#prechtel

Modern people seem to be proud of their despair, entirely imprisoned by their complacent respect for the overwhelming power of meaninglessness so popular today.

Humans are not in the world to succeed, to be more secure, to tame the Earth, to build big commercial structures or crash into them to find God; humans are not here to become comfortable, to purify themselves or anybody else, to become immortal or get their way.

If initiation is about culture and the modern world desires initiation, it will have to redefine itself.

Without custodianship of cultural substance, the elders knew that the world would become filled with meaninglessness.

In the United States, when I ventured off the reservation of my youth, most of what was really me, my true nature, the indigenous part of my soul, had to be hidden behind a germane grimace of conformity or held back unexpressed in a flat silence of invisibility in order to keep my heart safe.

"In her eyes I fall drowning, clubbed to death by the fisherman of beauty, I become the food for love."

....One of our passengers, a copper-faced Mazatec woman with a handsome gabacha (apron) began to weep and wail, as she had recognized a relative amongst the dead. Though she flung herself at the bus door to leave, the busdriver refused to release her to the pandemonium and confusion of the crowd. Eventually several other women and a handsome old Ladino took her into their arms as she flailed and convulsed, weeping and slobbering onto the floor, infected with the weighty force of her heartfelt grief. She tried to fight her way to the earth where her tears would feed life and the ground could eat her pain, as if only right, for real human beings must do this or be ill for not doing so. I myself was sick, devastated, grateful, hurt, alive, and very proud of this grieving indigenous woman, but disgusted also with what part of me was like a North American who seemed to be such an amateur in these matters, considering grief and beauty to be sideshows in life when they are really the left and right hand of the goddess called Life, in whose arms we are all suckled. The driver started us on our way again, and after an hour of tearful birdlike chatter, rehashing what we'd thought we'd seen, sleep invited me into her nest. We passengers all settled back into our journeys and into a sense of normalcy-not stoicism, fatalism, or denial, but life, which would go on, not despite such a misfortune, but directly on account of it. The tenuous nature of life in a place like this made the living of life a precious obligation. An awareness of the high stakes of mortality can resensitize a jaded person's sense of taste, and life becomes a delicious meal no matter how basic the recipe. So I wept, talked, and fell into a delicious slumber, actually more at home than I'd been in a long while.