El Para�so: A Pilgrimage to Guatemala and Mexico                                       

Paula Givan

Paradise found and lost. That is how I left Guatemala in 1979 after a two month stay during which time my seventeen year old self experienced a certain pitch of appreciation for life and all its glory, made clear by the simplicity with which the pueblo of San Francisco, Zap�t�tlan, Maz�ltenango, Suchitep�chez lived back then. The high crest of this early life experience crashed into a deep trough of the gritty reality of the decade of the 1980's and the brutal civil war that ensued, leaving 300,000 or 200,000 or 100,000 (depending on who counts) Guatemaltecos dead, mostly Mayan. My heart so utterly full was broken and frozen in space and time, for I could never quite shake the losses. Nor could I leave behind the tremendous anger I harbored at the U.S. government for its support of this genocide specifically, and of others generally.

By choosing in 2006 to walk into the fire of my original wound, everything began to shift and the weight of all things lifted somehow. The rough and sharp edges of the rock in my heart began to smooth.

For weeks before and then on the flight to Guatemala, I grappled with thoughts of the equinox cycle and the galactic center, as we hurtle closer to the much-discussed 2012 calendar end-date. I invited the poetic journey of the Hero Twins of the Popol Vuh to rewire and inform my unconscious in an attempt to nudge this wound of my past and to unbind the matrix of perception that has surrounded it.  It had taken me 27 years to return to Guatemala. The opportunity to do so as part of this larger project of seeding the continents was beyond imagination and a perfect manifestation of visionary imagination all in one stroke... which is why it was so completely delightful to learn that the beautiful man sitting next to me, was from the once small and very rural town of San Francisco in the municipio of Maz�ltenango in the departmento (state) of Suchitep�chez. So of the 12,000,000 Guatemalans living in 22 departments, this young man was from Suchitep�chez. Learning that we had the pueblo of San Francisco in common, he asked me when I spent time there. As these moments go, I learned that he was born in 1979, the same year as my service work. As the plane landed my heart raced from all of this knowing of being in the right place at the right time. I found my way outside fast, as I had, for too long, anticipated this moment of breathing in the smell of "Guate" and feeling the blast of hot, humid air.

I got hit. Stepping outside the weight of all things came crashing in again. Both the relatively recent and distant history of this place ran in front of me on all levels of perception. Sound and taste, smell and sight and more, I caught it all in my heart, this sadness of a country in recovery from a civil war.  I had successfully flown and landed in the bull's eye of my broken heart.

The shrill toning of k'uychi pulled me through the heavy framed doors of the hotel meeting hall. The group was already gathered around a large table to harmonize our energies.  We passed the Chavin piece and each spoke one word to express our contribution to the gathering. "Laughter" and "joy", "faith" and "gratitude", "respect" and "love of the RAMA mission", "magic" and "willingness to serve", "wonder" and "heart centered living", "compassion" and "munay", and "grace" were individually tossed into the soup of our collective pilgrimage. Shaking from an undifferentiated pool of personal information I spoke: "wholeness", knowing that my deepest fragmentation was being called to the table.  "As within so without. As above so below"  (...and just what if ...?)

*****************

The thousands of ruins that populate her landscape punctuate Guatemala's historical significance and powerful presence on Serpent Island. The Peten jungle of lowland Guatemala is home to some of the most spectacular ancient sites and that first week we visited many: Iximche, Yaxh�, Topoxt�, Tikal, Uaxact�n.

First though, we nestled into the Guatemalan Highlands at Chichicastenango, where the smell of open-air fires, exploding bougainvillea and very fresh air quickly brought us to purpose as good-will ambassadors. We found the fields of Maya Land tilled, fed, sown, and holding the promise of fertility.

The sweetness of Pedro Cruz Garcia's drum and medicine song, like a Mayan ranchera, still clips along in my memory as background music. As with all great medicine songs the listener can hear it for weeks, months or years after the fact, and yet it remains difficult if not impossible to duplicate. A voice giving expression to an individual soul journey or the soul journey of many, Pedro's song gallops along in harmony and lyric, conveying innocence, and a prayerful and playful walk that could only come about after many cycles of surrender and renewal.

It seemed that the wisdom carriers of the extraordinary Mayan lineage had risen from their knees after yet another cycle of hardship and were walking gently and in harmony. Mayan elders guided us to a 400 year old ceremonial ground at an overlook above Chichicastenango. We placed our medicine pieces near their Mayan cross of fire made with ocote, candles and copal.  Lightening electrified the night sky.

Much as the purity of the tone of Pedro's medicine song is indelible, so too are the faces and expressions of the children at the Academia de Arte y Cultura Maya Itzal.  Art and ceremony, ceremony in art -- the children taught us in living Guatemalan color that it is all a dance and a prayer as they offered flower petals to the earth in thanks and reciprocity for the refreshments they served from their pitchers. Honoring tradition and their ancestry, these children, under the care of the living Hero Twins, are germinating and beginning to sprout the fruits of a dream for tomorrow and beyond.

If you are co-creating paradise, it is necessary to recognize it. We found it at the hotel grounds at Lago de Atitlan. Truly this was the most beautiful place where I have ever spent time. We were indeed in the "navel of the universe" and just a short boat ride away from Santiago de Atitl�n. Here we saw the devouring side of Nature as the Tzutujil community struggles to regain its footing, after mountains of mud took out much of their foundation in early October of 2005.

                                                             *****************

Iximche, Yaxh�, Topoxt�, Tikal, Uaxact�n.  Temples, palaces, and pyramids in beautiful sequence we approached and communed with them. Until the last century these sites were under an ocean of a thousand years of jungle growth.  Our work was methodical and careful, prayerful and sweet. Like the winged serpent of Mayan mythology, we joined Heaven and Earth in the act of Creation.                      

On our last day with the large group we sealed our work at Uaxact�n. After dancing on the temple grounds we ate lunch in twenty minutes and left the woman waving after our bus, having given us obsidian chips while we haphazardly searched our pockets for donations for their tiny museum. My heart gave me plenty of feedback knowing that the community had been preparing for our VISIT for days, for weeks. One cannot live and work in a rural Guatemalan community and not know this about the people. About their lives. I had that haunting feeling of being ever so Norte Americana, compressing five or ten minutes into one, riding the speed of my agenda at all costs. I welcomed the reminder to walk softly and to measure the impact of my steps, happy to have another week in these parts.

The new group of six scattered and then gathered on a dock at Lake Peten Itza to watch the sun set slowly and deliberately and brilliantly and silently over the horizon. The moments were both empty and full. Rich. Priceless. The awkwardness of deepening, of leaning further into each other and this pilgrimage, was delicious. We were now six "unusual suspects" with a basic outline and a clear knowing that during the week ahead, the logistics of travel would require a one-step-at-a-time patience and attitude. Time felt kind and we quickly established a ritual of eating together and truly enjoying each other's company and the food.

Time. We had a 3:30am wake-up call for the first leg of the trip to Palenque. We learned that there was a time change that night and we were losing an hour. Then we learned that the hours were not changing after all so we gained an hour. We received all this news in more or less an hour. Time. It was getting still more slippery.

Several of us sat together stretching the remaining evening hours into infinity as we explored the concept of time and how delightfully slow it feels to be while in Latin America. We spoke of the probability that these temple locations were chosen because of their ability to suspend time, open the fabric and expose the ripple, create the space for mass experience of timelessness, again and again and again over the centuries.   I reflected on having walked these same temple sites and many others at seemingly random times and about how I would speculate about how they may have been  "...way back when." I yearned to be there in the original hubbub. That night I stretched beyond my mental understanding and gleaned viscerally that it really is all layered, current and concurrent... it does not matter the then or the now or the when.

*****

I had a dream shortly before our 3:30 rise-and-shine. As my dreams tend to be very direct, I simply watched the Mother Ship in full dazzling color descend over the horizon, slowly, deliberately, and quietly, like the sunset that we had watched from the dock at Lake Peten Itza. When it finally dipped below the horizon, there was an imprint of the six-pointed star emblazoned on the sky. It was unclear exactly where I was in this dream though there had been some sort of preamble or reference to being in southern Colorado and of teaching. 

******

All this work or play of seeding the continents, of nudging portals open with our song, prayer and story at prime and obscure temple sites in this exotic Mayan landscape, and the big bang happened when I was not looking, The bones of our mother adjusted and the sky spilled forth while crossing the boarder between Guatemala and Chiapas

A lengthy microbus ride during the pre-dawn hours had brought us to the Usumacinta River dividing Guatemala and Mexico. We hauled our luggage down a slippery embankment and balanced our stuff and ourselves precariously on the twenty-foot boat that floated us down stream and across the water. A herd of taxis waited for any work at all on the other side. Two of the cars drove us the short and dusty distance to the immigration office. An old recording of the band "Enigma", was playing at full volume from powerful speakers inside the building.

Sensing from every cell that for over two decades this place had been a focal point of mass chaos and migration of Mayan people, I was disoriented. Once again, smelling, tasting, touching and hearing the hysterical past and fragmented pieces of this very junction, my heart heaved from the earth's depths to the echoing broadcast of Enigma's Gregorian chants. A few tears rolled down my cheeks as I distinctly felt myself living the myth, re-creating, co-creating tomorrow's history. "Wholeness". That was the moment when the broken-hearted teenager who had lost Paradise to the decade of the 1980's and to a survival strategy of self-medicated imagination -- the part of myself who for decades, had approached healing through countless modalities and language studies that gave me the courage, time and license to investigate the details of what had happened long ago -- this broken part tasted wholeness again.

 

As I listened to the chants and looked the broad-chested immigration man in the eyes, offering a smile that he mirrored back, I knew that the paradigm that we have been living had shifted. This flash of full-heartedness echoed from me to everywhere. From right to left, above and below, before and after, it happened in a single moment out of a countless strand of many moments.

 

"That we have the openness to receive, the courage to hold and the heart to radiate more light than we ever thought imaginable or possible." So I had decreed from the top of Temple IV at Tikal. During the following half hour my heart cleared. With my head hanging outside the window, a shower of my tears, one after another, hit the dusty road that turned into pavement. "It really is all changing now," I said to whoever could hear me.

 ******

Twenty years ago during the month of May the town of Palenque was barely a village consisting of a couple of juice stands, several hotels and a little boy named Saul Martinez Pech who charmed me to my bones by showing me how to make little people from a book of matches. The town and ruins were soaked by day and night rain and were cloaked in a fog so dense that it was nearly impossible to see across the street or from one ruin to the next. It had been as if we were leaning back several centuries with the Lacandon people sitting quiet, peaceful and mysterious on the outskirts of ruins that barely had any facilities, let alone an official entry gate and modern restroom.  In 1987 it had been the far reaches of a deep jungle into which I had dropped after a twenty-four hour bus ride across the Yucat�n Peninsula.

 

Back then I sucked in the ruins of Palenque like oxygen during a barren stretch of time that held little magic aside from having miraculously finished my Bachelor's degree and just as miraculously steered a romance to Mexico for a five week odyssey.

 

I had always wanted to return to this dreamy earthscape. Now, along with the five other fanny-sore, out of formation, six-pointed star-fleet members, we rolled into town after a crowded, brutally hot and exhausting ride. We found a booming Ciudad Palenque of more than 40,000 people with countless streets, traffic lights, hotels and restaurants. Clearly the town had not stood still in my absence. These 40,000 people had migrated from the jungle and neighboring parts, laboring to create a center of commerce that was currently functioning though not exactly thriving. We spotted Lacandon men and women in town, impoverished and waiting in line for the bank to open.

 

It took a while to find the juice stand that I had safely guarded in my memory and the building where the old motel had been. In its place, an abandoned shell of a one-time metaphysical center was backed by a housing development, which had replaced the vast and dense jungle backdrop. 

 

The city was okay... most certainly changed and not my favorite. The people too were fine, though somehow different from Guatemalans. Saul Martinez Pech, I neither found nor inquired about. He had wanted to be a doctor. I would not have been surprised to find that he was mayor as well.

 

In Guatemala a distinct feeling of the Sacred radiates from the land and Mayan people and an undercurrent of living ceremony is still palpable inside and outside of the sacred sites. Ceremonial rights in Guatemala were at last made legal as a concession in the 1996 Peace Accords. Mexico on the other hand, in spite of its many majestic temple sites -- the king of which is no doubt, Palenque -- seemed to me to be stripped of the essence of its most potent history. For whatever reason, be it a loss of soul memory or simply vast numbers of famished tourists, this deficit was tied to the issue of ceremony and the Sacred, which had become a serious legal matter in Mexico. We had been cautioned that officials, particularly at the ruins, did not permit or tolerate public ceremony. Fully aware of the ongoing tensions and historical violence between the Mexican government and the Indigenous communities of Chiapas we understood the reality of the sensitivity of the political climate. Yet, we were there to conduct ceremony, including our star formation with the Chavin piece in full view at the Temple of Inscriptions, the burial ground of Pakal.

 

The first day we spent several hours on our own, wandering the glorious grounds, making our personal connections to Palenque. For me it was a necessary time of re-visiting memories and offering gratitude for my previous visit as a famished tourist... and time to consider my lifelong relationship to Central America as well as the post lightning strike eminence of Pakal, as he had manifested with Maasaw and Tunupa in the southeast corner of the Mesa Lodge in Florida, and the outpouring of tears that pulled me up from my knees to offer him a rose.

 

As we wound our way back to town through the enchanted Arroyo Otulum and stopped to eat, we each expressed our impressions and assessment of the vibration and climate of the ruins. Palenque dazzled us all, although most reported having seen many security guards equipped with walkie-talkies.

 

The following morning our predawn ambitions of entering the Temple  were diminished by the clerk at our hotel. Seeing us standing there fully clad with staffs, water bottles, and backpacks, all before sunrise, he shook his head and basically said, "No way." Instead, we watched daybreak from the town-square, enjoyed breakfast and entered with everyone else.

 

Pakal's tomb, the Temple of the Inscriptions, was opened for the first time in 1952 after a three year, all out effort to clear debris from a hidden stairway tucked beneath a massive stone covering the floor.  The researcher Alberto Ruz described the results of his labor as

 

"... a fantastic, ethereal sight from another world. It seemed a huge magic grotto carved out of ice, the walls sparkling and glistening like snow crystals. Delicate festoons of stalactites hung like tassels of a curtain, and the stalagmites on the floor looked like drippings from a great candle. The impression was that of an abandoned chapel. The floor was filled with a great carved stone slab in perfect condition. For the first time in more than a thousand years, human eyes beheld the glorious carved sarcophagus lid of a great ruler of Palenque. That the tomb belonged to an important ruler was beyond doubt, considering its magnificence. The entire pyramid of the Temple of Inscriptions had been built around it."

 

Pakal Votan, known as "a magician of time and of numbers, prophesized our collective experience of a phase of the old world dying and a new world being born. Based on knowledge of the larger-cycles of time as mapped by the ancient Maya, Pakal Votan knew that humanity as a species would become disconnected from the laws of the Natural World and would fall ignorant of our Sacred interdependence with Nature. He also knew that modern humanity would be put to the test to see if we can regain our conscious connection to Natural time, evolving beyond the constraints of man-made time"

 

The tomb of Pakal, who is celebrated as the greatest ruler of Palenque, held the richest offering of jade ever seen in Mesoamerica. On this day in 2006 the Temple was roped and wrapped with yellow tape that prohibited us from getting near it, giving the site the impression of being a crime scene. We hiked stairs that looped to the back, southeastern side.  Stepping over the tape we flirted with standing directly behind it and were snapped back by a security officer who firmly pointed out the boundaries. Respectfully we took several steps back. Without hesitating, we consecrated the ground right there, which was as close as we could be to the Temple. We brought out all of our medicine pieces including the Chavin piece and planted our staffs. Our medicine ground was grand. We opened the directions, expressed intentions, offered prayers, sang songs, formed the six-pointed star and elegantly opened the portal of the tomb. Similar to our experience in ceremonial space at other temple sites in Guatemala, it was like being in a void space where everything on the periphery dissolved into a liquid hum. No one else was there. No whisper, no giggle, no sound of footsteps on gravel.  Some felt a shift in the ground, at once a seismic and subtle rolling over, and a sense of relief coming from the tomb as our efforts were embraced.

 

We stood in a sort of tongue-tied disbelief that after all of the momentum that brought the six of us together at this specific juncture, we were finished. As it turned out we were just getting started.

 

We moved to the west of the temple where a small pacha of grass separates Pakal's Temple from Temple XIII, the Temple of the Red Queen, where a 1994 excavation revealed the cinnabar covered remains of a woman of royalty. Unlike in Pakal's Temple of the Inscriptions, the absence of inscriptions makes it unclear exactly who this woman was. Artifacts including pottery and a mask made of 1044 pieces indicate the Late Classic period between 600-700 AD, contemporary to Pakal. We made offerings with all we had. With leaves, grains, seeds, waters, and with sacred corn from the Hopi land and from Peru, we fed the chaqra -- pleasing the spirits and the ants to no end, as they carried it down, down, down, out of sight, into the mother and some imaginable vast network as complex as the inside of the Temples themselves.

 

We ambled north to Temple X and did a wayra-infused Pachamama Renewal process over and over again. Distinctions between above and below melted and we were getting warm both literally and figuratively. People were beginning to watch us, wander closer, lean into what we were doing. In the east we sat in circle right in the middle of a giant chakana and lit the black corn candle. Ahhh... the wonder and mystery of it all! We toned k'anchay to the highest heavens. Deft hands planted a misa rumi sepka from Chaco Canyon right in the middle of the central plaza and of our giant Pachakuti Mesa. By then dozens of people from all over the world were loosely gathered.  We chanted "ohm" many, many times. People stopped in their tracks, moved by our intent in honoring the majesty of Palenque. Three or four hours had passed. The sky was clear and the temperature hot.

 

******

The six "unusual suspects", Garry, Dorothy, Phyllis, Mike, Judy and I, were an unexpected though perfect match. We spent the following days at one of Garry's personal retreat sites in San Crist�bal de las Casas, a place that it is a museum in and of itself, and an anchor for the deep history... political, social, and spiritual... of Chiapas. I recall pitchers of hot chocolate fireside in our rooms, exquisite cuisine, and the splendid companionship of our group. We toured the surrounding landscape that is pulsing with significance,  and visited neighboring villages, the sum of which was as profound as all events and places leading up to it. This too, is a story that must be told, as this region is home to the Sacred and to living ceremony in action, yet I believe it is someone else's story to tell.

Thank you Garry for sharing with us, your heart! My heart holds gratitude for the opportunity to have painted this canvas with each of you. Thank you all for your brush strokes and color choices, especially to Judy, roommate and Amauta, I thank you for sharing your beauty and wisdom.

 

http://www.mesoweb.com/palenque.htm

 

http//www.13moon.com/pacal9620link.htm