THE STORY OF MY STORIES
(An informal c.v. which tries to tell my life story in a few pages)

I would like to start this informal tale saying that I was a happy child, who spent my entire childhood playing outdoors, something I´m very proud of… I didn’t go to school until I was seven, when I had already learnt nearly all the important things in a natural way…, as I was growing up, apart from the usual infatuations of each age, I gradually fell in love with knowledge, the adventure of discovery, the pleasure of discovering explanations, sometimes incompletes, to the questions of life.

I studied in a mixed secular school with 15 children in each class, which with hindsight seems a great privilege to me. I had good teachers there, some excellent, and I learnt to reconcile learning and pleasure, also to live with different people, in this case with getting along with boys –these peculiar and unknown beings- among whom I made good friends.

As far as I can remember I wrote my first poem when I was about twelve, imitating the rhymes of “La vaquera de la Finojosa”, but with different theme, of course. I didn’t keep it, but I still remember some of the verses (¡with possible improvements…!)

Writing became something usual for me: diaries, letters, many letters…, and poems. Reading also became an agreeable experience for me. I read the great poets, Neruda about love, Cernuda about exile, Miguel Hernández hidden from Spanish textbooks… I soon discovered “Leaves of grass”, by Walt Withman. I memorized it and still conserve it, in yellowed pages, and in grateful for the company it was for me and the way in awakened my life as part of nature.

My friends had a lot to do with these discoveries and many others. I learnt to grow in a group, to nourish myself with friendship to give and receive ideas, concerns, discoveries, searches…, and in this way I grew up, I became and adult always holding hands with others.

I fell in love and I knew what is was to reach the heights. I also learnt to lose them. While still very young I combined work and studies, the office desk with the university, with all that forcing me to organize my time, to learn to use it as a treasure, lo know how to share obligations and pleasure, because I also enjoyed dancing very much.

Although it doesn’t seem appropriate to such a biography as this, I would like to say that I began to dance very early and haven’t stopped doing so since then. Even today I make time for this body talent, for the pleasure of moving to the rhythm of the music and letting the mind relax while the heart beats very fast.

In the middle seventies I published my firs poetry book whose title was Yo no se (“I don’t know”), which expressed my doubts, my intuition that the absolute knowledge of ourselves and about the world turns out to be an impossible adventure. Those early poems not only expressed the state of my spirit but also (I began to understand it…) they anticipated the following search which would refer me each time with more strength to the active acceptance of the mystery, to that “being alert” which precedes the silent arrival of the light, any light, to later mark the return of silence, recompose the question, showing again to remain expecting without indications.

In that same year I “debuted” as an ecologist, promoting the defence of a park which the construction companies wanted to turn into blocks of flats. Along with a small group of people, in A Coruña city, we were able to save what was known as “Santa Margarita Hill” and which became a public park. Today it is a lovely place well looked after which shelters the House of Science.

Since then, my vital path as a woman has always been accompanied by others two dimensions: the artistic and the environmental, without wanting or being able to separate the one from the other.

At that time, with my first university studies finished, I began the second stage. It was impossible to stop learning. But at the same time I married, had children and discovered the unconditional love which comes with maternity and which never dies. Once again time was scarce…, once again I learnt to combine my role of wife and mother with my university career.

I did my PHD thesis when my children were small and knew what is was to have some books coloured with pencils in an unattended moment… (I was learning to conciliate order and disorder, something which would be very useful in my future life…)

A few years later, around 1982, I began to paint. It was a way to express complexities which “resisted” written language and even less to be explained by laws or theories. This permitted me to express myself in another language, continuing to do in different ways what was beginning to be a normal activity for me: to tell stories. Since then, I have never stopped painting. Art covers a very important part of my life, it is a language which permits me to say the unspeakable, to dialogue without words with science, elevate a dream…

In 1984 I read my doctoral thesis (PHD) on Environmental Education. I knew where I definitely wanted to go in my professional life. This subject wasn’t well known at the university. My colleagues asked me how I thought I could work in something “that didn’t exist”…, but I had the intuition that it was an inescapable question, of an offer which had to be made to the society so that our children and grandchildren would know about the value of nature and learn to respect it. My posterior professional experience has confirmed that the wager was worthwhile.

Once I completed my doctorate, the university was confirmed as my professional home. I was lucky to be able to work on environmental education and I could meet wonderful people who enriched my human and professional life. But I obviously had to continue to study because the theme was attractive and to be up to date in environmental questions was and is a passionate task.

This long period was also a time when several Marías lived inside me, especially two which, from the professional field, needed to agree without delay: the María who investigated and asked for answers from science and the one who experimented the creative art force. To reconcile them to secure that they got along together, meant I had to learn, necessarily, the inevitable dialogue between mind and heart, between what reason maintains and this soul movement which cant be expressed by any law or theory.

In this circumstances, the project to connect the worlds scientific visions and artistic expression (which would later become the Ecoart Project) emerged not as a result of reflection , not even taking a precise form, but as a vital pressure, as the enunciation of a process whose future even I didn’t know.. It meant, in essence, to join the two people (among others…) who lived in my interior: one who questions science to explain and give explanations about the world, and one who intuits, loves and imagines, through art to leave the world to be at once a place for sentiments, emotions, discoveries where knowledge, when it arrives, perchance surprises us with answers to questions not formulated.

In my artistic activity in the following years -painting and poetry- is the development of this proposal, trying to sketch from the language of art some ideas, always challenging, always unreachable in their complexity, of Heisenberg, Bateson, Bohm… and also of some important live scientistis: Murrai Gell-Mann, Prigogine, Margalef, Morin, Freire and many others. They taught me that thinking, as life, only qrows and regenerates when it is exposed to fire, to the possibility or its purifying destruction. And that time, afterwards, opens the door to the reconstruction, it exposes us to the novelty, to the utopia. I now know that the only way not to burn myself is to keep burning…

I didn’t learn less from my artistic teachers. From Paul Klee who advised me how precious is the knowledge of the laws under the prevention from any simplicity which confuses the bare law with reality; from de visionary Hölderlin who fought to re-establish the dialogue between the human being and nature; from Withman for whom a blade of grass is as perfect as the sideral course of the stars; from Zóbel obstinated in looking at the Júcar river to name it with its light… After all these questions, they helped me to understand that, as María Zambrano envisaged, one doesn’t go to the wood clearings to question…, the invisible passed us nearby…, it arrives when least we expect it, it is only a murmur which appears in a moment of grace and after disappears.

All of them impacted my mind and mi heart. And precisely from this shock I found the strength and signs to keep progressing, from day to day, in the encounter between established knowledge and the knowledge which we construct, which is finally the encounter of the imagination, the great teacher of life, with reality. From them I learnt that, fortunately, knowledge is not reproductive, but creative, that we produce reality with the same intensity with which we think we know it.

In 1985 I published my first book about Environmental Education. Other books followed about ethic, conceptuals and episthemologics questions, related to the environment, sustainable development, and the way in which it is possible, educationaly, to tackle the challenges of science, technique and the economy, in a globalized world.

In 1990, I began to direct a Postgraduate Course in Environmental Education, offered to professionals whose disciplinary formation needed a “transdisciplinary recomposition” to focus in a integrate way environmental questions. Our students were well qualified people: engineers, biologists, educators, decision-makers as civil servants, directors in private business, trade union leaders… With them I learnt the experience of team building in knowledge, helped by a group of teachers who , in the most part, were and are my friends. I knew how wonderful it was to grow intellectually in the company of others, and not only intellectually, but also in human aspects. With the transformation required by time, the postgraduate programme persists.

My second poetry book came quickly. The title was “Libertad no conozco” (I do not freedom) and my editor called my attention to the fact that once more the word “not” appeared in the title. I now think that, in an unconscious way, that “not” announced my opposition to any social models that I considered essentially unjust, but also (became the book title was taken from a poem by Cernuda…) the “not” reflected the impossibility to live without love…, spokes about an only possible freedom which was “to be prisoner of someone whose name I cannot hear without a shiver…”. Fortunately, I also know today other possible forms of freedom…

Other books accompanied this one about the environment, sustainable development, environmental education… which tried to tell people stories, the stories of a world in crisis and some of the various ways of envisaging life from positions which were not aggressive with nature. I also understand that it was necessary to tell the story about those billions of people who, in our planet, have no drinking water, food, or a dignified life-style.

Researching and teaching in the environmental field, and doing it from an educational point of views, took me inevitably to study and work with the scientific theories which try to tell us about the complexity of the living world. I had already worked with the ideas of Bateson, Prigogine, Morin… for my dissertation, and now an inspiring and boundless territory was opened to me: bringing me nearer to a new environmental paradigm not reductionist, in which order and disorder, hazard and uncertainty, the theory of chaos, take a place.

And now a small pause which brings us to the present: in 1990 I started to work on a book about this, a book about the theories on the complexity and there possible transference to the social and human sciences (a nonmechanical transference, requiring adjustments, logically). My children, who see how time passes without my finishing this text, say that, instead of a new paradigm, my drafts were become “the old paradigm”, due to the long wait… But I think I needed all this time in order to decant my ideas, to feed them with rigour, to discuss them with colleagues…

In this text I tried to interpret the constitutional process of the modern model of the world, specially in the scientific field, to unveil the influences which this model has had on the human and social behaviour about Nature (also on other groups such as women, children, third and fourth worlds…), and I try to present some possible proposals of change, born close to the complexity of everything living, also from the value of the different, from the fringes of the system.

And we return to the nineties. It is important, very important to me, to remember that, as this decade developed, my activity as a writer/painter and my universitarian path were accompanied by my vital experience as a woman. I fell in love again, I saw my children grow up and knew that I wanted another world for them, more balanced ecologically and socially just. So it was necessary to keep on battling for change, now with new reasons to do so.

The integration between art and science continued, meanwhile, unfolding in my professional activity. The Ecoart Project was born and now grew, still not baptized, similar to those long walks which we must patiently take, begin with a firs step which, by fortune or necessity, has no pretensions of going to any safe place.

In the 1996 the Unesco assigned me the Environmental Education Chair, which, since then, I directed in my University. The international dimension of the Chair incentivated my journeys to Latin America, a continent which has always surprised me (and continues to do so) for the human quality of its peoples. On my American trips, I have learnt that even for the most intellectual and abstract work its still possible to look into each others eyes.

The direct understanding of the Latin American country women , along my vital project of those years and my work concerning the environment, made me realize something that would be very important for me: that Nature was “invisible” for the economy and that women and Nature received the same treatment. At that time I understood the “invisibility” of us, women, and I realized that some day I would have to speak about it, that this would also be an integrate task.

In 2000 I published a new poetry book, this time in the framework of the Ecoart Project (which had been titled and by then had been “presented in society”). This book was titled “Microcosmos”, and tells about the value of life; the laws which govern it; the opening to chance, the relation between order and disorder which makes that the living becomes something changeable, inaprehensible.

In the title “not” did not now appear. I was in a different stage of my life. I had overcome the period of saying “no” and had happily entered in one time of propositions. Now it was the imagination which presided my searches. I didn’t only want to look with critical eyes at the existent, but to imagine possible worlds in which everything which socially showed itself as opposite could now shake hands: the reason and the feelings, nature and culture, the certain and the uncertainty, also the masculine and feminine.

That year was important for me. I enjoyed a sabatic period and could, at last, begin the project of talking about the invisibility of women. I took my small portable computer, I went to an Atlantic island, and there discovered something essential: It wasn’t I who had to speak for women. It was up to them to speak themselves.

All the notes which I took the previous outlines, thus began to reconstruct so that they could lift up their voices, that they spoke in first person… And it was in this way, letting them talk, how I fell in love with each of the protagonists, in their fight for daily life, their way of being in the world, their courage to love… of their joy… and so was born my story book “Them, the invisibles”.

Meanwhile, my children were growing up and me too (my process, more than growing pus, was “maturing”…). Together we were developing the experience of love with respect, of joy together, of the incondicionality which is so necessary for us to feel secure. We spent easy and difficult moments together; we built projects and, as the years passed, we learnt to give advice (not only I to them, but also them to me, which I am so grateful for). Today Irene and William are already good professionals and, above all, two good people, for which I feel very content.

And I continue to build knowledge, same time writing and painting, that is that I continue revealing and telling stories ( I also find time for my loved ones, for dancing, for going to the mountains with my walking group…). Because this had certainly been what I have done throughout my various activities, moulded into the books. I wrote at that time, and also in art exhibitions: to reveal, construct and tell stories with different languages. Sometimes they have been poetic stories, which tell about loneliness, love, joy… In other occasions, scientific stories, which noticed, or tried to notice, the complexity of the living world, of the many ways of approaching this complexity and revealing it partially, only partially, procuring that this revelation leads us to the respect, to the consciousness of being part of Nature but not its dominator.

It seems, then, that my destiny is to be a “storyteller”. But, of course, to tell something its necessary to listen a lot, to keep your ears attentive and your eyes ready to see into the nooks of life, to discover the “invisible”, to value small things, the insecurity… In my case, to be a “storyteller” isn’t a bad fate, as long as one accepts that the stories –scientific or artistic- don’t have in the end to give answers but, at the most, to provoke new questions. Finally, it is the questions which move me to gaze with astonishment at life, to imagine… and also to assume its mystery, the exile which precedes any presumption of evidence.

If I had to resume the sense of all this life, I would say, although there have been distressful stages, altogether I have lived it and I live it as an occasion to give thanks: for my children, my friends, my lovers… Lake everybody else I have been touched with sadness, unrest, fear… but, above all or even further, I have always liked for the attitude to enjoy whatever life gives us; the poem which somebody once wrote unaware for me; the painting which I painted yesterday and today hangs on the wall of another house; to cared for what has been constructed and what is still to be done; dancing which moves the body and meditation which soothes the spirit…; to celebrate each new year as an opening moment towards new projects, an invitation to the creativity, a challenge to solidary thinking… No better way exist, to my point of view, contributing so that life can be a space for hope.

And to continue to exercise the pleasure of discovery, to search from “the burning patience”, as Neruda said. Being aware that a new question follows every finding, and it is in this partial and provisional knowledge we root our fragile –and not for that less committed- truths. After such a long time, even now, as I write these notes, I again remember that book with which I began my writing in 1975 and I once again take possession of the final poem of Microcosmos, which ends, dialoguing with the reader, returning to the old intuition at the beginning:

     “What I wanted to tell you,
     “What I don’t about the world…”