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The following is excerpted from The Spirit of the Glacier Speaks by Arkan Lushwala.

In other times, when nature lost its balance, it asked us for help because it knew that the Runa, (human beings) had the skills to elevate the vibration of the spirits that live within all things. It did so through messengers. Spirits were heard talking in the Wak’as, (powerful sacred spaces) and in nature, and those who had the ability to listen to them became their messengers. For this type of gifted Runa, it was also common to cross the bridge between the worlds, arrive on the other side, and offer a tender gesture to some spirit they found that was not doing well, whether due to destructive events caused by human error or by some mysterious cosmic or telluric event. By following the instructions that they heard in the darkness of sacred spaces, they went on to help beings and natural spaces completely recover from their damage as often as was necessary.

Today the entire planet has been damaged. And I have heard well-meaning engineers and economists say that the repair of the world will come from them, from the light of their minds, rather than from the dark womb of the Universe. It seems as though they think their intelligence can be the door from which the solution will emerge, as if they could be mothers. But the healing of the Earth will not come about due to the success of a few intelligent men because that would just be a new demonstration of the human supremacy that caused the damage in the first place. The healing of the world will be created through the cooperation of everyone who lives on Earth, from the smallest microscopic creatures to the fungi, plants, insects, tigers, whales, engineers, grandmothers, and even the rays of light that descend from the sky and enter the bodies of each one of us.

The Earth knows how to heal the Earth better than anyone. Remembering to listen to all the beings of nature that are not only asking for help but also offering their wise medicine will be the long-awaited end of human supremacy.

White supremacy is slowly on its way toward disappearing because every day there are more and more of our white brothers and sisters who do not support this ideology. More difficult to eradicate will be the ideology of human supremacy. In recent years, white supremacy has been so often named and exposed that it can no longer go unnoticed. In some years, in order to continue existing, it has to camouflage itself. Shapeshifting into human supremacy, this new disrespectful relationship with nature has also manifested in the behavior of those who have been colonized. In order to adapt to the modern world and get a job, we have had to learn the destructive behaviors of those who touted their supremacy throughout history. Just like an illness received through contagion, human supremacy has become a pandemic. We have all been colonized. At first, Europeans were colonized by other Europeans, and like in the old legends, those bitten by a vampire become vampires. Today one does not need to have white skin to be in the driver’s seat of an excavator that destroys a forest. The one who holds the chainsaw in their hands decides whether the tree lives or dies. And while the descendants of the wise Indigenous did not invent the chainsaw, we too use them.

We have been taught to be human supremacists, and we have grown up in a world that doesn’t take into account the wisdom of our thousands-of-years-old Indigenous science. Our methods have not been validated in the universities nor in the schools our children are required to attend. We have become accustomed to the science and technology that has given humans the power to dominate the world without consulting with natural, wild, or spiritual beings.

It would be amazing if we humans could dislodge ourselves from the center of our world and let ourselves become engaged by something sacred, a powerful source radiating its vitality and intelligence toward us. With all of us sitting down, listening, and ready, something very sacred could emerge from the center and give us the wisdom we are praying for. Only after this could we use our wonderful human skills to influence a change in the painful state of the world. To heal our damaged material world, it will be necessary to access the power of the spirit world, and we come closest to the spirit world when we are dying. When we feel our life may no longer go on, we are being offered an opportunity. When illnesses or natural disasters hit us, we receive a jolt that can make us wake up. In the state of vulnerability that we are in when facing death, we can find hidden wisdom. But one who only sees the positive side of things and sees oneself as the one who always solves the problem loses the opportunity of receiving help from death—to wake up. To dare, once and for all, to see and reveal the truth of nature in the way a very sensitive artist does.

Though I would have preferred not to have gone to school when I was a child and spend years imprisoned in a room where they taught me things I did not choose to learn, I still feel grateful for some of the things I learned there. In particular, a good teacher told me about the work of Vincent van Gogh, a painter of undulating sparks and dancing photons that passed from his hand to the canvas with their spirits intact. His work was alive.

His work showed us how nature has to penetrate our mind in order for us to be guided by it. In order to work for the Earth, we need to have a Van Gogh type of attention.

Like this true artist who respected light and did not impose the vain perfectionism of experts on the delicate magic of our world, we can cross—from a place of silence, observation, and deep feeling—to the other side, the source behind the veil. With great care, we could bring something from the other side back here. And if someone asked me to choose between an engineer and Van Gogh to solve the problems of the world, I would choose both! I wouldn’t exclude the engineers, because they also have something to offer. And my respect would grow greatly for any engineer who would dare to work with him, the madman. If Van Gogh would have been born in an Indigenous culture, he would have been considered a holy man.

In our village, the last one up on the mountain, the dirt road ends, and an abundant silence in which the leq’echu bird sings fills the air. Here, at times, we also cry the way Van Gogh cried. Here, all the engineers that come receive food and are well treated since we know that they can help us have more water and more food. But it grieves us that most of the time they are in a hurry, that they want to help us without taking the time to know us, missing the chance to discover what we know thanks to the humility with which our eyes look upon the world. Thanks to having been humiliated, we know that human supremacy can only end one person at a time. It ends when someone is on their knees and receives help from beings of the spirit world, when someone lost is guided by a star, when someone asleep is awakened by a dream, and when nature speaks and shares sacred power with someone who is praying, willing to listen, and taking the time that it takes to do these things well.

The times are changing, and it has become urgent that human supremacy ends so that we may have the humility to let ourselves be guided.

What replaces human supremacy will be born from the black light. It will be born from this long night, from the intuition that seeks to sense when something approaches, from the wombs of women and of Mother Earth that are ready to give birth to new ways of living, and from the hearts of grandmothers who have been silent, concentrating and full of care like beasts in the wild, praying for us, asking that we be protected.

But who can protect us from ourselves? It is up to each individual to make the effort to heal themselves. There are many of us throughout the world who have rebelled against our own lethargy, who have decolonized our belief systems each time we have been awakened by buckets of cold water produced by our own conscience in moments of illumination. And so we have come to understand that the devil was created by humans and that hell only needs to be feared when one gets used to living in it. We have stopped believing in the superiority of those who won the wars, who continue looking at us from the tops of their monuments. We look again at the world like wild people, like Earth people, like pure beings that take from nature only what we need to eat, and the rest we care for with respect and reverence. Despite what news reports continue to say, we can no longer believe that social conflicts always have good guys and bad guys, forcing us to choose one or the other. Remembering that life is always born from the union of two different sources, we use our hearts to unite ourselves, to unite everything, each time they want to separate or distract us. We can no longer afford to be distracted. Otherwise, human supremacy will continue to damage nature, and soon we will destroy everything that remains.

From The Spirit of the Glacier Speaks by Arkan Lushwala.

Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Disruption Books. Copyright 2023.