Mati here in the Chemistry

How many times have we studied something without feeling it? How many times have we memorized only to forget the next day?

Chemistry. For me, it was poison throughout school. Not because it was difficult, but because it was never alive. They taught us to regurgitate information, to ask ourselves "will this be on the exam," to run a race without destination. They never showed us the magic. They never told us we were studying the gods. My brain shut down, closed itself off, and with good reason.

I never liked studying for exams. I liked learning, but what I experienced in school was something else. We didn't learn, they trained us to spit out data. Most teachers taught from that logic: this is in, this isn't, this is what you need to know. In chemistry I was so bored that I felt I was running a race to fill my head with information that would disappear the next day. They never showed us the magic of chemistry, nor of mathematics, and my brain blocked itself to it.

I remember my last chemistry exam. I couldn't finish it. Probably the last one I turned in was drawings I had made, nothing related to what we had studied. It was my silent surrender to a system that asked me to memorize what my soul couldn't understand without feeling. Chemistry became my shadow, that dark place where we store what we couldn't integrate. And like all shadows, it was only waiting for the moment to become light.

THE GRANDMOTHER'S CALL

Several years ago, my guides told me something I immediately rejected: I should do ayahuasca. I refused emphatically. My connection was pure, I thought, I didn't need anything external, I didn't need plants or ceremonies. I was enough. I believed that my way of connecting with the invisible was clean, direct, without intermediaries. Why would I need anything else?

But life has curious ways of showing us when we've lost ourselves, when we've forgotten that purity is not isolation but integration. I was in Mendoza, Argentina, completely lost, not knowing where to go. My entire being had disconnected, like a loose cable in the middle of a storm. I had lost my north, I had lost my center, and in that profound emptiness I understood that I needed to begin something new, that returning to the roots was not going backward but remembering who I was before believing myself separated from everything.

I accepted. I crossed into Chile, and there, in ceremony, everything began to change.

THE HINDU WORLD I DIDN'T KNOW

When the medicine entered my body, something completely unexpected happened. My entire inner world became Hindu, a culture with which I felt no connection whatsoever, a tradition I knew nothing about, with which I had never worked or studied. And yet, everything the grandmother spoke to me came from there. Deities I didn't know appeared before me, symbols I had never seen unfolded in my vision, mantras I had never heard resonated in my chest.

I didn't understand what was happening. Why India? Why those gods? I came from other traditions, other paths. But the medicine doesn't ask, it simply shows us what we need to see.

And in the midst of that strangeness, a phrase pierced my chest like lightning, like a truth that had been waiting my entire life to be heard: "If you came to this world in service of the Mother, why do you deny her kingdoms?"

That question turned my head around, broke me, rebuilt me. It left me without words, without defenses, without excuses. The grandmother continued speaking, and each word was a soft but certain blow. She told me that mushrooms and plants were the first neurons of this world, that for thousands of millions of years Gaia's wisdom expressed itself through them, that they know this Earth in ways we humans, recent arrivals, can barely imagine.

She told me that if I truly wanted to connect with the Earth, if I wanted to speak with forests and mountains about the consciousness of this world, I needed to stop thinking like a human and listen to those who truly know this Earth. I needed to set aside my arrogance, my belief that my way of connecting was sufficient, my idea that I could do it alone.

So I did. I accepted her teaching, I accepted my ignorance, I accepted that there were entire kingdoms of consciousness I had denied by considering them unnecessary.

THE MYCELIUM AND THE MINERAL PROCESSORS

Almost eight years passed until I felt her call again. Eight years of integration, of walking what I had learned, of living from another place. And when I thought I had already received everything the grandmother had to teach me, she called me again.

Ayahuasca then showed me the mushrooms, but not in the same way. She spoke to me of mycelium, that invisible network beneath our feet, that biological internet connecting trees, roots, stones, memory. She showed me how mycelium is not just connection, but processing, distributed intelligence, collective consciousness functioning in silence beneath the surface of the visible world.

And then she told me something that changed everything, something that would open a door I had kept closed since my school years: "The mycelium processes mineral consciousness. Speak with them."

Mineral consciousness. Those two words together made no sense in my mind. Minerals were inert, dead, lifeless. That's what I had been taught. But the grandmother was telling me there was consciousness there, that mycelium was the translator, the processor, the bridge between the mineral kingdom and everything else.

So I did. With respect, in ceremony, I connected with the mushrooms in another way, not only as medicine but as teachers, as librarians of a wisdom older than any human civilization. And when I did, they opened a world I had denied for decades, a world that had closed to me in school, a world I believed dead, boring, useless.

The atom. The chemical elements. The periodic table.

Suddenly, as if someone had turned on a light in a dark room that had always been there, the powers of chemistry were the gods, they were consciousness itself expressing in elemental forms. And that turned my head around for the second time, with the same intensity as that first question from the grandmother.

The poison of my education was becoming the medicine of my consciousness. What had blocked me, what I had rejected, what I considered my greatest failure, was transforming into the deepest path of connection with the Earth.

THE TRUE GODS

The stories the elements began to tell me led me to an expansion I hadn't felt since my childhood, since those years of puberty where everything was possible, where the universe fit in a single glance, where there was no separation between me and the cosmos. An expansion I had forgotten by living so much as human, by believing myself separated, by inhabiting only the surface of what we are.

Because the true gods and goddesses are not in distant temples, they don't dwell only in inaccessible dimensions, they don't hide behind mystical veils. They are here, now, in every breath we take, in every heartbeat we feel, in every movement we make. Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, calcium, iron. The elements of the periodic table began telling me their story, and that story is what I continue discovering, day by day, breath by breath, atom by atom.

I had forgotten that we are made of them, that they are part of us in every instant, that we are them. There is no difference, no separation, only the forgetting, only the illusion that we are something apart from the universe that created us. We are stardust with memory, stellar consciousness walking on Earth, elements gathered in a dance we call life.

The mushrooms showed me that each element has personality, has history, has purpose. That the iron running through our veins was forged in the heart of a dying star, that the calcium holding our bones was born in the violent explosion of a supernova, that the carbon forming every cell of our body is the same carbon that forms diamonds, trees, mountains.

They are not abstract concepts. They are living forces. They are ancient consciousnesses. They are the gods who decided to unite, combine, create complexity, until forming this we call humanity.

CHEMISTRY AS A PATH

Perhaps I didn't have to learn chemistry in school the way they taught it to me. Perhaps I didn't have to memorize valences or balance meaningless equations, filling papers with empty symbols that connected me to nothing. Perhaps I only had to feel it, live it, let it speak to me from within.

To feel that every time we breathe we are breathing the gods, that every time we eat we are eating stellar consciousness, that every time we move it is millennial forces dancing in us. To understand that we are not users of matter, but matter itself becoming conscious of itself.

From that day on, chemistry became my path through the world, not as an academic discipline but as living language, as geography of the space we inhabit, as a map of the territorial forces that compose us. Because if in the previous text we spoke of the calendar, of the time that moves us through lunar and stellar cycles, now we speak of the space in which we move, of the territory we are.

And that space is not empty. It is full. It is made of elements, of forces, of ancient consciousnesses that decided to unite to create mountains, rivers, forests, bodies. To create us. So that we could, someday, remember that we are them, that we always were them, that we never stopped being them.

THE EPIC JOURNEY THEY NEVER TOLD US ABOUT

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if in school they had taught us chemistry this way. If instead of memorizing they had invited us to feel. If instead of exams they had given us ceremonies. If instead of mute periodic tables they had shown us sacred maps of the forces that compose us.

Perhaps I wouldn't have needed poison to find medicine. Perhaps I wouldn't have needed to close myself to then open. Or perhaps yes, perhaps that was my path, perhaps I had to reject to then embrace with more depth.

But now we are here. And we can choose how we look at chemistry, how we relate to the elements, how we honor the gods we breathe. We can continue seeing them as dead concepts in a textbook, or we can begin to see them as what they are: the most ancient forces of the universe dwelling in us, waiting for us to recognize them, to feel them, to remember we are one with them.

Because turning one of the most boring subjects in school into an epic journey toward the universe and beyond is not only possible, it is necessary. It is the path back home. It is remembering that we don't study chemistry, we are chemistry. That we don't learn about the elements, we are the elements learning about themselves.

And when we remember it, when we feel that truth in every cell of our body, everything changes. The periodic table becomes a sacred map. Each molecule becomes a relationship between gods. Each breath becomes an act of communion with the cosmos.

The grandmother was right from the beginning: if we came to this world in service of the Mother, we cannot deny her kingdoms. Because we are the kingdom. We are space made conscious. We are the gods who created us, remembering themselves in human form.

Therefore I launch these questions to everyone...

Are we conscious of what we are made of? That the calcium in our bones was born in a giant star that exploded thousands of millions of years ago?

Do we feel that the iron in our blood was forged in the heart of a dying sun?

Do we remember that every atom in our body has a story older than Earth itself?

Are we ready to turn one of the most boring subjects in school into an epic journey toward the universe and beyond?