---
title: "The Living Time"
sousTitre: "For Aymara writer Fernando Huanacuni Mamani, a single word—pacha—encompasses time and space. But pacha is not an empty container in which one is placed: it is a living whole in which one participates."
description: "Pacha, the Aymara word brought to light by Fernando Huanacuni Mamani (CAOI): linguists render it as 'time and space,' but it goes further—not two empty measures in which one is placed, but the capacity to actively participate in the multiverse, to immerse oneself in it and belong to it."
date: 2026-07-03
lang: en
tradition: aymara
auteurs: ["Fernando Huanacuni Mamani"]
---
# The Living Time

We say time *passes*, and things are *in* space. Two words for two empty measures: a flow that carries us away, a box in which we are placed. The first is read on a clock, the second measured with a ruler; neither expects anything from us but to be counted. In the Andean highlands, a single word holds both together—and refuses, precisely, to be a container.

The Aymara jurist and writer Fernando Huanacuni Mamani, who compiled Andean thought on living well for an Indigenous organization, the CAOI, pauses on this word, *pacha*, which translators render in one stroke—"time and space." He warns that the stroke is too short.

  
    Según la traducción de los lingüistas, hace referencia sólo a tiempo y espacio, pero para el ser Andino esta palabra va más allá del tiempo y del espacio, implica una forma de vida, una forma de entender el universo que supera el tiempo-espacio (el aquí y el ahora). Pacha no sólo es tiempo y espacio, es la capacidad de participar activamente en el multiverso, sumergirse y estar en él.
  
  According to linguists’ translation, the word refers only to time and space; but for the Andean being, this term goes beyond time and space—it implies a way of life, a manner of understanding the universe that surpasses time-space (the here and now). *Pacha* is not merely time and space: it is the capacity to actively participate in the multiverse, to immerse oneself in it and belong to it.

Linguists are not wrong; they have too little. *Pacha* does name time and space—but *no sólo*, not only. The word that follows shifts the entire meaning: *capacidad*, a capacity. Not a frame, but a power; not what one is placed in, but what one does. Our time and space are things in which we are positioned, passive no matter what we do; *pacha* is something we enter. We do not cross it as we cross a room: we *immerse* ourselves in it (*sumergirse*) and *dwell* within it (*estar en él*). The word does not describe a stage on which life unfolds; it names life’s active belonging to the whole.

*[pacha]* Decomposition provided by the author: *PA*, from *paya* ("two"); *CHA*, from *chama* ("force"). *Pacha*, "the union of two forces"—the cosmic, descending from the sky, and the telluric, rising from the earth—whose encounter is what we call life: the totality of the visible (*Pachamama*) and the invisible (*Pachakama*).

The etymology he offers already rejects the container. *Pacha* is not a neutral framework preexisting what fills it: it is the union of two forces whose collision *is* life. Andean time-space is thus not the empty, prior condition of beings; it is the very weaving where the visible and invisible hold together. There is no *pacha* first, and living beings afterward: beings and their time-space come into the world in the same gesture. The word does not situate life—it is its fabric.

This is where we must separate before attempting to reconcile. Our modern time and space were conquered by being emptied: for exact measurement, time had to flow uniformly, indifferent to all else, and space had to be equally indifferent to what it housed—two containers all the more precise for participating in nothing. *Pacha* follows the opposite path. It does not gain reality as it is emptied, but as it is inhabited; its truth is not that of measurement, but of participation—it is true in exact proportion to one’s presence within it. Two conceptions of time and space, not two versions of the same: one is verified by withdrawing from the living, the other by entering into it.

*[Une voix de l'intérieur]* *Pacha* is a loanword attested in Aymara, a living Andean language shared with Quechua; "the living time" is our French rendering, just as "tiempo y espacio" is, by the author’s admission, a Spanish rendering that falls short. The synthesis is carried by a named Indigenous voice—Fernando Huanacuni Mamani—relayed by an accountable Andean Indigenous organization, the CAOI: "according to Huanacuni," never "the Aymara say." In this lexicon, the word joins [suma qamaña](https://viasophia.org/lexique/suma-qamana/) and [ayllu](https://viasophia.org/lexique/ayllu/), other pieces of the same thought of the living.

Reclaiming the word is enough to shift perspective. As long as time "passes" and space "contains," we remain on the sidelines—spectators of a backdrop unfolding without us, accountants of a course that eludes us. *[Pacha](https://viasophia.org/lexique/pacha/)* does not unfold before us: it is participated in. It does not ask to be occupied, but to be entered.

---

**À lire aussi**

- [Là où le mot « ressource » n'a pas de place](https://viasophia.org/reenchanter/2026-07-02-la-ou-ressource-n-a-pas-de-place/)
- [Vivre bien n'est pas vivre mieux](https://viasophia.org/reenchanter/2026-06-17-suma-qamana-vivre-bien/)
- [Ce qui circule et ce qui se paie](https://viasophia.org/reenchanter/2026-07-01-ce-qui-circule-ce-qui-se-paie/)

## Sources

- Fernando Huanacuni Mamani, *Buen Vivir / Vivir Bien. Filosofía, políticas, estrategias y experiencias regionales andinas* — Coordinadora Andina de Organizaciones Indígenas (CAOI), Lima, 2010, trans. texte original espagnol ; rendu français maison


Canonical source : https://viasophia.org/en/reenchanter/2026-07-03-le-temps-qui-vit/