Summarizing a life in a few lines is sometimes an easy task. Should we start at the end? Should we start at the beginning? Because in the end everything is a circle… But somehow we have to start this portrait.

 

Born in San Román de Cameros, in La Rioja, Óscar Antonio Santolaya Lasanta is the son of Alfredo and Pilar. The youngest of four siblings, he is the father of two children who anchor him to the ground: Íñigo and Carmen.

 

He studied as a boarder in several institutes in Logroño: Augustinians and Marianists and, after his time in the parachute brigade, he studied Agriculture, Nature and its details at the University of La Rioja and Helsinki. And Systems Psychology in Mexico, at the Dr. Emilio Cárdenas University.

 

It was his study in Mexico, and his concern and predisposition to wonder about Life and its deep and spiritual processes, which caused the seed to germinate in him that another world is possible. “A world that, in many cases, is already being created,” in which the relationship with agriculture, with Nature, with the Earth, with people, is made from the heart, from uniqueness, from the deep feeling that everything is a system, that everything is part of Everything.

 

He discovered permaculture and the close relationship between oneself and the smallest thing: the detail. Deeply grateful to the person who showed him this path and the beauty of the hidden, the subtle, the soul, he discovered that the movement that really produces change is the slow step, observation, respect for natural processes and empty attention to the subtle. Thus, one day, he preferred to embrace a world in favor of people and the earth, a life project that, at the same time, is a process of learning, integration, trust, respect and generosity.

 

Many lives, many teachers, and among them, Master Fukuoka through his books. Not through a green revolution, but through the revolution of a straw, and the re-recognition of the importance of re-greening deserts and hearts, as a dream of Life. And it is only through the heart that we can touch the sky.