Filomena

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.  

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.