Skin on Sundays

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Epicentro

Epicentro

In us
the spirit 
of the earth
swells.
In light,
we turn seeds
into trees.
In darkness,
we transform 
wreckage
into relic.

Sunday,

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The other day, my friend Cris called me up and asked if I wanted to do a collaboration celebrating the release the song Epicentro, by BNDRA (the band consists of Cris and Compa). There are several reasons why I excitedly said yes. First, I’m super familiar with the song, because Omar produced it, in our living room, and so I heard it evolve from its early stages of just ideas into the beautiful musical piece of art it is today. Of course, that’s another reason I wanted to do it: I love the song. It was originally written in the wake of the huge Mexico City earthquake of 2017, and carries a message of strength and unity. Calamity can cause people to break or bring them together. In the case of Mexico’s earthquake, I saw with my very eyes people rising from the destruction to offer whatever they could to help. I saw the spirit of the city and its people come alive.

There is something beautiful about Mexico that BNDRA communicates so well in this song Epicentro: how much the culture of the country is still connected to a spiritual energy that comes from the universe, the earth, and every living and nonliving thing in it. In Mexico, that spiritual energy is alive, felt, and widely accepted as a truth of existence. It’s not about religion; the spirituality I’m referring to is a result of a feeling of connectedness, to other humans, to animals, to plants, to earth. I think that is a huge part of what has made me feel so at home in Mexico in the first place, so in my element, and thus I stayed. It was a pleasure to reconvene with those emotions and ideas in this collaboration with BNDRA. That’s what the poem is about, what the song is about, and my overwhelming sensation of living here in this beautiful country.

Definitely go listen to the BNDRA song on Spotify or check out the video on YouTube. It’s so lovely.