Martín Prechtel - The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic: The Parallel Lives of People as Plants: Keeping the Seeds Alive

Also by MARTN PRECHTEL

Secrets of the Talking Jaguar
Long Life, Honey in the Heart
The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun
Stealing Benefacios Roses

Copyright 2012 by Martn Prechtel. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwisewithout the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.

The chapter Always a Place at the Table originally appeared in Sacred Fire Magazine, issue 9, as Beautiful Running.

The names of some individuals in this book have been altered in deference to their desire for privacy.

The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic: The Parallel Lives of People as Plants: Keeping the Seeds Alive is sponsored by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences, a nonprofit educational corporation whose goals are to develop an educational and cross-cultural perspective linking various scientific, social, and artistic fields; to nurture a holistic view of arts, sciences, humanities, and healing; and to publish and distribute literature on the relationship of mind, body, and nature.

North Atlantic Books publications are available through most bookstores. For further information, visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com or call 800-733-3000.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Prechtel, Martn.
The unlikely peace at Cuchumaquic : the parallel lives of people as plants, Keeping the seeds alive / Martn Prechtel.
p. cm.
Summary: A memoir, spiritual adventure story, and ecological fable, this book shares the message that plants and humanity are interconnected, and that the survival of one depends upon the otherProvided by publisher.
eISBN: 978-1-58394-376-2
1. Prechtel, Martn. 2. ShamansUnited StatesBiography. 3. ShamansGuatemalaSantiago AtitlnBiography. 4. Human-plant relationshipsGuatemalaSantiago Atitln. 5. Tzutuhil IndiansReligion. 6. Tzutuhil IndiansRites and ceremonies. 7. Santiago Atitln (Guatemala)Religious life and customs. 8. Santiago Atitln (Guatemala)Social life and customs. I. Title.
BF1679.8.P74A3 2011
299.7842dc23 [B] 2011028182

v3.1

B ecause this book is meant as a gift to that thing in original humans, which at one time made them a welcome sound in the symphony of all Nature, this book is dedicated to all those men and women, Keres-speaking, Spanish-speaking New Mexicans and Tzutujil Mayan farmers, who in my early days, against all outside pressures, were still dedicated to keeping alive the seeds of their own tribal shards of the original magic of human culture and beautiful ritual farming.

I n fond memory of all the plant forms and their people in Europe; the many Asias; Africa; the Middle East; North, Central, and South America; Micronesia; Melanesia; and Polynesia who have been forced into nonsustainable mechanical food production, genetically altered, culturally GMOd, or who have disappeared altogether.

It is not enough to save heritage seeds.

The culture of those people to whom each seed belongs must be kept alive along with seeds and their cultivation.

Not in freezers or museums

but in their own soil and our daily lives.

I n the early seventies when I left the United States, I fled the overwhelming influx of the modern Americas crush on what was left of the indigenous and old Hispanic New Mexico of my youth.

Bouncing through Mexico in a seemingly aimless meander like a sowbug rolled up and washed where lifes river will wash, I landed like the subject of some forgotten mythology on the shores of Lake Atitln, blinking and stunned by the depth and beauty of an ancient seed-ritual culture whose heart still beat to pump life into a magical world that was as tangible as my own capacity to see it.

For over a decade, I lived a life of welcome, Indigenous spiritual determination and soul-feeding usefulness to the germ of that magic face of the Divine as a full constituent of the hierarchy of Sacred Farmers of the Tzutujil Maya of South Atitln.

But it wasnt long until the vicious snarl of Guatemalas multi-entity war of the 1980sfunded and promoted by the same mentality both left and right that I had earlier tried to futilely escape by leaving the Statesrolled through Guatemala, flattening the indigenous mind and terrorizing all subtle mythic life. Like thousands of Guatemalans, I was harassed by the constant threat of assassination and disappearances, and after not a few close calls and shrapnel wounds, instead of fleeing yet again to another pristine place, I came back to New Mexico with my Tzutujil wife and two boys.

Though it took another decade of anonymous, tribeless poverty before I could land square enough to begin living again, it would take another ten years before I could breathe deep enough to know it was all right to live in a country whose people have no idea what the world really is beneath the veneer of global modernity.

Ironically, the telling of all the comedy, terror, struggle and layers of beauty of what we experienced was a story that everybody in the U.S. seemed to want to hear.

Back in the early 1990s, the great American poet Robert Bly and others, after coming across the telling of these tales of ours from a mind so radically non-European, insisted I teach, not only encouraging me to continue telling my story, but also emphatic that I should publish.

Robert explained to my incredulous and somewhat crestfallen soul that due to the homogenizing entertainment motive of the modern mind from the effects of television, the irreality of the virtual programs of the computer, and a bad public education, the modern public was no longer capable of any quick recognition of tactile reality that had anything to do with the earth or the natural wealth of human emotion.

While the people might be entertained by the grand things I spoke into view, they would never honor nor accept the legitimacy of who I was and what I taught, if my story were not framed in the format of published pop writing.

This was outrageous to me, for all the beauty I stood for and spoke came from cultures where the grandest of all comprehensions were never, ever, written and only transmitted in osmotic whispers inside the context of hands-on ritual. To write them was to freeze and kill the germ of the seed of the knowledge.

But luckily nobody but anthropologists were particularly interested in these grand things, or less still in my original thoughts as influenced by a close understanding and service to those grand things. In those days, the publishers didnt want my vision or a manual on how to remake an old culture; they wanted a marketable, entertaining travelogue of the story of my interesting life in order to relax the reader with just small wisdoms whispered here and there.