good grass always lives

There is a township southwest of Medellín that is named after a saint and even houses a 129-year-old church. There in San Antonio de Prado—with narrow streets and muleteers who transport tobacco, wood and liquor—there is a village where Virginia Saldarriaga, born in 1962, lives.

In her house there is a garden where she plants marjoram, rosemary, arnica and joy; On the sidewalk they say that they are their friends and nurses because they cure even lovesickness. Essences, candles and other concoctions are painstakingly prepared there. And he is so devoted to his plants that he asks their permission to even steal a piece of them.

One day Virginia realized that some plants were not growing and others were growing with their heads down.

—Surely it's that witch! “The one who dances at midnight in the garden and makes my plants die of fear,” exclaimed Virginia to her daughter Jenny Saldarriaga, director of the Medellín Music Network.

He says that when the witch approached the garden the plants suffered a lot since they knew that she would step on them and mistreat them. Virginia, still grieving and sad, decided to bring her plants back to life by singing and playing tiple and lyre, two instruments that she loved to play at the age of five with her father in Cartago, a municipality in Valle del Cauca.

One night Virginia mistakenly drank a potion of aguapanela that the witch had left on the table. She immediately fell into a deep sleep that enveloped her in a terrifying darkness, from which she seemed to never wake up. She felt so weak and plagued by strange hallucinations that she lost all hope.

In the midst of his anguish he began to look back on his life in music and the joys it had given him. Singing Christmas carols at her first communion mass, participating in the Cartago children's choir, founding the Cantos de Antioquia choir and remembering seeing her daughter graduate from the EAFIT music faculty thanks to a scholarship, were memories that motivated her to wake up that deep dream and thinking that through singing she could save her life and even give life to others. After this rebirth, the witch was never seen on the sidewalk again and all her plants grew fresh, green, full of energy.

The story is inspired by the life of Virginia Saldarriaga who is a peace activist and has been a member of the Reconciliation Choir since 2022. She is passionate about sowing and singing, and her entire life was dedicated to music until a diagnosis of cancer, which kept her in death. clinic for fifteen days, they made her forget about her love for singing. After that particular episode, he says he was filled with courage to be reborn as plants do and reaffirmed his mission in life: to heal the soul through music and heal the body through planting.

“For me, the Reconciliation Choir means rebirth, healing through singing, and the most wonderful thing is finding people who are looking for the same thing. What I like most is seeing the harmony of all my classmates in rehearsals and singing one of my favorite songs, Nothing for War.”