2012: Under the Witz Mountain
2012: Under the Witz Mountain
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I went to Ixil shortly after the war, and visited a village where the army had put everyone into their huts, nailed the doors closed and burned them to the ground. The few survivors who had not been in the village that day went through the ashes, and finding a few black, charred timbers still structurally sound, built a building to tell their story in. I remember them, standing on the dirt floor piled high with a carpet of fresh pine boughs, pointing up at the charred wood over their heads and telling me about those they had lost.
Storytelling among the Maya is not just a cultural tradition; it is a survival strategy. Through conquest, genocide and civil war, stories have held the culture together. My story is fiction, but I have tried to remain true to that tradition. Some truths cannot be found in glyph-reading, code-breaking and star-gazing; they require metaphor and allegory. My little story takes much from the Quiché creation story Popol Vuh, its handful of characters in small towns and forests sharing the final unfolding of our time. I hope you enjoy it.
We also have been putting together Mayan ‘dream boxes’ which we hope to have available in the coming weeks. In the story, Ahpú spends a night in a dream house and finds clues that help him fulfill his destiny. If you have read the essay on Mayan dream interpretation on this site, you understand the importance of dreams in the Mayan spiritual cosmos. The ‘dream box’ is a collection of items used to partially recreate the special space of a traditional dream house. Further resources for Mayan dream interpretation and being translated and published online here at the Witz Mountain.
I recently learned that my one of my Nahual spirit guides, based on my time of birth, is the same hero Ahpú whom I had made a protagonist in the book. In November 2008 I slept in a Mayan dream house while in Guatemala, and was visited in my sleep by a blazing sun on a black night sky. In the Mayan cosmic vision, Ahpú is the Sun. I don’t pretend to understand it all, any more than I understand Filomena who wakes me up at 3 am demanding to blog, Kasper, who still runs with me after 30 years, and the other characters clamoring to get out like Jinns in a bottle.
They are all my friends, and together we thank you for visiting and making this site a success.
Mike Weddle