When the vulnerability of life and interdependence meet and share a kiss.

On August 10, 2026, I woke up at 4:30 in the morning. I had to go to Tocumen Airport in Panama City. I was traveling to Cali, Colombia, for work.

As I was getting ready for the trip, on the other side of the border, the earth was stretching like a cat waking from sleep, making everything move. A magnitude 7.4 earthquake shook Colombia. Its epicenter was located in San José del Palmar, in Chocó, one of the country’s most historically neglected regions, where racial and class inequalities profoundly shape the lives of its communities. The earthquake was also strongly felt in Cali, Pereira, Manizales, and other parts of western Colombia.

My flight was delayed for a couple of hours. We finally took off from Panama, and when we arrived in Cali, we found a city still shaken, its heart racing. There were disruptions to communications, water, and electricity. I still did not fully grasp the magnitude of what had happened or the damage caused by that violent shaking of the earth, especially in the areas closest to the epicenter.

When I arrived, I met up with my work team, who had also experienced the earthquake and, at the same time, were providing care and support to the members of the delegation who had come to Cali to share a cultural immersion with Afroresistencia in this beautiful city and to experience the Petronio Álvarez Pacific Music Festival.

Fear had settled onto the faces of those welcoming us. The earthquake had disrupted everyday life and left behind questions that could not yet be answered. Are we safe? What might be happening in Chocó? Will there be more aftershocks?

Even before I left Panama, some friends who had seen the first images of the tragedy began calling me. They assumed I would not travel. Their concern for me began to make me uneasy as well. And yet, once I boarded the plane, those fears faded away. Or so I thought. Over the following days, they returned, because that shaking of the earth had reminded us of something we often prefer to forget: we are vulnerable. Life is never guaranteed. In an instant, we can cease to exist, lose our home, our territory, or the conditions of life we have come to rely on. Our bodies may survive and still be left marked by physical and emotional aftereffects.

Throughout the week, I kept asking myself: What is this earthquake placing in our lives? What is it trying to tell us? What can we learn from this experience? In the end, another question stayed with me more than any other: How do we turn this life experience into a pedagogical one? I remembered Tita Torres, a great teacher of mine, and her invitation to pedagogize life. And so I began to look at what had happened from a different place. The earthquake confronts us with our vulnerability, but also with our interdependence.

We are vulnerable because we need other people. And precisely because of that, we are interdependent. We need someone to listen to us, someone to hold us, someone to prepare food, someone to ask how we are doing, someone to care for those who are afraid. We need networks of care, and it was that interdependence that allowed us to keep moving forward.

Our fears were shared, our tears became collective, and there were many comforting embraces. It was the group that held the fear and made it possible, little by little, for joy and smiles to return to the faces of those in the delegation.

It was the collective work, the embraces, the shared meals, the conversations, the laughter that timidly began to return. It was also the songs of the elder women, whose voices accompanied us through that passage from fear toward calm.

And perhaps therein lay one of the deepest lessons of that earthquake: we live in a system that insists on making us believe that we should be alone, isolated, without networks of connection, and without needing anyone. It convinces us that we must be self-sufficient and that everything we are and everything we have is exclusively the result of our own effort.

Meritocracy is then presented to us as an unquestionable truth, and individualism becomes almost an obligation. As if we could sustain our lives in solitude; as if our bodies were invincible; as if we did not depend on other people, on our communities, and on nature. And yet, there is our planet Earth, moving beneath us and reminding us otherwise.

It reminds us that we are vulnerable bodies. That our lives depend on other lives. That we need relationships, care, and the networks we build long before we come to need them. For me, this experience reaffirmed something we often say within feminisms, but that this week I was able to experience in my own body: the network holds us, and its fabric cares for us and helps us heal. The network also rescues joy when fear tries to take it away.

I recognize myself as vulnerable and interdependent with other people and with nature. Recognizing these two dimensions of our existence can help us resist the narratives of a capitalist and neoliberal system that tries to convince us that we need no one and that, if we work hard enough, we can handle everything on our own.

The earthquake reminded us, in the most brutal way, that life is not self-sufficient. That we need other people to sustain it, and that we need nature, even though we often act as if we were separate from it. This supremacist attitude toward nature is yet another consequence of the establishment of a patriarchal system in which nature came to be placed beneath the power of “man.”

A standing ovation for the Colombian people who are mobilizing to support those who need it most today. Applause for those who, even in the midst of their own scarcity, offer their abundance to those who are now mourning their losses. Applause for those who are not only lending a shoulder, but placing their bodies where they believe they need to be. And a huge, long embrace for the elder women who, through their songs, are accompanying the souls who transcended during these painful days we have lived through in Cali.

Perhaps pedagogizing this experience means learning to see our vulnerability not as a weakness, but as a condition that connects us. Recognizing that we need other people can also be a form of resistance against a system that wants isolated individuals, competing against one another and believing that each person can save themselves through their own effort.

On that August 10, the earth moved, and so did we.

But while the earth reminded us of our fragility, our bonds reminded us of our strength. Perhaps it is there, precisely there, where the vulnerability of life and interdependence meet and share a kiss.