Filomena

Something from Peru caught my attention. Archeologists and anthropologists, the experts, always translate the underworld as, well, the underworld, the place where dead people go. You have your earth, your heaven and your hell, we Mayans have our Xibalba, along with the earth and heaven, and the Incas had Ujuy Pachu (underworld), Kay Pacha (this earth) and Hanaq Pacha (above the earth). In Peru, however, the Incan Ujuy Pachu was translated ‘the innerworld.’

I like the idea of an innerworld. For the Inca, communication between earth and heaven was through the condor, much like communication between earth and heaven, for Mayans and American Indians, is the work of the eagle. Communication between earth and the Incan innerworld was the work of Amaru, the snake. For Mayans, the vision serpent snake is the conduit for shaman communication with the divine. Carl Jung might have called this the collective unconscious, a trip to the innerworld. In Mayan dreaming, to be near a snake with no fear is a representation of spiritual evolution.

This is the symbol of the Ouroborus, the circle snake biting its own tail. The beginning is the end. The divine touches the inner world. That’s why I like the image of an innerworld. On this earth of gravity and physics and mortality, if the divine is anywhere it’s inside us. Jesus said the Kingdom of God is within us, in the innerworld. Maybe in some other life God will be separate, where we can point and say ‘there he is’ or ‘there she is’, but that’s not the world we live in now.

When that priest looked down at me it was like he was a giant. Maybe he was tall, but I was so little it wouldn’t have mattered. Mom had brought me to see if I would go to the parish school. I was used to adults looking down at me. They would smile and some would give me candy. The man in the black dress was stern-faced and almost yelled his question. “Do you accept Jesus as your personal savior and lord?” I was so scared I cried, and mom had to pick me up to keep me from running from the building.

Mom was very religious. She kept that picture of our precious Lady of Guadalupe years after the month pages of the calendar were torn off and thrown away, the virgin in her red gown and green and blue veil covered with stars. Still, to her great credit, mom carried me out of the parish school office and we never came back. It was not that I couldn’t answer. I didn’t understand the question.

I saw a friend recently with a long face and a far-away look. I asked if anything was wrong. I saw his eyes focus, maybe just then seeing me there. He was worrying about salvation, his personal salvation, about ‘in His name alone,’ and I didn’t know what to say. I guess I feel like worrying about personal salvation is a conceit, but I wasn’t going to say that to him. It’s like worrying about death. It’s holding onto your ego with white knuckles. It’s like being afraid God is going to mess up your case, like not trusting the universe.

But look around. Who wouldn’t think the universe isn’t being taken care of, at least part of the time? But trust is trust, a simple decision we make based on a complicated secret formula, secret often to ourselves. We trust a dear friend whether she is all together or in anguish, and trusting the universe is just the same. If that priest in his black cassock had smiled at me instead of screaming, it might have changed my life, but the universe is what it is, and he had no control over it.

And so I pray for my friend and his fear. In proverbs it says fear of the Lord is the first step toward wisdom (or something like that). A monk once told me fear of God is like fear of rollercoasters. It is a fear we will stand in line for hours to be inside of, if only for a few minutes. That is a healthy fear, fear with a racing heart and a smile.

Those of you who know my story from ‘Under the Witz Mountain’ will not be surprised I find life a bit ambiguous. There is a perfectly fine English word that is almost not part of the American language. The word is liminal, and means living on an edge, at a threshold, and between two places or two states. The Witz Mountain book takes place in a liminal space, between Christian and Mayan, the living and the dead. I have a hunch, though I am no professor, that the word limbo has to do with the luminal, a place that is not earth or heaven, a place that is nowhere, a place for waiting. A Catholic book says limbo is the edge of hell.

I see us all as liminal beings. We live every day between joy and sadness, relaxation and anxiety, anger and grace, and, like under the mountain itself, between life and death. At least in the western culture, the thinking that came with the Spanish and, for the North Americans, the English, this is not part of the thinking. There must be a part of our mind that tricks us into thinking we are not in this liminal space. It’s the same part of the mind that is hit daily with random light particles and sound waves and chemicals in the air, and turns the chaos into a stable illusion as familiar as a faded photograph. The world we see is not the world we live in, but it’s one we’re comfortable with.

This same brain creates the illusion that if we are alive in the morning we will be alive in the evening. If we go to bed moving all our arms and legs we will wake up moving them. It’s a preposterous assumption, but we don’t think twice about it. It’s the illusion they call ego, that we are discrete men and women, dots and dashes, moving smoothly through time.

It’s not that God is dead. God never existed in our illusion. Right now I am sitting with my feet in a pool of water. The water is warm. My back is against a flat rock. The rock is cool. This moment is a liminal space, the edge between past and future. Almost nobody lives here. The English word liminal is not even in my American dictionary. Every time I type it, my spell-check turns it into ‘Luminal.’ We live in that other world, the virtual space of the ego, a place where God-Ahaw, who lives only in the real moment, never existed. And never will (so stop looking at the sky).

My mama used to quote scripture. ‘Don’t be anxious for tomorrow’. I see her at the pila washing the same skirt her mother washed, humming while she worked. ‘Tomorrow will be anxious for itself’. I thought it was so sad, the washing that never ended, but she was in her moment. There is nothing in the moment that can make you anxious, not even a reminder that the world illusion might crumble to dust.

Of course it might.

It seems the gringo media circus is putting a new act under the big top. They haven’t stopped trying to tell their customers what the Mayans believe, but now the message is changing. For years the marketing message has been ‘the Mayans predict the world’s end in 2012,’ and now, just a few weeks before the delayed release of ‘2012,’ the much hyped Columbia Pictures film that fits a tsunami, earthquakes and an alien invasion into a 30 second trailer, they’re switching gears! The Associate Press story ‘Mayans are sick of 2012’ was all over the internet, on msnbc, Huffington Post and others. I like Arianna Huffington. I think she has a good heart, and doesn’t mind letting people see that she’s searching, even if they don’t want her as governor, but she could have looked at this a little closer before printing it word for word.

Basically, the story says that Mayans are sick of 2012, “fed up,” while quoting gringos like Lawrence Joseph who are now saying that with or without the Mayans the world might end. So now we find ourselves in the middle of a gringo paranoia marketing war. The interesting thing is that both camps are basing their arguments on what they claim Mayans believe, as though their own gringo tradition or theology is so worn out or discredited that it’s not part of the story.  I think that’s sad for them. They should think about Christmas. Many good Christians feel sick about what the gringo marketing machines have done with their Christmas: the hype, the pressure to buy and consume, and the push to make their children want to find toy guns or violent video games, and oversexed dolls and girls’ clothes, under the tree. Does this make Christians sick of Christmas, or “fed up” with the birth of their Christ? For the Maya, December 21 2012 is a religious day.  To say they are “fed up” with 2012 is like saying Christians are “fed up” with Christmas. They may not approve of Mr. Joseph and the marketing machine, but that does not mean the Maya will not observe their day of religious transformation.  

Mayans carry a pouch for the objects that help protect them, give them strength, and can even make them invisible. Many people don’t believe this, and not just the gringos. But who believes and doesn’t believe the truth isn’t so important. The red kidney bean is the color of blood, and is kept in the pouches for its energy, the vital force held in our blood. Blood it itz, a living fluid, like the resin incense of copal trees, and a food for God, an offering. If you don’t believe this ask a Christian, who prays to be washed in the blood of Jesus. Blood carries life force, and the bean is blood red. Of course, red kidney beans are also poisonous, and eating just three raw beans can put you in the hospital with severe pain and vomiting. The beans are cooked to destroy the poison. Those are the two sides of the red kidney bean, the vital life force and the dangerous poison.

When I was in college I had to take a psychology class and they talked about the shadow side of people, how every choice you make includes two possibilities that you, the person, could do. Even if you don’t choose to, say, take the money from the cash register before leaving work, if you had to choose, that becomes part of you, a potential you, a ‘you’ pushed into the background and called shadow. Plants also have their shadow sides, like the life and death sides of the red kidney bean.

Which brings us to tobacco. Tobacco is a sacred plant, like the copal tree. It is the smoke of the tobacco that brings our offerings upward, to God, including the spirit force carried by our breath. When European gringos found the Indians smoking tobacco up in North America, they were looking for an export crop, but had to invent the pipe bowl to increase the dose, and make the nicotine more addictive to guarantee their market. Drug companies know how important delivery systems are. Indian pipes were small, and ceremonial. Tobacco was not a recreational drug. It was used to communicate with the divine. And so we have the huge, growing tobacco shadow, as God searches for the prayer from the Mayan fire or the Hopi kiva pipe, among the billions of cigarettes sending their smoke in the same general direction. Like the red kidney bean, the shadow side of a strong living force is death, the poison of life.

A man friend in college wrote a novel and asked me to read it. I told him I loved it, and then he came over and wouldn’t leave. He went on about his character, a misunderstood writer, and talked and talked, one hand waving in the air and the other fondling my shoulder.  I wanted him to go, this shadow self of a character he’d put in a book. It was called ‘The White Horse,’ and I don’t remember if it even had a horse in it. Like the rider and his animal, this author patted my flanks like I was his property, like he held my reins because he had written a book.

Next morning he picked up his book and took it with him. I’ve often thought of that book – not the man, the book. There was no mention of a spiritual world, no hint that one existed, and I don’t believe one character sought it, reflected on it, or asked the questions we all ask in the world where we all live. At least if we are living. I didn’t see it at the time, but The White Horse was a fiction so unbelievable that I wouldn’t find it entertaining today. It was like having a big coffee table book about the ocean, and page after page and chapter after chapter finding facts about how light reflects off the surface of the water, but nothing underneath. No fish or whales or coral or sea fans, just the sunlight and the surface. Would anyone pay for a book like that?

In the village where I lived, people came from miles around when we consecrated a new patch of corn and beans up in the mountains. The priests would come to consecrate the ground, to corner the plot with its north and south and east and west, and find the center, the place where the plot of land would be dedicated. And the people came with their Rosaries and fans and water; I guess today they would bring cell phones. Even the Assembly people and Presbyterians brought Rosaries. They would lie down with their faces in the dirt, heads pointing to the north and then the other directions, pray to the sun, clutch their rosaries in the name of the father and the sun and the holy-ghost, and dedicate the field to the jaguar spirits.

For those people, God can be as outrageous as he desires. Even now, what those people did, and still do, does not bother me. What bothers me are people who make God small, people who say God can do this but not do that, churches that tell God who he can and can’t invite to the table, and religious publishers that control the God-formula he is not allowed to deviate from. When they see this, spiritual people should put up their shields. But if stories about God are outrageous, amazing, contradict themselves and are difficult to comprehend, then those are the stories we need to pay attention to. Those are the stories we should not dismiss just because we don’t have a little labeled box to put them in.

Thus is supposed to be a happy time. The book 2012: Under the Witz Mountain is out and my story is a public thing. A gracious lady from Texas wrote a really nice review on Amazon, and Lynette in Australia has told Mike that she’s really digging it. Maybe those were his words, or maybe they still talk that way in Australia. Mike can be a little not-today sometimes. This is supposed to be a happy time, but I can’t get the New York Post out of my thoughts. Damn them all, I wouldn’t have even seen the article if Padre Pena hadn’t had his Pascal Candle wrapped in it. Pascal Candles are always white to symbolize life, but Pena’s was smudged black just like his black-smudged face, or maybe it was the cheap ink of that worthless rag.

Sorry, I’m just upset. The New York Post reporter’s name is not important. We’ll call him Reed Tucker. He says we’re heading for a 2012 disaster of Biblical proportions. I’ve written about the 2012 paranoia in gringolandia here in the blog before, but Tucker, I mean the anonymous Post reporter, goes on to say ‘if you’re looking for someone to blame, and rightfully so, search no further than the Mayans.’

Can you believe that!? The gall of him! Blame the Mayans? Don’t they have laws there in North America about libel and hate crimes? People think they’re better than us because we live our religion, because the other life is as real to us as the material world. Not just me; I died even before the book starts, but I mean people above the mountain too. North Americans think they’re better because they have liturgical religions and ours is still sacrificial. Well I would tell them to look at their Pascal Candles this Easter. We burn great mounds of copal incense in our fire ceremonies, but what do they think those big red buttons on their candles are? Sure, they’re the wounds of Christ, but they’re also globs of tree resin incense, just like our copal, because we both considered this ‘blood of trees’ a perfect sacrifice, and you continue to burn it on your Easter Candles every year just like we do in our fire ceremonies.

So don’t be too quick to consider us savages, and don’t be too quick to judge our religious day based on what the western media doomsayers tell you. The lady who wrote that review of 2012: Under the Witz Mountain on Amazon.com understood the religious nature of my story. I hope you do too.

Blessings.

I watched the 2012 Movie trailer in a pool of water today. Some people think only the Itza, the water witches, see things in water, but under the mountain we all do. Have you seen the trailer? ‘How would the world’s leaders prepare 6 million people for the end of the world?’ And then, after an earthquake, or maybe a flood, or maybe an earthquake and a flood, you see ‘They Wouldn’t.’

Why would the gringos think like this? I remember when I was a little girl, and the way I thought about the day when I would be a woman, the way I looked forward to it. The shoes I would wear with pointed toes and high heels, and putting makeup on my eyes, something even my mom didn’t do. I would see the older girls come out of the corn patches with boys, their lipstick smudged. Thinking about being a woman, and back then I saw 15 year old girls as women, was something scary, but scary in a good way. I had a friend Maria Immaculata whose family had a car. She was the only person I knew who had a car, and her papa told her he would teach her to drive when she was 15. When we were 15 everything was going to be new and different, our clothes, our bodies, the way boys saw our bodies. I was terrified, and I couldn’t wait.

Looking back, I think the people in my village looked forward to 2012 like that. It was scary, but they were like children looking forward to growing up. Gringos are paranoid. They think scary must be The Towering Inferno, or Friday the 13^th part 21. They don’t think about roller coasters. They don’t think of proverbs, that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. It seems for them, any change in the whole world can only be a disaster waiting just around the corner. The people in Matapalo didn’t think like that. Our lives were poor, and we were ready for change. 

So enjoy the movie, but I hope your gringo 2012 works out better for you. I’m still looking forward to ours.

The wall is still going up. I know the wall builders lost in the big election across the border, but it’s still going up. I wasn’t a college engineering student very long, but I know the principle of momentum. Momentum drove my own life many times after I put the brakes on too late, and could only look with fear or sadness at what came next. The tabloids in Mexico say Miss Laura Bush is getting a divorce, and he is building her a big house in Texas. Maybe she’s trying to put brakes on. Who knows? Quien sabe? The tabloids are the tabloids.

The wall is the new US Border Patrol wall. What’s it like, being on this side? I don’t feel different, I mean, compared to before they started building it. But I know it is different. It has to be. It’s the difference between keeping someone out, and being kept in. In your mind you paint a picture of what your place in the world looks like, what it feels like, and it’s always better to be in that place because you choose to be, rather than because a wall is keeping you from going somewhere else. There was a time when we could go to San Diego and shop as easily as we could go to Guadalajara. Not my family, of course, but at least it was possible. Now it’s not possible, or at least it’s harder, only I know that without the wall I wouldn’t even be thinking about going there.

I think gringo culture is a lot different from us. They like money but don’t like saving it. They like fresh vegetables but don’t like to work outside. They like having family, at least in movies and TV shows. They like their daughters to be virgins, but every other girl older than 12 they like to be a sex object. They spend millions on medicines and surgeries to live a long time, and lock their old people away when they begin to slow down.

Us? We just like stereotyping, and with the wall it ought to be easier.