The gnewen key of memory, guarded by ever-returning swallows.
In Eternity, the Swallows Return.
Author’s Note
This piece is a continuation of my earlier reflection, Confronting the Shadow of the Self—where fracture met its echo. If that essay was descent into dissonance, this one is the return: a meditation on sovereignty, rhythm, and the harvest of love after loss.
Together, these writings form a triptych. The first, Archetypes of Belonging, examines the inner psyche through symbolic roles—the Performer, the Rebel, the Seeker, the Lover—and how they shape belonging within a fragmented self. The second, The First Bruise of Belonging, turns inward, offering a first-hand account of fetishization, cultural appropriation, and the ways performance erodes authenticity.
This present essay is their continuation and response: an exploration not only of the shadows but of what comes after—how one learns to stand whole, to carry intimacy and love without camouflage, to belong without erasure.
A Harvest of Eternal Sovereignty
“From longing to sovereignty, in the rhythm of cycles.
Where rebellion sows and love returns like seasons.
Fields of love green again after winter.”
Prologue — Summoning Jueves and Bécquer
In reconciling with my inner self — the part of me that so severely criticizes my phase of fetishization, my irrational adoration of Hispanic people — I find that even after more than a decade since this song was first released, the melody, the voice, and the breath of Leire Martínez, the lead singer, still linger in my mind. It feels as if I have summoned the spirit of Jueves and Bécquer into my being, as if I am singing alongside Leire herself.
Though my previous piece — unpoetic and piercing as it may be — represented a necessary dissection of fetishization, its anatomy, its causes and effects, it also traced how one evolves out of power imbalances and the desire to be seen and admired from within a fragmented soul. Most importantly, it explored how to liberate oneself from self-depreciation and self-defeat — how to carry on as a sovereign being by resisting cultural appropriation and refusing subservience to power-play dynamics. It was the process of uprooting oneself from cycles of soul malnourishment.
Now, in this piece, we turn toward cultural appreciation — a path that nurtures rather than drains. A mindset that supplies the soul with the right ingredients, allowing it to flow freely, to release the need to control the rhythm, and instead to live with intentionality. And not be swallowed by the darker seasons of fetishization — those peaks of excess admiration, assimilation, and imitation that choke the spirit. Instead, like the golondrinas in Bécquer’s verse, we learn that love, friendships, and even our own inner phases arrive in cycles. Some pass, some return, some transform — and each season, whether shadow or light, carries its own necessity for the growth of the soul.
That poignant and melancholic tune in El Jueves resonates with the deep ache in my soul, recreating moments of longing, desire to belong, and the pursuit of a sovereign, untethered love that transcends ordinary lineage yet breathes within the ordinariness of life. It is a message of love etched into memory through thick and thin, lightness and shadow. It reinvigorates the sacredness of love and the lived experiences of radiant love, and the fleeting stations of platonic bonds and kinships.
In this knowing, language itself is not mere consonants, nor the song a simple composition of notes and rhythm. It is infused with breath, with body, with passion, longing, grief, and belonging. Cultural immersion itself became nourishment — not just study, but a lived experience, a meal for the soul. Each word, each melody, was food along my journey of truth-seeking in art. And like a table spread with both sweetness and bitterness, it became the necessary sustenance for my soul’s evolution.
For me, cultural immersion was never about tourism or novelty; it was a trial, a lived process — a continuity, an open door into art as truth and into soul as experiment. The language itself is not just consonants. The song is not just a composition of notes and rhythm. It is infused with breath, with the body of passion, love-ache, belonging, and grief. Spanish was my passage to sovereignty — a reminder that inner work is cultivated like a field: seasons of sowing, seasons of harvest. From the beginning, the rebellion that took me from Agricultural Economics into Spanish was never a detour but a planting. Listening to the echo of the wild voice in nature. And so, the harvest would come in the form of love, sovereignty, and the gnewen key — a turnkey that tends to my sovereign voice.
First Stop — Finding Poetry of Food in Economics
The bachelor’s degree of Economics, by default, was never just a field of study — it was virtue signalling. It was a credential, a title on paper expected from my family’s lineage. My father, who worked in IT management, assumed I would follow the corporate path, work under the umbrella of his cousin’s conglomerate, inherit the legacy, and become a financial analyst in the mergers & acquisitions department. That expectation was clear: I was meant to play a role, to follow a structured path, to acquire the credential that would pave my way into the corporate world. Yet in reality, the work itself mattered little. In such environments, there are only two currencies: actual business experience or nepotism. And in my case, it was the latter. I could have just shown up, doing little, and still been carried by the umbrella of the related party.
The script was simple: acquire the right credentials, inherit my father’s legacy, and secure my place in a conglomerate where experience mattered less than belonging. On paper, it was stability, privilege, success. In reality, it was suffocation — a performance mistaken for purpose. I could inherit a chair at the table, but never a life that truly belonged to me.
The hollow chair I saw yesterday in Struga — seat gutted, abandoned beside a parked car — perfectly captured that truth. It stood as a ghost of inheritance: structure without soul, a vessel once meant to carry lineage but now emptied of meaning. That chair was the life I refused — the legacy I chose to walk past.
In grad school, the very irony was that I edged myself into further rebellion by pushing Economics toward the very edge of rebellion itself — choosing to study Agricultural Economics. On the surface, it looked ordinary: the intersection of food, natural resources, and finance. But subconsciously, it was my quiet act of defiance, an attempt to carve out a niche as a researcher — though that path never materialized. Symbolically, I was aching for love even within a credential that was meant to embody work-readiness and professional façade. My grandmother complained, my parents shrugged their shoulders and let me pass through. Yet within it, I found poetry in food, in rhythm and process amidst the noise of metrics, numbers, and production value. The true value of that degree was never in expertise or internships. It was in the path itself — a path woven into my soul-being, a thread created by God.
Passing Stations in Panama
Panama was my laboratory of love — but also a field of passing seasons. Each encounter was like planting seeds that sprouted briefly, only to wither before they could root deeply. The train ride of companionship became like a cycle of sowing and harvesting — stations where something grew for a moment, then faded back into soil, teaching me lessons in impermanence.
My ex was the first long stop, the crop I tended too long. We moved to Panama together, but our rhythms were mismatched. His obsession with American ideals — entrepreneurship, productivity, efficiency — clashed with my yearning for raw expression and soulful connection. What began as fertile ground hardened into arid soil: sex became rehearsal and performance, food a routine harvest stripped of meaning, duty the only glue. Like land exhausted by over-farming, the bond hollowed out, and I finally left, boarding the train again toward renewal.
The xylophone and acoustic professor was another station, another planting — a figure of rhythm and discipline, showing me how craft itself can be a harvest of intimacy. His music reminded me that not all fruits are sweet; some are medicinal, some are grounding.
The Costa Rican poker player embodied risk and chance, a wild seed scattered by wind. With him, I glimpsed the freedom of life outside convention, but also the instability of crops that sprout quickly, only to be washed away by rain.
The hotel manager was stability incarnate, like a perennial rooted in order. His presence offered calm, predictability, and shade — yet no blossom of transcendence. He was the station that reminded me some growth is steady but never luminous.
These friendships lasted longer than others, but even they were harvests of a season, not eternal orchards. They were meaningful in their own right, yet none struck my heart with the recognition I craved. Panama taught me that not every seed must become a tree, not every station a destination. Some encounters are reminders, some are lessons, some are compost that nourishes the soil of the soul.
They were signposts pointing me back to silence — urging me to let the soil rest, to forge my soul inward, to cultivate sovereignty before longing outward. In that quietness, I came home to a deeper truth: to possess valiant strength is not to uproot one’s shadows, but to grow within them — carefully trimming the wild, invasive vines, tending to the wizened branches, and clearing away the dead, so that the inner garden may continue to flourish and weather the cycles of seasonality.
Hunger and El Jueves
It was in this state of searching that I stumbled upon a song: El Jueves – 11 de marzo. From the first listen, its lyrics etched themselves into me. Over the years, the song has looped endlessly, echoing like a private litany. And slowly, I understood why: it embodied the emotional truth I had been carrying all along.
The waxing and waning of love, whether platonic or uncanny passion, felt like both the phases of the moon and the seasons of a field. Latin culture gave voice to this — where love blooms like spring, burns like summer, fades like autumn, and retreats into the silence of winter only to return again. Its temperament overlapped with the Slavic — especially the South Slavs, whose love is storm-like, heightened, existential. Both traditions allowed love to surge and break like tides, to grow and wither like crops, to cycle without shame.
I had been carrying that heartache silently: searching for a spirit strong enough to embody enduring passion. In Hispanic culture, I found an outlet — in words, in films, in daily gestures. Romance there is imprinted into language itself: every word carrying melody, rhythm, metaphor. Joy, sorrow, anger, grief — all had their rightful harvest. The intensity resonated like the ebb and flow of Slavic emotionality, like seeds breaking through soil only to bend with the wind.
By contrast, my Asian upbringing demanded utmost restraint: careful balance, duty, compromise, contained affection. It was like soil compacted too tightly — unable to breathe, unable to let roots spread. The gnewen key I was born with — in Eastern tradition said to be hidden in the mouth at birth — was never meant to bind me to duty or barren inheritance. It was meant to unlock my capacity for fierce love, to let the fields of my soul breathe and blossom. Yet I never swallowed it. I restrained myself, postponing liberation. My father, who rarely speaks to me now, cannot understand this. To him, my yearning is foolish, my search a wreckage. To him, the gnewen key is tragedy. But to me, it is essence — the seed of sovereignty, waiting to be planted in living soil.
The Turnkey, the Golondrinas, and the Twin Flame
El Jueves is not only a song. It is the turnkey — the mirror, the key, and the recognition of my twin flame. My Panama years were stations, but never the destination. Like the lovers on that train, I have been waiting for that one recognition: love recognizing love, twin flame to twin flame. The gnewen key was never meant to remain hidden; it was always meant to turn — to open the door to a love as raw, unguarded, and eternal as the swallows that always return.
And so, what began in rebellion against suffocating structures — in Economics, in nepotism, in corporate masquerades — has become a pilgrimage into the soul. Spanish became my passage to sovereignty, my sanctuary of expression, and El Jueves my compass of longing. From Bécquer’s swallows to the eternal rhythm of seasons, I learned that love, friendship, even fleeting encounters are cyclical — stations along a divine timetable, each nourishing the soul in its own way.
If the introduction was my hunger, the ache of a spirit starving for recognition, then the conclusion is my table: a banquet of lived experience, not always sweet, not always sustaining, but essential. In agricultural economics, I once studied food as metrics — inputs, outputs, production values. But now, I see food as poetry: as rhythm, as growth, as cycles of sowing and harvest. In the same way, love too is not about consumption but about process — a cultivation of soul, patience, seasons of planting and seasons of reaping.
Closing — The Harvest of Sovereignty
El Jueves remains my passage — a song that is not just melody but sustenance, a reminder that even in darkness there is bread, even in longing there is wine. To love is to sit at the table of the soul, to taste grief and joy together, to be nourished by the fleeting and the eternal alike.
In the end, life is a harvest of sovereignty — seeded in rebellion, watered by longing, tended through continuous pruning, and ripened in the light of love. The gnewen key was never meant to remain hidden. It was always meant to turn — to open the door to a love as raw, unguarded, and eternal as the swallows that always return, as the fields that green again after winter.
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