Every trip to Chile unsettles what I expect from it. I arrive with a plan for what should happen inside me, and Chile ignores the plan every time.
Beauty there is contrast: colour against colour, sharp rock against soft cloud, storm weather next to still water, politics and daily life pulling against each other without ever resolving. Nothing in the landscape rounds off; the edges stay sharp.
Chile uses that beauty as a surface over something rawer underneath. I stand at the coast and after a while my thoughts are washed away. The questions I arrived with go quiet along with them, and I am left without an answer and without the question itself. Chile empties you out.
The country sits on storms, earthquakes and tsunamis. The Andes run for thousands of kilometres from north to south, a scar across the whole length of the land. A scar heals thicker than the skin around it. This land breaks the same way, and comes back stronger for it.
Peace in the ordinary sense is not on offer here, and nobody expects it to be. People wake up already fighting something. What they want is a day without a second fight stacked on top of the one waiting for them every morning.
I recognise the shape of that fight. I’ve spent my whole life fighting inner battles too. Against everything and everyone inside me. Chile does not separate an inner battle from an outer one. Every inner fight there wears an outer face, visible on the street, in the way people hold themselves.
Then the cordillera comes into view and the idea of fighting anything falls away. No battle up there would buy you peace. The absence of a battle is already peace enough. You stand before a mountain range with no order to it, one that asks to be climbed and is never actually conquered. Its brightness marks a limit as much as a view: ocean to the west, cordillera to the east, a narrow inhabitable strip between them, the driest desert in the world to the north, eternal ice to the south. Go further in any direction and you are lost within hours. Stand still and nothing is solved either. Chileans grow up with that geography inside them, and anyone open enough feels it too. I have family there. The feeling overwhelmed me, someone from the foothills of the southern German Alps, where the mountains ask nothing like this of anyone.
On my last visit, during the European summer, I had expected something to happen to me. Internally. But nothing happened. Chile does not care what you bring with you, and it leaves you alone with it. Being left alone there does not feel like peace. Chile has no interest in proving anything to you. It leaves you be if you can adapt, and it lets you know fast if you cannot.
I could partly adapt. I never found silence. The people around me are quiet, but never silent in the peaceful sense. Their quiet is a fight that has learnt not to make noise, an attentiveness with no spiritual layer underneath it. Another earthquake is coming. Nobody there spends time wondering when.
So why does Chile keep pulling me back? People travel to the far end of the world looking for peace. They read the books, book the retreats, take the pause and wait for the one still moment where everything lines up. Chile has no interest in things lining up, and this time it gave me no answer. It sent me home without the questions I had brought with me. That absence is worth more to me than any answer would have been.