Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them,
‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’
and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’
what shall I say to them?”God said to Moses,
“I AM WHO I AM.”He said further,
*“Thus you shall say to the Israelites,
I AM has sent me to you.”
— Exodus 3:14
The first time I read this verse, I understood nothing.
I believed the language of gods and prophets had been created for gods and prophets, and that we—grounded, earthly humans—were never meant to understand such dialogues. I attributed my lack of understanding to divine codes, like in movies where they say this is classified information, accessible only to those in power.
And yet, something would not leave me alone.
Because it felt deeply unjust that words said to be filled with truth came with the promise that this truth would set us free, and yet seemed written in a language permanently out of reach.
Damn it, I thought.
The more I read, the less I understood.
The result was always the same: I stopped reading, stopped trying to understand, and handed everything over to a distant God—bearded, robed in white, seated on a cloud—designing destinies from afar. And without noticing, I let others design mine.
That is how I learned to blame.
Not consciously, but reflexively.
When you don’t understand, you look outward.
When meaning escapes you, responsibility gets displaced.
A lack of understanding—and the sense of injustice it produced—governed most of my days.
But I did not stop.
I read and reread.
And when I couldn’t understand the Gospels, I went down levels.
I turned to lesser, popular, disregarded readings.
And without knowing it, those readings trained more than my taste—they trained my patience.
That’s when Borges began to make sense to me. He once wrote:
“I do not advise reading only good books.
One should read everything, even bad books,
because by contrast
they eventually lead us to the good ones.”
With time, that sentence stopped being literary and became biographical.
I remembered myself reading El Sensacional de Luchas, a Mexican magazine that turned the lives of masked wrestlers into modern myths—stories of honor, excess, betrayal, and redemption.
Just as El Sensacional de Luchas mythologized Mexican wrestlers for working-class readers, American pulp magazines and cheap paperbacks once did the same with boxers, cowboys, and soldiers—stories dismissed as minor, yet essential in forming the imagination.
From there came other authors, other thresholds: José Agustín, Villoro, Paz, Sabines.
Later, names that are no longer merely read but crossed through: Wilde, Whitman, Emerson, Kipling.
And finally—almost as if the path had always been leading there—I arrived at those who were the scribes of the carpenter.
That’s when I understood something essential: the problem was never the text, but the reader’s haste.
Some truths do not open on the page, but in life.
In the same way my readings improved, so did my landscapes.
Without realizing it, the external map began to mirror the internal one.
I started in a small town called Martínez de la Torre, where the world seemed to end on the same streets every day.
Later I walked through Puebla, Mexico City, and eventually the road opened toward Buenos Aires, Montevideo, São Paulo.
I crossed the ocean and walked London, Berlin, Rome, Madrid.
In every city, on every corner, questions kept appearing.
Not new ones—but more precise.
And at the same time, something—still unnamed—began to suggest itself:
there was a reason certain buildings felt more alive,
why some plazas breathed differently,
why the North and the South did not feel the same,
even though I still couldn’t explain why.
I had no answers.
Only movement.
I kept walking because in that act—in simply not stopping—Life continued to flow.
And though I still didn’t understand what truly made a place beautiful, I sensed it wasn’t only stone, height, or history, but something invisible that appeared when human beings and their work aligned with a deeper order.
I didn’t know it yet.
But I kept walking.
And while I slowly learned to read better, I also learned—without noticing—to live worse when I stopped understanding.
Because when understanding doesn’t mature, it turns into complaint.
And complaint, over time, learns how to organize itself.
That’s how the world I inhabited began to resemble my inner confusion.
It didn’t happen suddenly.
It settled in.
First, the habit of explaining everything in external terms.
Then, the ease of pointing fingers.
Finally, the deceptive comfort of always knowing whom to blame.
The modern world simply perfected that ancient gesture.
Screens accelerated it.
Social networks amplified it.
Algorithms learned to offer us culprits the same way they once offered us advertisements.
When something failed, the cause was always ready: the system, the border, history, ideology, the other.
As an immigrant, I quickly learned to read the world as a map of external obstacles: papers, laws, languages, contexts. And I won’t lie—those things exist.
But I confused difficulty with cause.
I confused environment with origin.
I searched for justice outside, the way one searches for signal in a digital desert.
And I found it… briefly.
But none of those justices transformed me.
Until one morning, I woke up.
No revelation.
No epic moment.
Just a cool morning, the sun doing what it does, and a strange stillness.
I looked at myself in the mirror.
And then something happened that never happened in books: justice appeared.
Not as punishment.
Not as condemnation.
But as recognition.
The number-one culprit was there.
The one who failed in a marriage.
The one who cheated, thinking he was escaping.
The one who got lost in addictions.
The one who opened the door to deep depression.
The one who wasted years searching for answers in the wrong places.
It wasn’t the system.
It wasn’t childhood.
It wasn’t the border.
It wasn’t the algorithm.
It was me.
—I AM— I said.
And for the first time, I understood what Moses heard without metaphor:
not a distant name, but an immediate responsibility.
I am the one who has done everything.
The good and the bad.
The small and the great.
I am the origin of my effects.
That day the world didn’t change.
But I did.
And suddenly greens were greener, blues deeper, water clearer, birds more luminous.
Not because the world was different, but because I stopped looking at it through guilt.
There I understood something essential, though still incomplete:
external conditions do not determine my internal ones;
it is my way of being in the world—my gaze, my disposition, my consciousness—that qualifies every experience.
It wasn’t a total awakening.
There was no final revelation, no truth conquered once and for all.
But understanding—even faintly—that I AM participates in the creation of my experiences was a giant step toward a more truthful understanding of life.
Not a punitive justice obsessed with blame,
but the quiet justice spoken of in the Gospels,
the one that begins when a person stops living only as an effect
and accepts, with trembling and dignity, their place as a cause.
That understanding didn’t make me perfect,
but it slowly aligned me
with something larger than myself:
with an expression of the universe where responsibility does not condemn,
but orders;
where nothing happens by moral accident,
and everything invites itself to be assumed.
And do not be confused when I speak of I AM.
A drop of the sea is not the sea.
It does not contain it in extension,
it does not govern it,
it does not exhaust it.
But its composition is exactly the same.
The same salt.
The same water.
The same nature.
Perhaps that is the clearest—and least arrogant—way to understand what it means to have been created in His image and likeness:
not as complete gods,
but as faithful expressions of the same essence;
not as the Whole,
but as a part capable of reflecting it.
From there, I AM does not seek to elevate itself,
but to align:
to live, at least a little at first,
up to that from which it proceeds,
until, with time and awareness,
it finds true likeness
with that which precedes it
and enters—by understanding, not imposition—
eternal life.
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