Secrets of the Talking Jaguar

memoirs from the living heart of a mayan village by Martín Prechtel

P3 The Tzutujil demand that you "go the route" to learn anything, which means that questions are not answered until they are asked properly, which can only be accomplished by someone who has taken the time to get the Mayans' vision of life. This can take years. But by then you are "Mayanized" and don't feel like writing anymore. So you go do something else!

P4 None of these people could figure out what I was up to. It was like trying to figure out what a jaguar basking in the sun was up to. Just that; happy to be alive.

P51 As I pushed along, the rainforest seemed like a floor of a strange ocean, an enormous body of water trapped in the form of plants. It was an awe-inspiring woman with a million faces...

P52 And as in the ocean, nothing moved in a straight line. Everything crept, fluttered, stalked, strolled, surged, crashed, or grew in spirals, swirls, or undulations, and anything else meant exhaustion.

She was so inviting, yet unknowable, addictive and poisonous, dreamlike but very touchable, beautiful and deadly, changeable and uncontainable, where the discoverer is discovered by himself, walking on the bottom of the ocean of his own soul, surrounded by leaf-locked water while dying of thirst, devoured in the belly of this verdant Mother of Abundance.

P54 I discovered that my acceptance of my smallness in the face of it all made being lost into a kind of being at home. How lost could you be if you felt at home being lost?

P55 Nothing. Totally silent here, under the honey. The smell was sweet, very sweet. My entire being was a big old tongue floating in an ocean of honey. The creation was honey. Everything had revealed itself, all things wore their significance without mystery, and all things had meaning.I could see everything inside everything else, merging and dismerging simultaneously, products of their ancient largesse, and yet see how each unfolded its unique face by its own personal effort. Every minute thing that had a purpose in the whole, even if heretofore unrevealed, was now easily understood. You could see how all the pieces fit together or destroyed each other in the perfectness of the push and pull, resistance, and receptivity that made life pump and function.

Meaning was honey. You didn't have to comprehend meaning, you ate it, you drank it, swam in it, became it. You could understand it, but it mattered not at all, and you didn't even want to.

Everything was here. Nothing good, bad, ugly, or lovely was omitted, and everything fit in many places in the larger picture, which fit into a larger picture, and so on. What had been and what would be were one river.

...in this honeyed place I could know it all. In this sweetness, knowledge was a merged, spherical thing, inseparable from the fact that it couldn't be used here; knowing was an irrelevant and useless impediment to the deliciousness surrounding the knower.

There was no "I" anymore, only the "I" that was starting to centrifugally spin down into the honey, plunging like a whale made of honey that merged with the honey where he dove, disappearing as a whale, as "I" disappeared as "I" into an ocean of sweet soundless merging...

...a primal pull like a mile-wide magnet on a pin, an implosive cyclone, funneling everything into oneness.

P66 But these egg-smashing kids were sure of their identities. However innocent they were, they knew whose children they were and what culture they must promote. Watching them, I sank into a mire of melancholy and despair. I realized how different I was becoming, how this way of thinking had kept me apart from most other people.

My deep loneliness and tendency toward homeless wandering were the direct result of my mission to be seen in the same way I saw.

P78 Three large holes in her earlobes were laced with hanging shanks of red and violet yarns from which were suspended old Spanish piastres and reals, seventeen-century silver money.

Five hundred years before, armored men, worried about money, metal, and maintenance of their position, had come from Europe to leach the smooth copper hands, like her ancestors had, turned the Europeans' money into tribal status and allure. It was hard to tell who conquered whom. She certainly conquered me with her beauty. She was at home, an ancient home, the same home as when the conquerors came, conquerors who could never be at home.

"You came, you killed, you didn't see; we are still here, where are you? We survive, we wear the scales of your monster culture in our ears, enhancing the spirit and grace you have never been able to take away from us!" Her people were not conquered. They never lost themselves, unlike those who came to take, whose faces melted right into their greed. Something ugly and terrible was conquered by her in the irrefutable truth that she and her people exist as they always have up to this very day. There was a victory in this very moment.

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