Chile Doesn't Ask

A trip to Chile is always unexpected and it never ends the way you think. You can forget about expectations. They don’t work there.

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

Chile uses beauty as a facade for the raw. I stand at the coast and after a while my thoughts are washed away. No more questions. All unanswered. Chile leaves you standing there blank. Without shell and without core. You can figure out where that leaves you. And if anything remains, it’s the raw wilderness that this country exudes in every facet.

Chile carves its way through the storms, the earthquakes and tsunamis. The Andes stretch from north to south across thousands of kilometers through the country. They look like scars. Scars are stronger than what was there before. That’s Chile. Chile stands for destruction that makes you stronger. Peace, as we understand it, doesn’t exist there. People don’t expect peace either. They just don’t want another fight beyond the one they already wake up with every morning.

I’ve spent my whole life fighting inner battles too. Against everything and everyone inside me. Chile doesn’t distinguish between inner and outer battles. Nobody in the country fights only against themselves, but every inner battle has an outer aesthetic that you can see in people’s faces.

The overwhelming sight of the Cordillera makes every thought of a fight obsolete. No fight would create peace here. Here the absence of fight is peace enough. You stand facing a chaotic mountain range that wants to be climbed but cannot be overcome. The radiant beauty is at the same time the limit of what’s humanly possible. You see the end in every direction. The ocean to the west, the Cordillera to the east, between them a narrow inhabitable strip of land. In the north the driest desert in the world and in the south eternal ice. Anyone who wants to go further here is immediately lost. Standing still isn’t an option either. And that is deeply embedded in the consciousness of Chileans. If you open yourself to it, you feel it. I have family there. I got to feel it as a reality that completely overwhelmed me as someone from the foothills of the southern German Alps.

The last time I was there, during the European summer, I had expected something to happen to me. Internally. But nothing happened. Chile doesn’t care about what you bring with you. It leaves you alone with it. Which doesn’t mean it leaves you in peace. Chile doesn’t want to prove anything to you, but peace isn’t what it is either. It simply doesn’t want you at all. It leaves you alone if you can adapt. And God help you if you can’t.

I could partly adapt. I never found silence. The people are quiet but never silent. Their silence is a fight without silence. It’s mindfulness without spirituality. The next earthquake is only a matter of time.

Again and again I’ve asked myself why Chile draws me in so much. We travel to the end of the world looking for peace. We read books and book retreats and take breaks. Waiting for the moment when it goes quiet. When everything fits. But Chile isn’t there for you so that things fit. Chile didn’t give me an answer either. Chile sent me back without my questions. And for that I’m more grateful than for any answer.