Chile Doesn't Ask

A trip to Chile is always unexpected and it never ends the way you think. Expectations don’t work there.

If beauty exists as a universal standard, then Chile is the place that leaves the concept of beauty empty. Overwhelmingly beautiful and brutally demanding on perception. Beauty not as beautiful, but as the contrast of things that can never find each other. Colors, shapes, weather, nature, movement, politics, society. Nothing is a completed form. Everything has sharp edges and uneven movements.

Chile uses beauty as a facade for the raw. I stand at the coast and after a while the questions are gone. Not answered. Gone. Chile leaves you blank. Without shell. Without filling. Without core. What remains is part of this wildness that this country radiates.

It forces its way through storms, through earthquakes, tsunamis. It shows its vulnerability as a scar. Scars that are stronger than skin.

The people there don’t want peace. They don’t know peace. They just don’t want another fight on top of the one they already wake up with every morning.

I have spent my whole life fighting inner battles. Against everything and everyone inside me. Here you see that turned inside out. Chile doesn’t fight against itself. It gives an inner battle an outer aesthetic, and one look at the mountains makes the battle go silent instantly. Every fight becomes obsolete. It is fought to its end in that one look. Chaos in perfection. And still standing. In a radiant beauty.

I had expected something to happen to me. Nothing happened. Chile doesn’t care about what you bring. It leaves you alone with it. It has nothing to prove to you. It doesn’t want you. It lets you be, if you adapt.

I could partly adapt. I never found silence. The people are not silent. Their silence is a fight without silence.

We travel to the end of the world looking for peace. Books, retreats, time off. The moment when it gets quiet. When everything fits.

Chile didn’t give me an answer. Chile sent me back without my questions. Thank you.