Daniel Ruiz-Serna: Living territories and the ecological violence of war (Ep404)
“Given the kind of things that I saw, like the consequences of war, I came to understand that with the kind of violence performed in this region, you cannot always set a clear boundary between what’s going on with people and what is going on with the territory.”
In this episode, we welcome anthropologist Daniel Ruiz-Serna, whose work, situated in the Choco region of Colombia, aims to expose the entanglement of political and ecological violence whereby echoes of conflict and healing reverberate through place. In light of the enmeshment between war and land, Daniel welcomes a framework of living territories, as traced by his life and work with the diversity of human and more-than-human communities of Bajo Atrato, Choco.
Tune in as Daniel invokes questions around: What stories do the land and its respective guardians cry out in the face of ongoing damage—which exceeds designated categories of violence, and thus, so-called systems of repair? Accordingly, when it comes to human and more-than-human rights, what are the shortcomings of legal justice systems insofar as they fail to consider the life and spirit of territory and those who are inextricably tied to the life of such territory? How might the legal language of “justice” and “repair” be limited by, even tethered to, the roots of oppression? And what kinds of schisms, shifts, and stories are needed to reframe these concepts?
About the Guest:
Daniel Ruiz-Serna is an anthropologist, ethnographer of war, rural worlds, and human-animal relationships. He is the author of the book When Forest Run Amok: War and its afterlives in Indigenous and Afro-Colombian territories which describes the way war becomes an experience that extends beyond the human, affecting many other beings with whom people share the forests and rivers that make up one of the most biodiverse places in the world. Daniel’s research explores the effects that political violence has provoked among rural Afro-Colombian communities in Chocó. He focuses on how war transforms the relations people cultivate with their forests and rivers as well with the non-humans that live there.
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Dive deeper:
Learn more about Daniel Ruiz-Serna
When Forests Run Amok, a book by Daniel Ruiz-Serna
The Vortex, a book by José Eustasio Rivera (English translation by John Charles Chasteen)
Artistic credits:
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Oropendola
Episode-inspired artwork by Taylor TInkham
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Transcript
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Kamea Chayne: I would love to begin by contextualizing your lens, and invite you to share a little about the organic ties that you've woven with Bajo Atrato that have nurtured a sense of kinship you feel with the territory. So how did your relationship with this place begin, and what were some happenings and rituals that made you feel connected and compelled you to help spotlight a lot of the impacts of war and violence here?
Daniel Ruiz-Serna: I was doing my undergraduate studies in Colombia, and when I finished my studies, I decided that I needed to immerse myself in some kind of pragmatic experience to help me understand what was happening in the country. I studied in the capital city of Colombia, Bogota, and there's this big connection between what's going on in the cities and the brutal reality in Colombia. And I had the opportunity of working with an NGO, which is one of the most important Colombian Human Rights watchdogs. Part of my work was to document human rights violations.
And we are right in this region in 2003, 2004, in the context of a big humanitarian crisis. People were forced to leave this place for their lands. They managed to return to their lands- they returned to their villages, the hamlets, there was still the presence of armed groups, and those groups were threatening the livelihoods of people. Many leaders were threatened. It was very complicated, even to go to the forest to hunt, to go to the river and fish, all the activities revolving around livelihood were very restricted. So we were trying to respond to what was going on, providing food and shelter, but also being there supporting local organizations.
I was working in this region for almost four years and during this time I built several relationships with people, with locals. So in the beginning, I was this guy from an urban center, but as we built relationships and built trust, our relationships became stronger, and I essentially became friends with many of the people it was working with. I was living most of my life in this region, in my work, I was traveling to this region, Choco, and then going back to Bogota, but half of my life during these four years was lived in this place. So during these four years, I built a lot of different relationships with people.
I stopped my work there because I felt that I needed to find conceptual tools to try to understand the kind of things I saw.
I bore witness to how violence and war were creating what I call ecological violence, or some consequences on the territory, on the lands, and the rivers of these people.
And I needed to understand the harm people were describing to me, and the harm I also saw. So I decided to stop my work there and to try to let these beings and this experience be in my mind and body and to try to find the intellectual tools to understand the kind of violence I was witnessing in this region. So essentially, I went back to school. I decided to enroll in a program of anthropology, I finished my Ph.D., etc... But I always had in mind designing some kind of project to go back to these lands, to go back to continue the kind of work I was doing with the people I met there. Because of this deep connection, I have with the people and with the land, I tried to offer my skills to different projects that were taking place in this region. I volunteered in different kinds of activities, always supporting the work of local organizations.
That was the kind of logic that led the work we did. We were people from the outside, we didn't know the answer, we didn't know what to do in this region.
It was local communities, the people who knew what to do, and we needed to support what they were already doing.
So essentially I built up many different kinds of relationships, as I mentioned, even kinship relations, in the sense that kinship is a matter not just of sharing blood, but it's also it's a matter of sharing substances like food, like rain, those kinds of substances that are in the territory, but also the kind of substances that you give to the territory, to the land. Like tears, for instance, the kind of bodily substances that come to inhabit the place, but also they are substances that you take from the place like water, food, etc., etc... So sharing substances, sharing land, sharing territory, and sharing experiences are also ways of building kinship relationships.
But I even wanted to go beyond this kind of kinship relationship. And when I became a father, I have a three-year-old daughter, I decided to do something that I saw was a cultural practice in this region. When babies are born, there's this kind of small part of the umbilical cord that stays attached to the babies, and that remains attached for a short time after birth. So in this case, around 5 to 10 days a short part of the umbilical cord dries, eventually shrinks and falls off, and all that naturally. So this thing in this in this region, once the umbilical cord falls, there are two main rituals. So the first is to heal the tummy button of the babies with a substance, a kind of powder. And this substance comes from an animal or a plant that lives in this territory. So for instance, if the tummy button of a baby is covered with a powder that comes from a particular kind of ant, which is like an ant that is considered a very hardworking ant, the characteristics of this ant are passed down to the baby. So if you want your baby to be a hard worker, you are going to heal his tummy button with the substance coming from this ant. But they also use other kinds of substances like gold, for instance, to make a baby get a prosperous life. They use some kinds of plants also so that these babies once again acquire the skills or powers or key characteristics of these beings.
So this is one part, giving the babies characteristics of plants or minerals or animals that live in the territory. And the other part is the umbilical cord is buried under a tree. So this is a way of creating an organic connection between the babies and the land, because that umbilical cord to buried under a tree, and the tree that grows in that place comes to share an organic connection with the baby, with the person. So to some extent, you can also say that when people die, their souls go back to the places where their umbilical cords were buried. So there's a deep connection between the place where you were born, but more with the place where your umbilical cord has been buried. And people sometimes introduce themselves as I am from this region where my umbilical cord was buried.
When I became a father, my partner and I decided that we should do something similar with our daughter. So we decided to keep that umbilical cord buried next to one of the rivers in this region, so it's now under a coconut tree or a coconut palm. And it has been said that the well-being of the person goes hand-in-hand with the well-being of that tree. So people take a lot of care of the trees because it's also a way of taking care of a person's body and the other way around, like what's going on with your health also will be reflected on what's going on with those kinds of trees. So essentially, it's this kind of deep connection with the territory, with land—and so deep a connection that…
To some extent, you cannot trace clear boundaries between your inner self and the territory, or the beings that we have in the territory, because what happens to the land, what happens to those beings also affects in one way or another what's happening with your body, with your head, and with your general sense of well-being.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you so much for sharing all of this. Now, if our listener is unfamiliar with the region of Choco. I mean, a short conversation could never do its history justice. But what are the key things that people should know as a sort of introductory backdrop to the history of this place that makes it unlike any other colonial mining center? And how has that contributed to the perception and narratives of those in power in the corporate world or nation-state governments about the region as this sort of unruly frontier zone?
Daniel Ruiz-Serna: The first thing is, what we call states in the US, or provinces in Canada where I live, are called departments in Colombia. So I work in this region in Choco, which is the department located in the north of Colombia and borders the Pacific Ocean. We have a very important river, which is called the Atrato River, which was one of the rivers to which rights were granted. So this is a river, which is a legal personhood with a particular set of rights. The region where I work is like the lower and more northernmost course of the river, it's very close to the place where Panama and South America connect. And it's a very aquatic landscape because we have a lot of tropical rainforests in our biodiversity hotspot. We have a lot of rivers, but also several kinds of swamps, lagoons, and lakes. So this is also one of the more rainy regions in the world. You will find water everywhere, even underneath your skin, because there is so much humidity, it's constantly raining and you are sweating. Water is a key component of this landscape.
This region, during the 16th and 17th centuries when the Spanish conquistadors arrived, they had a lot of trouble trying to settle in this region. Essentially, they complained a lot about the temperature, about the forests, about climate, about humidity. So they didn't find this place suited to settle, the Spaniards found it very hard to stay there. But at the same time, they found that this region was full of gold, there were gold mines, but those mines are what's called alluvial mining. This is essentially the extraction of gold from creeks and rivers. So, not necessarily mines in the traditional way.
The Spaniards found these mines, and wanted to take advantage of all of these minerals. And in the beginning, they started to use Indigenous peoples as workers to exploit these lands. But the thing is, in essence, there was a set of laws that the Spanish crown issued that prohibited the enslavement of Indigenous peoples, and also because of the different diseases that Indigenous peoples were getting, there was a sharp decrease in the population of Indigenous people. So what the Spaniards did was bring people from Africa, enslaved people.
At the beginning of the century, thousands of enslaved people came from Africa, and they were the ones working in those alluvial mines.
These mines were exploited by these enslaved people, but what the Spaniards did was allow these enslaved people to work on their own. So meaning you have to reach a particular quota or a particular amount of gold, that you have to give me every month or every two months.
Because there was not a great presence of white settlers, the African people who were brought to this region enjoyed a certain autonomy because they work on their own. They were enslaved, it's true, but there was not this constant presence of white settlers, of people constantly supervising the work that they have to do. So what these people did was essentially work for many, many hours trying to exploit the role for their own, and they organized in this way that they collected enough work to pay to the white settlers the quota was of them, but also to purchase their liberty, their freedom. So there were many cases in which people preferred to work very, very hard to purchase their liberty. And this is the method that most people followed to get liberty.
So many of these people, once they purchased their liberty, decided to go elsewhere, and they started to settle upstream in the many rivers of this region because there was this abundance of forests or fish, but also game animals. They came to establish their settlements and build alliances with the indigenous peoples of this region. And they did that in a way that gives them certain autonomy. So on one hand, the presence of white settlers is absent, and [there is] the abundance of forests, rivers, and resources. So people enjoy certain autonomy and these Black communities enjoy certain degrees of autonomy that were not achieved in many other parts of Latin America. That was kind of an advantage for them because that autonomy allowed them to become a solid peasant society. But at the same time, because of that lack of presence of authorities also led this region to be entrenched in situations of high poverty and marginalization. So the autonomy allowed these people to live and to keep their cultural traditions, and their institutions, but at the same time set them apart from the mainstream society in Colombia.
Kamea Chayne: As you share, a lot of historians have named this community what's called rainforest peasantry or a post-abolition Black society that, unlike others in the colonial Americas, attained high levels of autonomy. And certainly, there are layers of nuance there as well.
To get to the heart of your work, you emphasized the forms of violence perpetrated against Indigenous and Afro-Colombian territories that exceed that which is conceptualized as environmental damage. So what might constitute environmental damages from wars that mainstream narratives and war studies might talk about? And what do you mean when you speak to this ecological violence that blurs the lines between the natural and the cultural and sees war as more of a structure rather than an event?
Daniel Ruiz-Serna:
That's one of the things about the deep relations, the connections people have with their land or what they conceptualize as territory, is the fact that there's not a clear boundary between people and the surrounding worlds.
In the sense that there is a deep relationality, a deep interconnection between your well-being as an individual, as a human individual, but also the well-being of the large community of life or the large community of beings you shall live within this particular region. The example I give you about the rituals performed with the belly button is the idea that the territory is not just a background for human actions. It's a territory of life because it's what sustains people's modes of being, like economic activities, like all symbolic or religious institutions. It's a territory of life, but for people, it's also a living territory. So that means that the land, the river, and the forests are more than a background of people's actions and that the territory is conceived as an entity. And people relate with the territory, with the forest, with the beings, including the spirits and animals, as persons, because they are also in particular degrees of agency and person called like just like people do.
The concept of territory as a living territory is important because it's a living entity, but it doesn't mean that it behaves in the ways people do.
So the kind of being that the territory is isn't necessarily similar to the kinetic systems that a human being has. For me, the productive question here was not if the territory is or is not a living entity, but rather try to understand the kind of being the territory is. The way the territory manifests its own ways of being. So it's not thinking about the rebirth of forests as natural resources, but rather what kind of entities they are, what kind of things they can do.
Given the kind of things that I saw, like the consequences of war, I came to understand that with the kind of violence performed in this region, you cannot always set a clear boundary between what's going on with people and what is going on with the territory.
So I came up with this idea of ecological violence essentially to try to point out the fact that what's happening in this region in terms of, let's say, depletion of natural resources or pollution or transformation of our land use, all those things is not just something that is happening to the environment, because again, the environment, the forest, the rivers and not just the background for human actions. They are beings and they participate in the daily lives of people. So ecological violence is not just about what happens to the environment, as you know, ecology is about relationships. So ecological violence is about how the relations that help sustain life in the territory are hindered, how war affects those set of relationships that bring territory into being, that bring life to the territory. Even an event like the depletion of natural resources, or deforestation, they have an environmental consequence. But the language of the environment, that much was not enough to understand this deep connection between people and the territories. So violent transformation of the landscape, like the change of rivers of forests, triggered another set of relations between people and the surrounding worlds and triggered another set of relations that are much more than instrumental for economic relations.
One of the things that I heard from the beginning when I started to do my work there was that many shamans were complaining about the difficulties they had trying to hunt and to get animals. Essentially, they say because of the presence of our armed people in the forests, because of the attacks that the army did, all that made the spiritual protectors of animals angry, and those spirits decided to keep gaming animals away from people. So hunters had a lot of trouble trying to hunt them because the spiritual protectors of these animals decided to keep those animals at bay, to keep them far from people. And they were complaining about, [this] provoking some kind of problem because we have not enough food, our sovereignty has been compromised because of what's going on. But the thing is, the way they were framing what was going on was not just in matters of environmental damage, or damage to our human rights, or our human right to go to the forest, or our human right to food. It was rather like damage to the guardians of game animals. How can you make sense of that kind of damage if you only focus on the environment, or if you only focus on those series of cultural beliefs?
There was something deep here, and they were conveying the experience of war in a language that had no equivalent in the legal framework because we address what happens to the territory in terms of environmental damage or terms of human rights damage. And again, what they were telling me was something that exceeded these kinds of categories. So it's psychological violence, because it's about other-than-human forms of suffering, and it's about instances in which humans were not the only victims, but also were not the only actors. Therefore, there were instances in which the allocation of events to either natural or controlled domains was not neat, and was not simple. So, for instance, in the case of spiritual protectors of animals, who or what has been harmed by those military attacks? Where do you locate this harm- is it in the world itself, or is it within the cultural representations that people have about nature?
When framing in terms of ecological violence, is to think about the state of the world while making relations between different kinds of sentient beings, including people, but also what we call animals.
Ecological violence refers essentially to the fact that destruction and suffering are also embodied by other-than-human beings.
And that suffering transforms the conditions that sustain the worlds and the associations that humans and non-humans make possible in these particular places. When understanding the environmental damage of war, often that is framed within the language of collateral damage, the unintended results of war. And something very important here is that violence against nature, of violence against the environment is constitutive of war. It is a condition to wage war, and is even more the case in a region like Colombia, or in many other regions around the world, where warfare is waged in forests. So there is no such thing as collateral damage, like violence against the environment, against the forest, against animals, which is a condition to the waging of war in many parts of the world.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah. So it sounds like at the core of this are different ways of relating to the land and also different worldviews of what territory means. There are territories of control and ownership as just these environments or otherwise, it's also in a deeper way territories of webs of living relations that are also constantly being remade. So it's important to unravel the complexities of how people understand the concept of territory. And I guess this leads me to ask this question, what would this way of looking at territories as living territories mean in terms of rethinking justice and reparations beyond inclusivity and multicultural politics going forward?
Daniel Ruiz-Serna: There was something that happened in Colombia because you have this armed conflict and therefore the state has the will of many different legal tools to try to address the legacy of war. So at some point, the state decided to design this particular law to address the concerns of victims. So they designed this very complete law to redress the damage experienced by the thousands or millions of victims in Colombia. But indigenous peoples and Colombian organizations, they say, okay, the state must undertake these steps, but that's not enough because the theme you are conceptualizing, victimhood or damage, is not taking into consideration our experiences of war, our experiences of harm. And they managed to design or create this law that recognize that alongside humans and alongside human ways of being, the territory itself was a victim of war. So they say our territories have also experienced the damage of the war, therefore, they should be considered victims. And that means that they should also be granted the right to justice, to reparation.
That was a very important step for many, for the state, for institutions, and the transitional legal system. That was important because that brought into discussion the idea that the environment and nature was also suffering or was also a victim of war. So that arose awareness about the many ecological legacies of war. And that's very important, but again, it was not enough for indigenous peoples, because when we talk about damage to the territory in terms of environmental concepts, we are framing nature or the environment with modern concepts, or with this idea that nature is something aside from humans, that nature is this domain that is independent from the will of human beings. And they are telling us, and they are practicing their lives in which like there's not this kind of clear boundary between people and territories. So they were not just referring to the environment, to what we understand as nature, but they're also addressing the concerns of spirits, the concerns of humans, the concerns of the spiritual beings that live in rocks, the concern of rebirth, who are also considered kin. So the idea of territories went beyond the idea of nature, and that pushes the legal system framework to think about reparation and justice in ways that take into consideration the well-being of the natural world for things other than what the natural world represents to people.
So territory and the environment are worth protection for what they are because they have an intrinsic value and not just for what they represent to people.
And this is the kind of discussion or concept that Indigenous people have brought. The thing is, the legal system is still trying to deal with this concept of complex concepts, because in Western legal tradition, just recently we have made room for rights to other-than-people. So we have these big movements about our rights of nature in Latin America, but also New Zealand. Just recently, the legal system has started to expand its own biases or concepts, to make room for non-humans and to redress the damage of this in non-humans in ways that are consistent with the experiences of indigenous people, for instance. So essentially, Indigenous peoples are pushing the boundaries of some of our concepts, the concepts that lay the foundations of the human rights movement, for instance, are of the legal apparatus of the transitional justice systems around the world.
The language of human rights is still very important to indigenous people because that helped them to gain attention to the situation, but also to become important actors in the political arena. But the thing they are telling us [is that]…
the human rights framework is not enough because what has been hindered is not only human ways of being but all kinds of beings.
The human rights framework is still too human-centric, like because the human rights framework presumes this kind of cut between humans and the material environment, but also because the way of conceptualizing the legal subject always revolved around human beings and individuals. The only authorized subject of law is the autonomous free individual. But we are not dealing with individual beings, but beings or people, persons who are made of relations, of deep relations with the environment, with the natural world, with the beings that live in the territories, including palm trees and rivers, forests, etc., etc...
The concepts the institutions created to deal with the damage of war should be transformed to address the concerns of victimized communities, but also to redress the legacies of war. And that also compels us to reconsider things like what is an individual self, and reparation.
How can you repair those relations that have been broken, how will you repair the relationship with the spirit that has gotten mad because of what happened in the first place? So there are many things to which, like the legal apparatus, the multicultural state will be not good enough to deal with, because many of these concepts exceed institutions and practices within their modern multicultural state.
Kamea Chayne: Right. So to envision reparations more holistically, people have to first better understand the depths of the harms that have been inflicted. That goes much further and beyond the human realm. And of course, the present-day dynamics and politics of every living territory around the globe are unique in terms of Bajo Atrato, you say that "This land is imprescriptible. It cannot be taken away, inalienable, it cannot be transferred, and unseizable, it cannot be sold to repay creditors, which are three key features that reinforce collective forms of use, enable its production and management and guarantee intergenerational permanency." With this recognition in mind, what inspirations can people in other parts of the world take from the alternative models of society, of the communities of Bajo Atrato?
Daniel Ruiz-Serna: One of the important things to bear in mind here is that when people are talking about the harm to spirits, to rocks, to rivers, sometimes the best multiculturalism or a multicultural state, the best you can do is to consider these things as cultural beliefs, meaning that, okay, so the state knows we have to try to protect the worldviews of these people. The thing is like, okay, we have this kind of damage to the territory, but the damage can just be our damage to the environment. In the sense that is something that you can assess that you have really measured and know, because there are these environmental consequences, or there is damage to worldviews and culture. So the state tries to protect the people who embody these cultures or views, but they will never take seriously the idea that the spirits have indeed been harmed.
The way I understand it is the multicultural state is trying to make room for the respect of these peoples, but doesn't take seriously into consideration the ways indigenous peoples conceptualize life, conceptualize a rhetorical centralized land, and conceptualize justice.
So when people are addressing or are talking about I'm sorry about the concerns of spirits, they are inviting us to reconceptualize our categories, our modern concepts. Because in modernity, we have no role in the spiritual world, or the spiritual world is something that is just something that belongs only to the religious sphere, or in the best cases, to like worldviews. But the thing is, what a state can do in a case of transitional justice, is we should take seriously those philosophies and those concepts to call into question our premises, very modern premises, but also to see how biased the premises of the modern legal apparatus or the scientific method, if you will. Because at the end of the day, like again, the legal apparatus is culturally biased because, for instance, it relies on this liberal idea of the individual or the free individual, which is not necessarily the case among many indigenous peoples.
So what we should learn from this context in total, from what's happening in terms of the world and terms of the advocacy of indigenous peoples bringing into attention what's happening with the territories is that we need to rethink justice, to reconsider what reparation may be, but also to enlarge or create new means to repair what is broken. And I think one important thing here is that, for instance, the current transitional justice system in Colombia is trying to deal with those local experiences of damage and harm, but also to respond to international standards. So we have this international legislation about war, but that international legislation was created in Europe in another continent in another period, and does not necessarily have all the tools to deal with experiences that are happening in countries like this. So essentially is like if we learn from what's going on now in Colombia, in this region, we can set the standards of what can be done in other transitional justice systems, and what can be done in other countries to take seriously the experiences of indigenous peoples. Because the first tenet of transitional justice is to put the concerns of victims at the center. But if the experiences of victims, if you wrap those experiences in terms of environment or cultural beliefs, you are not respectful of the concerns of victims and you can end up creating another kind of injustice or victimization of these communities. So essentially, it's like we are on the verge of creating something important about justice, reparation, and the redress of damage. This is an opportunity we should take seriously to learn from these and try to design better models.
~ musical intermission ~
Kamea Chayne: What has been one of the most impactful books you've read or publications you follow?
Daniel Ruiz-Serna: Okay. I'm going to mention two, just because I'm Colombian and I think that this is an opportunity to bring to attention a kind of literature and others. I want to mention a novel called The Vortex, which was published in 1924 but is essentially a novel about the Amazonian rubber boom. And it's documenting the kind of of of of suffering and exploitation of indigenous peoples at that time. But it's a beautiful, well-written novel that for me was like my first introduction to the forests, to tropical forests because it describes the beauty of these forests, but also the kind of dangers that live in these places. So I learned about beauty, but also also how to be cautious when you are living in a place that assaults all your senses. So it's called The Vortex, and it was recently translated by an American scholar called John Charles Chasteen. So yeah, that is a fairly new translation into English and I recommend it if you want to understand or approach the tropical forests of the Amazon in a way that conveys both the beauty and the danger of this place.
The other one was a kind of source of inspiration for me, it was a book by Hugh Raffles called Insectopedia, and it was like, so well written, I wanted to write similarly. It's just because it's Raffel is bringing insects to our attention, which often are just disregarded or not taken as serious actors. So yeah, I think it is very important to have inspiration that makes me make connections with different life forms, how they are actors in themselves, and how our lives are deeply intermingled with the lives of these tiny creatures.
Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra or practice you engage with to stay grounded?
Daniel Ruiz-Serna: To stay grounded... I understand that expression, but I can't I cannot help but think of that expression as a kind of metaphor, because at the end of the day, to stay grounded is to be connected to the core of who you are. I'm not sure if I'm a creature of the ground or only on the ground, because I learned from the struggle that staying grounded sometimes requires not just setting your foot on land, but also like more with your body on water. So in that sense, I think that one of the things that help me to stay grounded is to listen to creeks, to the flow of water. I can spend hours just close to a river and listening to talk to the water flowing. This is something that helps me a lot. And essentially when that happens, it's also because I'm walking in forests and trying to listen to birds and the other beings of the forest. So it's walking, essentially, but listening, listening to the forest, but also listening to to to water, to creeks, to rivers, to the flow.
Kamea Chayne: Hmm. I love that. And what is one of your greatest sources of inspiration at the moment?
Daniel Ruiz-Serna: My daughter is a source of inspiration because she's at this age, which has this constant or this perpetual sense of wonder. So she's asking about everything, but also willing to learn about everything. So this is the stage in life that has this importance of having this sense of amazement or awe, of trying to understand things. So yeah, this is the thing that always is pushing me to not take for granted the world around us. So yeah, this is the question center, and again, her constant sense of wonder has me not take things for granted and to try to understand things in a way different than we are used to understanding.
Kamea Chayne: Well, Green Dreamer, we are coming to a close here. But to learn more and stay updated on Daniel's work, you can head to danielruizserna.com, and we will also have more links and resources shared in our show notes at greendreamer.com. Daniel, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It was an honor and pleasure to speak with you. For now, what final words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers?
Daniel Ruiz-Serna: Thank you for having me here. Thank you for the opportunity. For final words of wisdom, perhaps something along the lines of Keep your life filled with wonder.
