by Marivel Guzman

Updated April 12, 2025

Author’s Note
Originally published in 2007 as My First Encounter, this updated version reflects how much I’ve evolved—both in curiosity and in consciousness. What began as a single moment of awakening has since become a lifelong journey. Over the years, I’ve continued to question, seek, and expand my understanding of the unseen. This piece is not just a reflection; it’s a return to the spark that first opened my eyes.

The First Questions

From the age of eleven through my teenage years, I attended a Catholic girls’ institution run by Carmelitas nuns. In this environment, we didn’t call our teachers “teachers”—we called them “Mothers,” a title reflecting their authority as spiritual guides. I respected them deeply. I wasn’t trying to be rebellious; I simply had questions. Real ones. Complex ones. Questions that were not easily satisfied by “because God says so.”

Each weekday, we had a class called “Morals,” during which we read a random Bible passage, reflected on it, and wrote a summary. Most girls did this quietly. I did not. I asked why—relentlessly.

The story of Adam and Eve never sat well with me. Even as a child, I couldn’t accept that Eve was blamed for Adam’s weakness. He was created first. He was the man. Wasn’t he supposed to be wiser? Stronger? Why, then, did he simply take the fruit and eat it—just because Eve offered it?

I remember asking the Mothers, “If Adam knew better, why did he listen? Why is she to blame for his choice?” They had no answer that satisfied me. Their discomfort only grew when I followed up: “Why didn’t Adam and Eve have children in paradise if they were supposed to ‘be fruitful and multiply’? Why does the Bible wait until after they’re cast out to mention their children?”

As an adult, I returned to Genesis—not once, but many times. I no longer read it as dogma, but as metaphor. And what I see now is a story drenched in symbolism and patriarchal assumptions. In Chapter 1, God creates man and woman and commands: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.” But by Chapter 3, after the eating of the “forbidden fruit,” they are expelled from paradise—and only then are their children born.

That contradiction struck me like lightning.

What if the “fruit” wasn’t an apple at all? What if it was sexual awakening—a metaphor for desire, for womanhood, for agency? What if the true sin, in the eyes of those who wrote this tale, was Eve’s sexuality—her body, her vagina, her ability to initiate life? And what if the serpent, far from being evil, represented desire itself—the force that stirs consciousness, passion, rebellion?

The more I thought about it, the more the metaphor unraveled the logic. Adam and Eve didn’t have children until after they “sinned.” Shame came after awareness. Sex came after shame. Eve wasn’t the villain—she was the catalyst of awakening.

But back in that classroom, all I had was intuition and a quiet storm inside me. I didn’t have the words yet, only the questions. And those questions were already dangerous.

Rebellion Through Curiosity

Fridays were set aside for confession. After morning lessons, we climbed the stairs to the second-floor chapel, where we were expected to kneel and confess our sins to the priest. It was supposed to be a solemn moment of humility, but I felt uneasy about the whole ritual. The idea of baring my soul to a man behind a curtain—when I could just speak to God in silence—never made sense to me.

I remember asking Mother Teresa, my sixth-grade science teacher, “Why must we confess to a priest if God is everywhere and already knows our hearts?” Her reply was sharp and final: “You’re being disrespectful to the Church.” There was no room for further discussion. After that, I began making up sins—small, harmless ones—just to get it over with. I wasn’t being flippant; I just couldn’t bring myself to fake guilt I didn’t feel. It felt like theater.

I never went back.

As an adult, I never returned to the Act of Reconciliation, nor to regular Catholic Mass, except for weddings, baptisms, or funerals—social formalities, not spiritual obligations. I never again felt the urge to kneel before a man in robes and confess anything. Not because I was defiant, but because the very foundation of the ritual struck me as flawed.

In my understanding of life, humans don’t commit “sins” in the way the Church frames them. We make choices. We act. We learn. Some actions may cause harm, others healing. But to me, these are not offenses in need of priestly pardon—they are experiences, lessons, chapters in our personal evolution. If a murderer or a thief finds solace in confession, perhaps they need that intermediary. But in my book of life, I do not need a priest to forgive me—especially not in God’s name.

Looking back, I see confession for what it is: a form of institutional control cloaked in absolution. I rejected it, not out of arrogance, but out of an inner clarity I’ve only come to articulate fully in adulthood. I trusted my own moral compass more than the fear-based doctrine handed to me. And in doing so, I began a quiet rebellion—one that never made a scene, but never surrendered either.

Discipline defined that institution. Once, during a geography class, a student misbehaved, and as punishment, the entire class had to stay until we had memorized every country in the world and its capital. It didn’t matter who had spoken out of turn—we were all guilty by association.

We were not allowed to go home until we passed the test. And we hadn’t eaten. I remember some desperate parents tossing food over the tall side wall of the schoolyard, hoping their daughters would catch it. The scene looked like a bizarre, silent protest—bags of sandwiches sailing through the air like lifelines.

Each time we felt ready, we had to raise our hand, step forward, and recite the entire list in front of Mother Felicitas. If we faltered—even once—we were sent back to the benches to study again. One mistake, and the process restarted.

Now, when I think back on that day, I can’t help but laugh. Not because it was funny, but because it was unbelievable. How could anyone think that was an appropriate punishment for teenagers? Memorizing 191 countries and their capitals—that’s 382 names—matched in perfect pairs. We were punished with cognitive overload and hunger, as if obedience could be beaten into us through exhaustion.

At the time, I thought it was just unfair. Now I think: How could they be so vile? How could punishment take the form of such absurd intellectual cruelty?

After that ordeal, everything changed. We walked straighter. Spoke softer. Touched nothing we weren’t supposed to. It wasn’t that we had learned respect—we had learned compliance. And that is something I have spent my whole life unlearning.

Always Achieving, Always Searching

Despite my reputation as a persistent questioner, I earned straight A’s. I joined the school’s musical group and learned to play the mandolin—an instrument no one else wanted. My academic success gave me a certain immunity, a layer of protection for my curiosity. I excelled not just to shine, but because learning made me feel anchored. Learning was my self-defense.

Outside school, I was just as active. I played volleyball and basketball, joined a regional dance troupe, sang in a youth music group, and played chess at Center 45. On weekends, I met a friend to play basketball, sneaking into her neighborhood schoolyard to access the courts. My life was packed with activity—overflowing, even—and still, I felt a hollow silence beneath it all. A kind of quiet disconnect that I didn’t have words for at the time.

Now, as a mother myself, I understand that feeling more deeply. I remember watching my own children perform at school—singing, reciting, playing music. My heart overflowed with pride and joy. I clapped the loudest. I took the photos. I lived every note and every line with them.

But when I look back at my own childhood performances, there was no one in the audience for me. My grandmother, who raised me, never attended. Neither did my aunts. They worked. They had lives of their own. I understood their absence intellectually, but emotionally it left a void.

And maybe that void explains my hunger for knowledge, my addiction to understanding, my constant pursuit of something. Maybe my obsession with independence was a way to seal that emotional fracture—a quiet way to tell myself, you don’t need anyone to feel whole. Maybe my curiosity was survival—a tool shaped by the plasticity of a young mind that refused to fall apart.

People called me “Mi pequeño Larousse,” after the pocket dictionary we carried at school. I always had an answer, always wanted to explain. Not to show off. But maybe to belong. Maybe to feel seen. Maybe to prove, silently, that I was enough on my own.

A Family of Women, A Foundation of Strength

Living among strong, self-sufficient women taught me not only to think independently—but to trust that voice inside me. To understand that my version of right was valid, even if it didn’t match the script I was handed. And that realization became the bedrock of my awakening.

Still, I am not perfect. Even with my liberal ideals and expanded consciousness, I made mistakes—especially as a mother navigating the school system with my own children. I didn’t always stand strong when it mattered most. I had a son who was incredibly intelligent, playful, rebellious, and fiercely independent. But he was also surrounded by peers who fueled his ego, and the structure of the system didn’t make space for boys like him. I often reflect on how I could have supported him better, pushed back harder, or guided him more gently.

Now, as a grandmother, I offer my daughter-in-law a different kind of strength—not just advice, but solidarity. I tell her to stand firm, to nurture her children’s fire while teaching them how to play the game. Play the game, I tell my grandkids, until you’re in control of the rules.

Sometimes I wish I could download my entire life’s journey directly into their consciousness, implant the lessons like a seed that blooms instantly. But I know better. Wisdom doesn’t get transferred in bulk—it’s narrated, one story at a time, gifted moment by moment, like breadcrumbs along their own path.

A Lifelong Student

From the moment I opened my first novel, I knew reading would become more than a habit—it would become a form of survival. Books were my refuge, my playground, my battlefield. They were the only place where I felt truly free to question without punishment, to think without fear.

I started early—with Dostoevsky. Crime and Punishment lit the first fire, and before long, I had devoured most of his work. That journey led me to Victor Hugo, Cervantes, García Márquez, Dumas, Tolstoy, the Brothers Karamazov, and beyond. Classics, politics, religion, science, metaphysics—I didn’t discriminate. I read everything. And with every book, I carved a new corridor inside my consciousness.

Reading became a necessity. Writing, later, became a calling.

I first chose nursing, believing it would align my compassion with a practical purpose. But the passion faded. I pivoted toward civil engineering—another structured field, full of math and certainty. I left that, too, in my third year. The world was changing. Computers were taking over, and so I went back to school again: computer science, networking, information systems. I was trying to catch up with the pace of the future, but still, I felt unsatisfied.

My soul wanted something else.

That “something” finally arrived as an intersection between photography and journalism. One captured images; the other, truth. One was light; the other, voice. When I began to write articles, document stories, question power, and amplify silenced perspectives, I felt something I hadn’t felt before—alignment.

In a journal from 2008, I wrote: “My soul is pounding in my consciousness, forcing me to deliver my simple understanding to the people.” I no longer cared if it was elegant. I wasn’t writing for literary prestige—I was writing because I had something to say, and people like me—ordinary citizens, global citizens—deserved to hear something real.

I wanted to speak in simple language. No big words. No coded metaphors. Just truth. Accessible and immediate. A way of bridging worlds—from the ordinary to the extraordinary, from the curious to the silenced.

That’s when I knew: I am a student for life—not of institutions, but of consciousness. I follow where the energy moves. I listen to the clues of instinct. I take the turns that feel unsanctioned, unplanned, yet unmistakably mine.

To be a lifelong student is not to be unrooted—it is to be awake.

Enlightenment as Liberation

To me, enlightenment is not a destination, but a process—one of liberation from imposed truths and inherited dogmas. It is not about acquiring light from others but about reclaiming the light that was already inside me, hidden beneath centuries of conditioning.

I’ve come to understand that the doctrines I was taught—particularly in religious settings—didn’t just shape how I behaved; they shaped how I perceived reality. One of the most deeply ingrained illusions was the idea that good and evil are absolute choices—an eternal tug-of-war between sin and virtue.

In a journal entry I once wrote: “Due to mis-education, we are led to believe that the theory of opposites is nonexistent. Religious education is most guilty of this tendency to ignore the balance that must exist in nature. Humanity, being primarily included in the order of nature, is thrown off course by the suppression of duality. Western civilization, in its effort to control the human mind, converted the doctrine of good and evil into a choice theory—rather than preserving the principle of balance—thus creating, in its path, a form of religious worship rooted in fear.”

I didn’t fully realize it at the time, but I was describing something very ancient and very true: that opposites are natural, and the denial of one half of our being—whether it be emotion, sexuality, desire, rebellion, instinct—is a kind of spiritual amputation.

Other traditions knew this. In Eastern philosophies, pre-colonial indigenous teachings, and even in esoteric mystical systems, opposites were not enemies. They were companions. Shadow and light. Masculine and feminine. Creation and destruction. Logic and intuition. To be human was to learn how to walk between them, not to eradicate one for the other.

That’s what enlightenment means to me now: to restore what was severed. To bring balance where dogma imposed division. To marvel at a flower without worrying whether its beauty is virtuous. To admire the rain. To feel joy without guilt. Anger without shame. To love without needing permission. To live without apologizing for your complexity.

It means to help the wounded, to comfort the lost, to protect life in every form—not because you fear divine punishment, but because you remember your place in the natural order. Because your soul feels it’s the right thing to do.

And it means to cry. To rage. To mourn injustice, war, the suffering of the innocent. These emotions are not moral failures. They are sacred instincts.

Enlightenment is the art of reclaiming wholeness. It is the process of remembering that the most spiritual thing you can be is fully, wildly, unapologetically human.

The Seeker Within

Even after everything I’ve read, written, questioned, and outgrown—I remain a seeker.

Not because I haven’t found answers. But because each answer opens another gate, another path, another layer of understanding. There is no final truth. Only deeper resonance.

My first encounter with truth-seeking began in a Catholic classroom, with a Bible in hand and a heart full of questions. It didn’t end there—it expanded into books, into classrooms, into digital rabbit holes, into motherhood, into rebellion, into silence. Into the sacred ordinary.

I used to think I was born to fight the system. Now I know I was born to rewrite the code.

To challenge what was handed to me—not with violence, but with vision. Not with bitterness, but with clarity.

I’ve learned to walk alongside my contradictions. To accept that I can be deeply rational and deeply intuitive. Fiercely independent and tenderly emotional. Analytical and poetic. Political and spiritual. There’s no law that says I must choose.

The seeker within me is no longer restless—she is rooted in curiosity. She trusts her instincts. She respects the unknown. She isn’t afraid of not knowing anymore.

She understands that wisdom is not hoarded—it’s shared. Not imposed—it’s offered. And sometimes the most sacred gift is not the answer, but the courage to ask the question in the first place.

And so I write.

Because writing is how I walk through the unseen.Because someone, somewhere, is still sitting in a classroom, afraid to raise her hand.And I want her to know: your questions are holy.They are the beginning of your awakening.

I Am the Witness and the Flame

I am not the child I was.I am not the student I pretended to be.I am not the mother they judged.Nor the woman they tried to tame with rules wrapped in scripture.

I am the one who asked the question.Who refused to accept half-truths.Who saw the serpent not as sin,but as signal—a whisper of awakening in a garden afraid of knowing.

I was raised by women who survived by bending the rules,and now I walk unbent.

I have played the game.I have watched the world move in patterns I was told were destiny.But I know now:instinct is memory encoded in the bones.And the truth doesn’t arrive with permission.It arrives with fire.

To those who follow:Do not trade your intuition for applause.Do not silence your questions for belonging.And do not wait for the world to validate your voice.Speak now.

You are not here to be perfect.You are here to be present.To remember.To awaken.To burn a little brighter each time you return to yourself.

I am the witness.

I am the memory.

I am the flame.