Benedictus Qui Venit In Nomine Domini

Part I in a Series of Reflections by Mario Garcia on participation in the April 2025 Conversations on the Soul of the Movement pilgrimage to Boriken.

At just past 9:30 p.m. the plane touched down in San Juan with the familiar thud of American machinery. Immediately, a ripple of applause broke out among the passengers. I joined in—not out of obligation, but instinct. The ritual was familiar. It happens in Mexico too. That small, shared celebration of safe arrival. 

As the cabin filled with the sound of Spanish—voices crisscrossing in a language that carries both precision and longing—something began to stir. A low vibration, a soft stirring. Caricias. That’s the only word I have for it. A gentle brushing of feeling. 

Outside the window: thick yellow light, cast through humidity so dense it settled on the skin before I’d even stepped off the plane. 

Inside the terminal, families reunited. Spanish and English folding into one another—corazón, hi baby, te extrañé, I’m here. We had arrived, yes. But what we were arriving into had not yet revealed itself to me. 

People moved. Earbuds in. Eyes forward. Some paused at signs, some texted family, others simply exhaled. We walked briskly toward the exit. Toward Borikén. 

And then, there it was—the green exit sign. My eyes fixed on it. The glass doors ahead slid open and shut in rhythm, like breath. At that moment I stopped observing and simply moved toward the threshold. 

What I didn’t yet understand—what would only become clear two days later, in front of the Puerta de San Juan with a community I can only describe, for now, as Seers—was that this was just the first of many portals. 

Portals of arrival. Of departure. Of entering, leaving, witnessing, remembering, invoking, resisting. Portals held open not by force, but by love. In silence. In persistence. 

Now, looking back with eyes closed, I can still see that first portal: the airport gate. A mechanical threshold into something far older, far deeper. That memory reopens it. And from this vantage point—after five days of overwhelming love, limitless gratitude, and spirit moving without performance—I see themes emerging. 

This movement, this work, is rooted in a deep and ancient knowing: that like the work of moving between realms—between ways of knowing and being—our work, too, is fluid. 

Not always linear. Perhaps not always practical to an outsider's perspective. But real. Spiritual. Demanding that we know where we’re standing so that we can serve as vessels for what spirit asks of us.

Spirit does not demand. It invites. And that invitation isn’t answered by will, but by surrender. That truth revealed itself again and again during the work Alexie led us through. 

So let this be a first gesture—an initial draft of a preface. A beginning of documentation. What follows will not be a travelogue. It will be an attempt to trace the soul of this movement. A movement arriving at the portal not in the name of retribution or domination—but in the name of love and resistance. 

And blessed are we.