The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic: The Parallel Lives of People as Plants: Keeping the Seeds Alive by Martín Prechtel

Author:Martín Prechtel [Prechtel, Martín]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781583943762
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2012-01-31T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

The Six Donancianas

If any one of three merciful things had dropped away from me in that era, I would have most assuredly melted away as a person, at least as that person I had become after my years immersed in the now-extinct magic of the old Tzutujil village. That diligent, hopeful, loyal servant of the Divine in nature would have disappeared without a trace, falling prey to the all-too-easy route of self pity, outrage, and a bitterness that would have, no doubts about it, eroded the still-delicate, slowly redefining cliffs of the new person I might become and any mysterious corresponding future, dissolving me into the thin strata of an acquired personality of colorful silt forgotten at the bottom of that wide boggy canal of American Individualist melodramatic self-importance.

The first mercy that wouldn’t let me sink was the impossibility of erasing the effects of having seen the Holy in nature. Because shamans in the old village didn’t answer to humans but to the wild, the love I had for Deified Time and all Existence was something I could, without a people or a tribe, still ritually feed on my own. Prominence for the Divine Diversity of Time as Matter, as all life and Earth, was largely absent from civilization, but even where it did exist it survived only by hiding in the small and the forgotten. But no matter, for the Holy was always bellowingly present, for me often residing in the most subtle and complex ways inside every aspect of any untamed and unharnessed fraction of the natural world. For that reason I had to live where I could pray and feed the “Holy” in everything that was natural and proceeding according to its innate nature. Not in some nightmare maze of forty-acre rural urbanite pseudo-farms, with bumper-to-bumper picket fences, covenants, and riding helmets, or in a manicured wilderness where with a permit, rustling Gore-Tex, hiking shoes, trail mix, a backpack, binoculars, and shorts, you pretended the Holy in Nature wasn’t running for her life when she heard your objective mind coming at her.

Another thing that kept me going was a relatively undamaged involuntary function of my soul in which ever since I was a child I always felt obligated to find beauty and wonderment someplace everywhere, no matter how mediocre, trivial, or dismal people had made the surroundings. This was a grand lubrication for the rigid outrage of my sometimes over-principled mind.

For a village smile to survive with any degree on my face, with all of the endless string of unfortunate accommodations, terrifying food, airports, polluted city travel routes, cars, taxis, buses, bullet trains, the blaring television, and mindless conversations of faceless, narrow, business-oriented personalities, it was a great comfort to recognize and still be able to smile with delight about the evidence of the Holy in some detail of civilization’s madness. Like the beauty of the occurrence of tiny book mites, who like words describing people having just scurried off the pages of Dickens, now recently

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