The Possibility of Everything by Hope Edelman

Author:Hope Edelman [Edelman, Hope]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-345-51701-2
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Macal River curves gently around Cristo Rey, cradling the village in a slightly open palm. Everald Senior guides the pale green Crystal Paradise canoe between the banks, his paddle slicing through the cool, clean water with steady, strong plup … plup … plups. The river smells mulchy and fertile, like something freshly pulled from the earth. A coolness rises from it and winds its way into the back of my nostrils. I trail my hand in the water, causing a little ripple to form alongside the canoe.

“Watch out for turtles,” Everald says from behind me, and I jerk my hand back so fast that droplets of water spray onto the thighs of my khaki pants.

The Macal is a lazy river on a late December morning, taking its canoeists for a leisurely stroll rather than a brisk jog. Walls of dark green foliage rise on both sides of the bank. Along some stretches, the branches bend forty-five degrees downriver as if held in place by a strong wind. It’s residual damage from Hurricane Keith in October, when the Macal, which is prone to flash floods, rose twenty feet above its normal level.

It’s hard to imagine such power churning through a river as placid as today’s. We need only two paddlers to follow the mild current downstream and could probably make do with one. This renders me virtually useless from my perch in the middle of the canoe, so I hold Maya between my knees and point out the landmarks as Everald narrates them from behind us.

“Ceiba,” he says, aiming his paddle at a tall tree whose light gray, branchless trunk rises ten feet above the surrounding tree canopy before bursting into a brilliant half sphere of green. “The national tree of Guatemala.”

Yax Che, the Maya called the ceiba, or “First Tree.” In the Maya story of Creation, the world began as a primordial sea in a field of unbroken darkness. Then First Father raised the World Tree, the Wakah-Chan, to separate Earth from sky and invite the sun’s light in. According to legend, he positioned the tree’s crown in the north sky, thus creating the central axis of the cosmos around which all the celestial constellations revolve. To the ancient Maya, the flowering, towering ceiba was the earthly representation of this mythical World Tree. Its upper reaches extend through the thirteen layers of the Upperworld, or heavens; its branches lie in the Middleworld, where the cycles of human activity and nature occur; and its roots extend down through the nine layers of the Underworld. Along its mystically charged central channel, heavenly deities could travel to Earth when summoned and human souls could travel down into the Underworld after death. Like the World Tree of Norse mythology; the Jewish Tree of Life, Etz HaChayim; the Bodhi tree of the Baghavad-Gita; and the Cosmic Tree of numerous shamanic cultures—as if a symbolic arboreal consciousness percolated up all over the globe at roughly the same time—the Maya World Tree offered its people a template for human cosmology.

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