October/November 2003

The Yearly Round
Richard Moeschl

Making Sense of North Korea
Eric Sirotkin

A Loophole So Big
Tom Engelhardt

The Joseph Strategy
David Ehrenfeld

Thieves in High Places
Jim Hightower

Strangely Like War
Derrick Jensen & George Draffan

Bush's Inferno
Pepper Trail

Their Arms Outstretched Into The Night
Martin Prechtel

On Slowing Down
Pride S. Wright

Living As A Free Human Being
Alan Clements

Achieving Balance Through Passive Movement
Kayla M. Starr, MPH

Yoga for the Young at Heart
Susan Winter Ward

Cosmic Calendar
Salina Rain

BACK TO TOP

Their Arms Outstretched into the Night

By Martin Prechtel

A master of eloquence and innovative language, Martín Prechtel is a leading thinker, writer and teacher whose work, both written and oral, hopes to promote the subtle irony and pre-modern vitality hidden in any living language. His life, the well known subject of his previous books Secrets of the Talking Jaguar and Long Life, Honey in the Heart, took him from his native New Mexico upbringing as a half-blood, Native American from a Pueblo Indian reservation to the village of Santiago Atitlan where he eventually served the Tzutujil Mayan population as a full village member, becoming a principal in the body of village leaders, responsible for instructing the young people in the meanings of their ancient stories that took place in the rituals of adult rites of passage.

Martín, once again residing in his native New Mexico, teaches internationally through story, music, ritual and writing, helping people in many lands to retain their diversity while remembering their own sense of place in the daily sacred through the search for the Indigenous Soul. 

Robert Bly, when describing his meeting with Martín Prechtel, explained “The Mayan people’s main and ancient job is to be beautiful and grateful. Before meeting Martín, I’d never known a representative of such a culture. But I can testify to the integrity, the massive learning, the faithfulness, the lighthearted joy and the hardworking nature of this representative.”

The following passages are excerpted from the introduction to The Toe Bone and the Tooth, Martín’s latest book.

After the terrible massacre of December 1991, resulting in the long-awaited removal of all the soldiers that had been permanently bivouacked in Santiago Atitlan for eight years, in the early spring of 1992 I returned for the very first time in just as many years to Guatemala and Santiago Atitlan.

I was met outside the airport by five teenage Atiteco boys who had still been young children when I’d left the village. In a little yellow Japanese pickup with the back window missing and the truck bed piled high with cum and q´oq´, or Mayan squashes, covered with a canvas, these young men had come to fetch me and drive me the ninety kilometers to the lakeside.

They wanted me to sit up front with the driver while the rest stood in the back, until we were due to pass an army or police roadblock, for which they had me burrow under the squashes and canvas with three of them seated on top during the inspection, by which ruse we were able to clear all seven checkpoints on the hot Pacific coast before the steep climb past Patuluul, the Land of Zapotes, up to the cool highlands and onto the Mother Lake, Lake Atitlan. At that particular time, from there to the village, the road would be left unpatrolled.

When we entered the first profusion of volcanic hills and forests, the driver stopped the truck while one of the young fellows in the back, a distant relative of mine through my children’s Tzutujil grandmother, inquired of me if it were true that I knew the story of The Toe Bone and the Tooth and if so could I tell it to them from here on out as we drove.

The landscape we were driving through was the story and we had to proceed mighty gradually, stopping very often, to allow me to tell the whole tale, pointing out all the places, rocks, rivers, trees, volcanoes, animals and so on as we passed them. Certain mountains that we circumnavigated were actually part of a different story to which they forced me to jump as well, only to return back to The Toe Bone and the Tooth after rounding the bend back into our original story.

I suddenly recollected how the last time I’d been on this road, I’d been telling the same tale, albeit headed in the opposite direction into exile with my little family. From the look on their enraptured faces, that alternated between a surprised thrill and embarrassment, I wondered if any of these attentive Tzutujil youth knew what came next at each stage of this powerful old story of their ancestors. I found myself asking them at intervals in the telling of the tale, “You remember, don’t you?” None of them did.

At one point, just before getting to the southeastern corner of the Mother Waters of Lake Atitlan, I got lost as well, the story didn’t match the land and I recognized nothing. I stopped speaking.

For these boys this road had always been this way, for me it was out of the story, an unknown thing. Amazed at my confusion the boys explained that an earthquake, several floods and an intense forest fire had rerouted the river, reorganized and tumbled down two mountains. The road now slowly edged around a slope of yellow dust and fast-growing gravilea trees, swinging 200 yards west to what had been, in my time, pure air above a deep ravine.

Another of the boys yelled to us, “This must’ve been where the Mountain God threw down the hills and tried to burn the Raggedy Boy. The mountain was angry for all our tearing up the ground.”

In the interim of my absence all these young men, either through their families, as war orphans, or by themselves, had been coerced by political circumstance into becoming protestant Christians, who expressly prohibited the old stories and any proximity with people who might know them. As a result none of the young people truly knew their own people’s “Big” stories such as The Toe Bone and the Tooth, but all had heard about them on the sly.

Though they didn’t know the tales, here in one telling they were already inside the story, remembering what had recently happened as part of what had always happened for thousands of years for the land and for their people. What was indigenous in them was still alive and ready to listen to the likes of me from far away who’d spent his life married to the meaning of their stories, which became my stories, stories that had been demonized by missionaries who came from the land in which I now lived.

Arriving at the edge of the village at two in the morning on Wednesday, ten hours later than expected, we were an emotionally charged and exuberant crowd of men as we unloaded one of the boy’s squashes at his house at the bottom of the hill at Chinimya. Far off but coming toward us, in the night we heard the shuffling of a hundred bare feet on stones, the squeaking of sandals, the muffled hum of men and women walking behind the roar and squeal of the big village drum played by my old comrade Aqoquix, and a new flute man.

This was a part of the ongoing ritual of initiation for young people that always coincided with the ecstatic and exuberant Mayanized Catholic Holy Week. On this night, every year for hundreds of years, the old people and initiating chiefs had come to meet the young men, right here at the northern shore of the village, who would have just returned from the wild mountains on the south side of the bay. It was here on this day, every year, in the dark under the almost full moon that the boys, in high spirits, would paddle with great speed in a rousing return in several thirty-person canoes filled to overflowing with great bundles of evergreen branches trailing in the moonlit water.

I had been in charge of this whole year-long ceremonial and involved in various capacities with it every year that I’d lived in the village. But initiation rituals ceased the year before I’d fled the town, from this exact spot, less than a decade previous. Hope and emotion wrestled in me until I noticed that the drum and flute player should have gone with the boys in the canoes.

When they saw me, the whole entourage of old timers stopped moving, the drum and flute ceased and every one of them looked down the hill. The Najbey Quej, my old friend the “First Deer” yelled, “Nix atet arja rilaj a Martín?”
“Could that be you, Old Martín?”
“Hie Tidta´, anen niniga.”
“Truly old brother parent, it’s me alright.”
“Natrsaga a goural naban, katjo wavie, jo ncosmaja.”
“How come you’re so lazy? Get over here and let’s get to work.”

I was only forty-one, but they’d called me Old Martín since I was twenty-two. Tearfully and hysterical when we had parted years before, now my elegant and enduring old comrades welcomed me back home as if I’d just returned from an extended pee among the rocks. They welcomed me by letting me know that they hadn’t let me go. I was remembered. As far as they were concerned, no matter how far I roamed or what we’d had to do to survive, I was still in the story with them and had never actually left the village.

Marching with the old folks again we arrived at the lake edge where I expected to see the initiate youth of this huge Mayan town, their mentors, their chiefs, their branches and their long, loaded, hand-carved log canoes beached on the soggy shore; but none were to be seen, nor would they be.

No one expected them for there were no longer any initiations. But the old people with their headcloths over their shoulders, their hands outstretched into the night toward the Mother Waters and her mother, the Grandmother Moon, commenced to speak the exact old words of ritual remembrance as if the initiate boys had actually been standing there.
“It’s good to see your faces again,
It’s good to feel your breath again.
We the eight hundred shimmering
Forgetters, the big trees and big vines
Do not forget you, our new
Fruit, whose seeds will
Be our remembrance planted in the
Deep humus of our passing.
We do not forget you,
We do not abandon you.
Yesterday and the day before
When we saw … ”

For those who’d been inside these old-time initiations it was easy to imagine the tired boys standing there with the branches strapped on their back, dancing to our words under their loads, swinging in the lake breeze. Now the village did ritual after ritual to what couldn’t reply or be seen by those that had never seen it before.

After that only one half of the rituals could be done, but these were carried out so assiduously that the following generations assumed by going through the motions they were doing the whole thing. Fifty percent of what was holy and necessary was missing. Those dedicated old beauties were the last generation to know the difference.

How much of the many religious and spiritual approaches in the world are extravagant, later outgrowths of the tiny, treasured bits that displaced people, overrun or driven to disperse from their homelands, could carry in their arms as they fled, leaving the greater portion of their Big Stories, rituals and understandings still waiting in the long-lost ground of their origination?

Are most of the allegorized, dogmatized, literalised, sanitized, boring, overly historified rituals and written stories, only jealously guarded fragments of a pushed aside indigenous intactness which all people, in this increasingly displaced world, have hidden somewhere in their bones as an unremembered legacy in which an intact living story still waits to come into view?

For, if, as my old Tzutujil friends used to go on about, our human bodies are actually the Earth itself, then somewhere inside this earth-body our homelands still await our return; inner homelands in whose soil our indigenous souls lie ready like seeds; seeds whose DNA are the Big culturally intact Stories; seeds that have waited for thousands of years for the spiritual climate to shift enough to where the tears of our human grief about the day we finally remember the overwhelming magnitude of our diverse, earth-oriented cultural losses could moisten the seeds of our Big Stories, causing our indigenous memories to sprout again into well-rooted trees of remembrance upon whose branches a never-before-seen-fruit, a new possibility for humans on Earth might come into sight, remembered beyond its own recollecting into a time beyond the already known and limited imagination of the age.

Some stories however, like the Toe Bone and the Tooth, sometimes refuse to wait in the ground like seeds and, without the old rituals where they used to live out their lives, they show up in the most unexpected places: under bridges, in wars, at the job, on the street hitchhiking, living out that Big Story in extraordinary ways inside the lives of ordinary people anywhere, who like refugees learn to live any way they can away from their homelands.

The Earth itself never stops talking out its Big Story, it is the people who stop listening. The Big Story needs the Earth to hear its tale and the people need the story to be on the Earth. But that means we have to have good open ears to listen. The indigenous soul hiding inside us has just such ears.

This book is an account of the old Tzutujil mythology of The Toe Bone and the Tooth as it lived itself out in my own life, a life spent trying to keep the story alive and remembered, when the spiritual landscape of the Tzutujil Maya it was born from was dismembered by the troops of the same syndrome of cultural amnesia that has caused all the diasporas of the world.

This book is not only about Mayans or Guatemala, Americans, America or the English; it is about how long it takes to become a human being. It seems to say that humans are most useful to the Universe when they are blessing, especially when the unblessed become the blessers and when humans give their gifts to what they can’t see; when they turn the failure and grief of their losses into life-giving beauty and when they are in love.

The Toe Bone and the Tooth is a love story and I give it as a gift to all those that love, especially to those with arms outstretched in the night, who having given all they had left, speak alone to what they would have loved and hearing only in reply the moon upon the water, begin to sing, hoping the real one might appear.
 
Other books by Martín Prechtel include Secrets of the Talking Jaguar, Long Life, Honey in the Heart, and The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun: Ecstasy and Time. Martín’s fourth book, The Toe Bone and the Tooth, the highly anticipated third in the narrative trilogy of Martín’s autobiographical series, was released in the United States in February 2003 by Thorsons, an imprint of HarperCollins. Please join Martín on Fri, Nov. 7, at 7pm, for a lecture and book signing for his new book ($3-$15 sliding scale), and in creating a village ritual to feed the spirit of life at a workshop entitled “Between the Rain and the Rock a Fire-Flower Blossoms: Calling the Hum-mingbird of Hope in from a Time Beyond Our Own” on Sat, Nov. 8 & Sun, Nov. 9, 9am-5pm ($145 by Oct. 15/$185 thereafter; $100 for people under 25). Both presentations will be held at the Bellview Grange, 1050 Tolman Creek Road, in Ashland. Call (541) 488-1192,or email rachrich@jeffnet.org, Visit Martín’s web site, www.floweringmountain.com, for more information on his books and workshops.