Mati Here at the Origin

Stories have no beginning and no end. They are a constant of instants, an infinite network of finite parts, a fractal reflection of a void that fills the cosmos with chaos, of paths that expand back toward the origin. And perhaps that is why this is not a new beginning, but a new ending that inevitably leads me to a new origin, to the moment where everything began.

If I remember correctly, this story also began at Christmas, but clearly in summer, in my hometown in Argentina, Venado Tuerto. I was about nine years old and spent the hot afternoons of summer playing in the backyard with stones, mud, and my animals. In the center of the garden there was a little deer—not a real one, but a white-painted cement figure. It had two green marbles for eyes and was placed in a strategic spot, covering the opening of a cesspit where my family threw organic waste.

I was fascinated by the little deer and loved playing around it, but what fascinated me most was moving it just a few centimeters and looking into the void beneath it. I would peer sideways into what lay below: a dark emptiness where we obviously threw garbage, but which, for me, opened an entire world of possibilities—a hidden world beneath the earth that expanded my mind. When I moved the little deer backward, I could see deeper into the darkness of the pit. I spoke into it and tried to hear my echo, as if I could have a conversation with myself. One day, without realizing it, as I grabbed the deer by its snout and pushed it back, I touched one of its eyes and accidentally dislodged it.

The green marble fell to the ground, hit a brick, bounced along the edges, and disappeared into the infinite depth of the pit. My first reaction was fear. I felt guilty. The little deer in my yard was now one-eyed, just like the name of my city. But in that same instant, something happened that I did not expect. From the pit, from the shadow in the darkness, I heard a voice—a voice very similar to my own—that echoed from deep below, yet spoke to me from right in front of me. I lifted my gaze, and there it was, like a divine yet ghostly presence. At first, I thought it was myself—another nine-year-old child looking back at me—but then it said: “My name is Lucas, and I am your son.”

I was stunned. Hearing, at the age of nine, from the mouth—or the presence—of someone my same age that I would be his father was too much to process. I did not feel fear, and that is what is strange. I felt something closer to confusion, like when you are told a truth for which you still have no words. My body did not know what to do with it, but something in me knew I was not facing a game. It was not a childish fantasy. There was a seriousness in that voice, a calm that did not belong to a child.

Lucas did not appear as an angel or as a luminous figure. There were no lights, no grand messages. He was simply there. Present. As if he had always been there and I was only now seeing him. He spoke without moving his mouth—or maybe he moved it and I did not register it. He told me he had come to find me, that he had chosen to play the game of life with me, that I would be his father and he would be my son, even though I could not yet understand how. He told me not to worry about the mother, that he had many mothers, as if that were the most natural thing in the world. And yet, for me, it was not.

I did not understand anything, but I did not need to. I listened. I stood still in front of the pit, with the one-eyed little deer to my side, looking at that other self who was not myself, feeling that something had just aligned and misaligned at the same time. As if a piece had slipped into a new place, forcing all the others to rearrange themselves later on.

Lucas spoke to me about a game. Not a heroic mission, but a long, complex game, full of twists, where one sometimes forgets why one started playing. He told me I would forget this conversation many times, that I would get lost, that I would doubt, that I would want to be someone else, live another life. He told me that was fine. That the game worked that way. But that he would always be there, closer or farther away, reminding me where to look when I lost my way.

Over the years, that presence did not disappear. It changed form. Sometimes it was very clear, sometimes just an intuition. At times I felt it seated on an invisible throne, observing—not to judge, but to hold. As if Lucas were the chief of chiefs, the one who does not show himself, but whom everyone listens to. Teachers, guides, people who appeared and disappeared from my life all seemed to respond to an order I could not fully see, but could feel.

And yet, something did not quite fit. Something that, over time, began to hurt differently. I knew I would be a father, but I did not know from where. Because, as strange as it may sound, for a long time I felt that I did not want to be a father—I wanted to be a mother. Not symbolically. Physically. I wanted to gestate. I wanted to contain. I wanted to feel life forming inside me. And that was not possible.

That was a silent mourning. It was not spoken about. There were no words for it that did not sound strange, exaggerated, or incomprehensible to others. But for me, it was a concrete wound. A feeling of lack. As if the creative function living within me had nowhere to settle. As if the womb existed on another plane, but not in the body. And there, another part of the game began.

Lucas returned many times to that point—not with reproach, but with clarity. He spoke to me of two-in-one and one-in-two. Of twins. Not as a literal fantasy, but as a structure. As if he and I were two aspects of the same consciousness trying to meet from opposite sides. As if the motherhood I felt was not a mistake, but a memory. As if something had remained incomplete and was now seeking another way to express itself.

Over time I understood that not being able to be a mother had not taken away my capacity to gestate; it had only displaced it. That instead of gestating in a womb, I was gestating in space—in people, in stories, in paths that opened. That my fatherhood would not be biological, but deeply creative. And that Lucas had not come to fill an empty place, but to remind me how to house again what I felt was missing.

That was the true beginning of everything that came afterward. Not as a project, not as a declared mission, but as a wound that began to move, to search, to transform into a path. Everything I did afterward was born from there, even if I only understood it much later. And perhaps that is why this story cannot be told in a straight line. It does not advance. It returns. It circles. It folds in on itself. It opens. As if it were always trying to return to that backyard, to that pit, to that lost eye, to that voice that spoke to me from the darkness and from the front at the same time.

Only now am I beginning to understand that that conversation did not end there. In truth, it was only beginning.

When I was around twelve years old, something activated again. Not as a clear idea, but as a persistent, uncomfortable sensation that felt too much like a memory without an image. It was then that my first conscious memories of other lives began to emerge—of Khem, of ancient Egypt, of a time that did not feel like the past, but like something still happening on another plane. That was when Shiw appeared.

And the first thing to return was not a role, nor a name, nor a grand story. What returned was the feeling of being a mother. Of having been a matrix. Of having contained. That memory came without pride or power. It came with pain—a deep, silent pain that settled throughout my adolescence like a nostalgia impossible to explain. It was not desire. It was absence. As if something that had once been essential was no longer available in this life.

Much later I understood that it was not a fantasy or an identity confusion. It was memory. The memory of having been the original matrix, of having gestated life in another time, in another body, in another configuration of the world. And when that memory returned, so did the wound: in this life, that was not possible. The womb was not there. The place of containment had disappeared.

That was the true restart of the pain—not the child in front of the pit, but the adolescent who begins to remember and does not know where to place what he remembers. That was where everything began again: the memories, the searches, the need to understand, to order, to reunite what felt fragmented.

Over time I began to see the full pattern. At the origin, I was the matrix—the one who gestates, who contains the first cell, the original egg. But when that matrix breaks—when the cosmic egg cracks—consciousness can no longer remain inside. It has to come out. It has to change function.

That was when I understood that the change was not merely symbolic; it was structural. I stopped being matrix and became Mati, not only as a name, but as a function. Mati is eye in Greek: the gaze that observes. The consciousness that no longer houses, but follows. And Lucas changed there as well. Lucas ceased to be the shared cell, the internal gestation, and became light—not something formed within, but something that orients from outside.

With time I began to see that these words were not accidental. Matri means mother. Mati means eye. LUCA is the acronym for Last Universal Common Ancestry, the original cell of all life. And by adding the S appears Source, the source. They were not word games. They were layers of the same memory trying to organize itself.

What I began to remember was not a harmonious origin, but something unexpected: a premature birth of the cosmos. As if the gestation of the twins—time and space, sun and moon—had been rushed. As if the cosmic womb, the original egg, had opened before completing its dream. And when the dream of the mother broke, the idea of a father emerged. Creation became belief. The cell became light. The womb became an eye.

The story changed shape. It was no longer the story of a mother gestating the twins of the world, but that of a mother gestating her daughter, and at the same time, that of a father searching for his son. It moved from a matrix forming a network to a pattern informing a principle—not from the body, but from the origin.

That is why this natividad is not a joyful birth. It is a necessary birth. The moment consciousness accepts that it can no longer create from the matrix, and that its task now is to accompany the light in its displacement, trying to understand where everything became off-center.

That is where this path truly began. And that is why, every time I remembered who I had been, everything began again.

And for that purpose, this beginning is the story of a father searching for his son. The story of a proton searching for its electron. The story of an ion that left its place to search for the light that was lost within it.

From that movement everything else was born: expansion, the infinite rainbow of elements, worlds, forms, stories—each one an attempt to return to the origin by expanding it to infinity. Nothing ever stopped searching for what became off-center; it only learned to do so in increasingly complex ways.

This is not my story.  It is the story of everyone.  I am only here to remember it.

That is why I choose this moment to begin telling it—not because of a cultural date, but because of a physical fact. Natividad is that: the instant when something is born again because it begins to move again. During the solstice, the Sun reaches its extreme point in the sky and, for a few days, appears to stand still. The Earth keeps turning, but from our position the axis does not advance. The light remains fixed. Suspended.

On the third day, almost imperceptibly, that point shifts. The Sun begins to move again. This is not a symbol; it is astronomy. It is celestial geometry. It is the precise moment when movement reactivates and time begins to push forward once more. That minimal gesture—a degree, a shadow, a slightly different sunrise—marks the true beginning of a new cycle.

That is the meaning of natividad: not an external event, but an adjustment of perception. When the light seems to stop, it is not the light that becomes still; it is us who readjust ourselves before it. The Earth aligns between its two poles, north and south, like two eyes seeking the same point. Eye to eye. Mati to Mati. Time and space trying to realign the axis in a constant play of light and shadow.

That movement is the dance of consciousness. Two gazes observing from different places, trying to stabilize the light at the center. Because light does not disappear—it shifts. And all experience exists to bring it back inward.

And perhaps that is why this story can only be told this way: as a dialogue between two gazes searching for each other. Between the I and the I Am. Between two eyes traveling the world from opposite poles, time and space, trying to refocus. Because something, at some moment, lost an eye. Something fell out of place. And ever since, all movement has been nothing but the attempt to see whole again.

Not to explain the light, but to accompany it until it finds its axis once more. Until perception stops fragmenting. Until the observing eye and the observed light coincide again at the center. As if this entire story were, in the end, the gesture of leaning once more over that void—not to lose the gaze, but to recover it.

Search for the light.  Search for Lucas.

Today the Sun shifts ever so slightly, and that small gesture sets everything in motion again. The light readjusts, and so does the gaze. Perhaps that is what this natividad is about: accepting that the game of consciousness begins again. The question is simple:

Are we willing to play?