~How I Became a Peacemaker~

 

“When I was young I was very sad and actually angry because of the big injustice in my country and felt romantically attracted to the “guerrilla” ideology. I wanted to be a musician and a song writer and felt a strong fascination for the native music, musical instruments and cultures.

That’s how on my way I learned a lot not only about music but the ancestral Native Andean and Amazonian spirituality. At some moment I found out their approach was not violent. Violence was not their way.

Precisely at that moment two important guerrilla movementes started a period of 20 years of violence in Peru, with thousands dead and absolutely no changes and no justice, just tragedy, suffering, mourning and a lot of orphans and displaced families.

This is the painful way how together with reading Lenin and Mao Tse Tung and singing songs glorifying the Che Guevara archetype and the social revolution I met the authentic Native Andean and Amazonian tradition, I read the Tao Te Ching some day, I learned about Gandhi and his amazing and noble struggle and his nonviolence ideology and I changed my mind.

I could say I healed my mind. I had to accept and confront the pain in my heart and transform it into compassion and commitment. It was hard but I had to do it.

So I decided to be the change I wanted to see in the world. I decided to involve myself in the Native Andean and Amazonian spiritual traditions and to study and practice the teachings of the Tao Te Ching.

Recently I started learning about Buddhism and Zen. I keep on singing for justice because I always did it from my love and compassion and not from my anger and precisely for that reason I don’t sing “guerrilla” songs anymore but songs for peace and forgivness, I sing for the Warriors of the Rainbow, the Warriors of the Self, The Warriors of Beauty and not for the soldiers of Hatred and Revenge.

I sing healing songs for my people and for the world, helaing songs for the healing of All Relations, all wounds, all imbalance, inside and outside.

I respect and understand the opinions that say a man who won the Nobel price of Peace can fight for peace and against war and slaughter of innocents using war and slaughter of innocents, but I don’t know, inside my heart there’s a voice that cries and tells me, this is not the right way and I am following that voice.”

~Kike Pinto Cárdenas