product not only of the ecological conditions of the area but also of the construction and later deactivation of a complex hydraulic system established by Indigenous groups that populated the territory in the pre-Columbian period, as explained in a paper published in SPAL-Revista de Prehistoria y Arqueología by Lorena Rodríguez Gallo, a history professor and researcher at Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Rodríguez’s work describes how humans have transformed this landscape over thousands of years.

Today several parts of the Bogotá region, which occupies a high-altitude plateau (averaging 2,550 meters) in the Colombian Andes known as the Bogotá savanna, are flooded during the rainy season every year. The region’s clay soil has low permeability, and the floods routinely damage roads, homes, and businesses.

Five hundred years ago, however, the city looked very different. Although the region surrounding Bogotá was, according to Rodríguez, “a highly floodable plain with difficult [natural] drainage,” Indigenous groups developed and operated a sophisticated system that used the region’s floods to their advantage.

Rodríguez’s work documenting the engineered landscape of pre-Columbian Bogotá challenges the idea that Indigenous groups lived in equilibrium with nature. In fact, she said, the connection is more of a dialectical, interdependent relationship, where the Indigenous groups and nature were part of a give and take that benefited humans and encouraged biodiversity as they transformed their environment.

Aloe or Sabila, beautiful and medicinal succulent. A couple of weeks ago my uncle, who is almost fully blind due to diabetes, shared with me that he was able to maintain some eyes cells functioning because he drinks fresh aloe juice every morning. He even went to check with his doctor who was surprised at how his eye cells were showing some regeneration after he started using aloe. Here is what he does: he gets the ‘panca’, he does a horizontal cut (around 4 inches), gets the pulp out and blends it with some water (i think lemon will be also good with this) and drinks it. To save the panca from getting dry, he buries it in dirt until the next day when he will cut another piece of the aloe. I am sharing this in case you know people that have diabetes and want to try something else and also maybe to start talking about how we can prevent and support diabetes through decolonial foods… Arequipa has a growing number of people suffering from diabetes, this shit is so deeply connected with globalization and neoliberalism yall! DECOLONIZE EVERYTHING. What else have you, your friends, or family used to control/treat or prevent diabetes?