How is a tree like a Mayan temple?

Layers. Every 52-year cycle of the Calendar Round (every time the synodic period of Venus made it halfway back around to resynchronization with both the orbital period of Earth and their own 260-day sacred calendar), the ancient Mayans built a new layer of temple atop what was already there. Trees build fifty-two new layers in the same period. Both are meditations upon time.

Some of the most beautiful trees I’ve ever seen have been at Mayan sacred sites (like the ceiba at the gate to Tikal). Coincidence?

Kaminaljuyú is the ancient Maya city on top of which the modern-day Guatemalan capitol is built. It’s huge–widely cited as the greatest archaeological site in the Americas–but most of it is buried now under highways and high-rises. The archaeological park preserves only a tiny fraction behind a 12 foot high barb-wire fence in what is perhaps not the nicest neighborhood. Not a lot of nice neighborhoods in Guate. Like at Takalik Abaj, centuries’ accumulation of earth has turned the temples into green hills covered in jacarandas and moss-bearded cypresses (this is where I saw the foxes). At the foot of this particular tree, two Maya priests were celebrating, still at it two days after the solstice, the tourists long gone. They asked me not to take pictures of the sacred fire atop their little brickwork altar or the offerings of tamales and aguardiente.

The tree was just as awe-inspring.

Same tree from the squirrel’s POV. Also my desktop background.

This enormous, amazing tree has been growing in the central plaza in Tecpán outside the church I daresay since before the church was built. Pedro de Alvarado’s troops built their first permanent military base here in 1524 just after they razed the nearby Cakchiquel capitol of Iximché, at the ruins of which I spent the night of Ojlajuj Baktun. I have never seen a tree like this–it’s clearly some kind of conifer, but the foliage is fernlike, soft to the touch, though much thicker than a fern’s. I’ve researched to the end of my ability and I can’t figure out what it is. The twitter of a thousand birds in its canopy competed with the ranchero band ringing in the new era at the other end of the plaza. I sat on that wall with my back to its trunk and ate a chocolate-covered frozen pineapple.

Laguna de Chicabal is a tiny volcanic crater lake in Quetzaltenango department that spends about half its time inside a cloud. On the trail descending to it from the mountain, a hand-cut wooden sign asks visitors to stop and ask permission of the Mam ancestors before going on. On the path around the shore are twenty altars piled with calla lilies and carnations, each corresponding to one of the twenty days of the month in the Mayan ritual calendar. I paced it out labryinth-style, thinking of nothing, while the cloud condensed in gray jewels on my eyebrows. This tree corresponds to the altar of Noj, day of self-reflection and creative thought.

Next, maybe some temple meditations.

What by way of inertia we here came to call the end of the world, the Mayan apocalypse, I spent in Guatemala, the center of the Mayan world.

Now that the grand tidal wave of misinformation has crashed and the world didn’t end, I’ve had trouble figuring out what name to give that strange night’s vigil. “The end of the world” doesn’t work anymore. “Winter solstice” doesn’t quite cover it. The Mayans, both ancient and modern, called it 13 Baktun, or Oxlajuj Baktun, meaning simply that it represented, depending on how you want to count, either the beginning or the end of the thirteenth unit of 144,000 days since they started keeping track in 3114 BC. The Guatemalan tourism department’s propaganda machine has been calling it “the new dawn of the Maya”, plastering the words all over posters and websites like they’re a catchphrase for the latest summer popcorn doomsday movie—meaning, depending who you ask, either that it’s the dawn of a new golden age for the Maya, their culture will regain and even surpass what it achieved at its peak, its people will be respected again etc…or else that it’s merely the dawn of a new age the Maya happen to have predicted, but which is really up for grabs in terms of whose new dawn it will actually turn out to be.

Temple 3, Iximche archaeological site, Tecpán, Guatemala, half an hour before sunset, December 20th, 2012.


Temple 3 again, with ghost, wind and Orion, sometime after midnight on the 21st.

I’m not sure if anybody actually believes in the former interpretation. Certainly a lot of people are hoping for it, many of whom I heard speak or sing or pray at the ruins of Iximche in the cold, windy hours from the afternoon of the 20th through the morning of the 21st, as the sun’s last rays slipped from the surface of the altar, the moon and the constellations of the Feathered Serpent and the Seven Hundred Boys rose and set. When it came my turn to throw my candle on the sacred fire and light up the ceremonial cigar graciously provided for me by the Ministry of Sports and Culture, I prayed for that too. But I’m not holding my breath.

Smart money, sadly, must lie with the latter interpretation, which has been taken to heart by every one of Guatemala’s 28 political parties and pretty much everybody with a soap box or a chunk of rubble to lift them half a head above the crowd. A few days earlier, I happened to show up at the ruins of Zaculeu at the same moment as “next president of Guatemala” Manuel Baldizón (I strongly advise you not click that link without first turning down your computer volume), mid promo tour, solidifying his position as prophesied leader of the new era acclaimed by several local beauty queens and a half dozen white guys dressed in rented monkey and jaguar costumes. Surrounded by late Classic temples half-assedly “restored” with concrete in 1947 by the United Fruit Company, he somehow managed to keep a straight face as he promised to represent all Guatemalans, not just robber baron industrialists in geek-rimmed glasses like himself, but Quiche, Mam, Cakchiquel, even Garifuna, and to usher in a new era of peace and prosperity blah blah blah blah facepalm.

Baldizón at Zaculeu (nerd glasses, center right) with beauty queens and monkey man. Click for full size.

In case the above hasn’t made it obvious, nobody I met in Guatemala thought the world was ending. Nobody even brought it up—with the notable exception of a Korean 24-hour news reporter who interviewed me on the morning after. He asked what I was planning to do if the world actually ended. I disappointed him; I had absolutely no plans for that contingency. Hadn’t even considered it. Funny: I know exactly, down to the letter, what I’m going to do in the event of a zombie apocalypse—but the Mayan apocalypse would have caught me unawares. Good thing it didn’t happen.

He asked what I was doing there.

“I’m here,” I told him, “to find out what the real Maya think.”

Because I didn’t know. For all my research, for all the ranting I’ve done for years on this very subject, all my information has come from outsiders—white people, mostly—the kind who’ve spent decades sitting in jungle mud puzzling out fanciful interpretations of crumbling reliefs left behind by a decadent, brilliant civilization disappeared these thousand years without once looking up at the quiet, calm-eyed guide who led them here and wondering how or even if the one could have engendered the other.

Guatemala, like the US, like every other nation in the Western Hemisphere, lives with the legacy of its colonial past: a disenfranchised indigenous population, descended from those who lived there before everybody else showed up, but lacking nearly any say in what’s done with land that was once theirs. Unlike the US or any other nation in the Western Hemisphere besides Bolivia and maybe Peru, Guatemala’s indigenous population, with dozens of unique cultural groups and even more distinct languages than there are political parties, is actually the majority, yet they have if possible even less of a voice in their government and the world, less recourse to combat the appropriation of their lands, resources, and yes, their culture. Guatemala has yet to issue its indigenous peoples any casinos, if you follow me.

Perhaps you heard how in advance of 13 Baktun, Mexico banned Maya peoples from performing ceremonies at their own ancestral temples. Perhaps you wondered, like I did, why the hell anyone would do that. It didn’t take long to figure out. What bigger soapbox could the modern Mayan people hope for than the summit of an ancient Mayan temple on the day the whole world is waiting for the not-apocalypse they never predicted? If you’ve spent decades, centuries marginalizing those people, you’re probably not going to be particularly interested in letting anybody hear what they have to say. Especially if you’ve made big plans to invite a bunch of foreigners and charge them a lot of money to see the same ancestral temples, especially if those foreigners have collectively deluded themselves into thinking the Mayans whose doomsday prophecy they’ve bought into have been dead for a thousand years and at the same time developed some not very complimentary opinions about the state of your democracy.

We’re talking about countries who put ancient, jewel-bedecked Maya kings on their money. Can you see how the sight of a bunch of poor, oppressed actual Mayans might be muddying the message?

Everywhere I went in Guatemala, I saw evidence of the (overwhelmingly non-indigenous, non-Maya) government appropriating Maya cultural icons to promote tourism, validate the regime and foster a sense of national identity. In Guatemala City there’s a giant chrome and glass mall designed to look like a Mayan temple. At Zaculeu there was Baldizón, riding the crest of a populist political campaign funded by the sale of mining rights to indigenous lands in El Petén. At Iximche, while the real Maya were quietly murmuring prayers around a fire, the government carted in truckload after truckload of armed police, a stage and sound system, a garishly-painted plywood ballcourt and a bunch of white guys dressed up in feathers and beaded loincloths to reenact the ballgame to the tinny sounds of recorded birdsongs and thumping synthesized bass. Granted, at least they let the Maya people be there and take part. But there were, very clearly delineated, the fake government-sponsored prayers and the real indigenous prayers. The fake ones (amplified, with backing vocals) talked about a bright future. The real ones talked about a harried, tortured present.

And given all the bullshit about apocalypse we’ve been telling ourselves for years out here in the rest of the world, it’s those real prayers we need to hear, to remind us what’s still at risk.

Protesters at Iximche. Translation: 13 Baktun is our time, the time of the people. No to the illegal development of electric power. No to the privatization of natural hot springs. No to the privatization of communal lands. Repeal of the General Mining Law.

So. I’ve got a soapbox here, a little one. And despite being well aware of the problems involved in my being the one to tell you this, I still think it’s better if I say it than nobody.

Here, as best I can remember and in paraphrase, from a seven-page manifesto I heard read aloud in Spanish and Mam at Iximche on the first morning of the new era by a pot-belied Mam gentleman in a straw hat and scraggly black beard, is what the real Maya think.

This isn’t your new dawn, it’s ours. Stop trying to take it from us. Stop trying to profit from our culture. Instead, listen to our ancestors for a change. If you don’t want there to be a real apocalypse, stop destroying the earth. Stop damming and poisoning our rivers. Stop dumping pollutants into Lake Atitlan. Stop bulldozing our forests. Stop mining for gold. Stop evicting us from our lands. Stop massacring our people. Stop pretending like it didn’t happen. Stop pretending like we don’t exist. Archaeologists: stop saying the Maya are extinct. Let us live and speak and teach our children and practice our culture and languages in peace, or else this new Baktun will be even worse than the last one.

Update 1/31/2013: I’ve been looking for the full, real version of the above massively abridged, painfully subjective recollection. El Nubo has a printed copy, which I hope she’ll eventually post over at Cultural Survival; in the meantime, here’s an earlier edition of the same manifesto: Second Declaration of Iximche (en Español).

Zaculeu Temple 1, with flowers and ashes.

Urban Green Man is the both the title and intended subject matter of a forthcoming theme anthology from Edge Publishing for which I’ve been invited to submit a story. Considering all this moss that’s been creeping from my armpits and between my toes of late and the details of my living circumstances over the past couple years, you’d think this would be right up my alley, right in my hermitage, so to speak… but for some reason I’m really having a hard time at it.

The below ramblings on nature and the city are the result of an attempt at writing-avoidance aka “brainstorming” in order to figure out what the green man myth could possibly mean in an urban context and in the modern age.

Some variety of blue lobelia, best guess Lobelia kalmii, Franklin Park Wilderness, Roxbury, MA.

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Where I live now, no matter where I stand or how far I walk, it always looks like the woods are just beginning beyond the farthest-away squat little fenced-in company cottage I can see. I can pursue them, but when I get there, they’ve inevitably receded to exactly the same distance as before.

These days the actual forests have barb-wire fences around them and the skulls are decidedly un-mossy, so I dwell in forests of the mind. Justin has recently introduced me to the concept of psychogeography, which I gather basically demarcates any attempt to interpret urban landscape as the product, or the manifestation, of the internal landscapes of its inhabitants. I’m going to bend that a little to fit my own purposes. Or maybe completely ignore it, just fall back on the usual influences—Castaneda, Borges, Freud and Thoreau—under a different auspice.

Outside my office window there is an auto-body shop. It’s ugly. It makes high-pitched metallic noises repetitively. I have undertaken the mental exercise of replacing it with various monolithic elements of natural landscape lifted from my experience: a lichened granite ledge shaped by glacial processes, a kettlehole pond, a field of wildflowers, a hemlock glade, a Yucatan thicket, a colossal zoomorph of the Classic Maya. It works, to a point. There are some landscapes to which that space just won’t lend itself, even in my imagination: the mazelike warrens of thirty-foot boulders populated by owls and deer and Polyporous berkleyii in the woods of Satans Kingdom surrounding the neighborhood where I grew up. Or, you know, any mountainside I’ve ever fallen down.

But it keeps the bats out, if you get me.

It used to be easy. I could just step out into the garden with my whiskey and corncob pipe of a steamy midsummer night, maybe fiddle about a bit with the maize god statuettes guarding the tomatoes, look up across the hazy cornfields at King Philip’s Rock and pour out a bit of libation to the turning wheel.

Instead, I spent the moments surrounding midnight wandering the side streets east of a walled-off Boston Common, looking up past the evocative rootlike patterns of plinths and facades at the starless sky, smelling the smells of stir-fry and subway exhalations, marveling at the thirty kinds of not-English I heard from passersby.

Here’s this new blog Justin led me to, Next Nature, that deals with the unpredictable “natural” phenomena which arise from human culture. Fascinating stuff. I love this:

Our technological environment
becomes so complex
we start to relate to it
as a nature of its own

Gray Catbird, Dumetella carolinensis, Arnold Arboretum, Jamaica Plain, MA

Happy Solstice, wherever you are.

Sitting through my semi-annual Catholic mass the other Easter Sunday, I thought about ritual. In some ways, it seems a silly thing to do–the same thing, over and over. But we all do it. We all have rituals: religious or not, spiritual or not, whether it’s watching The Princess Bride for the umpteen thousandth time and struggling not to say every line along with the actors or lurching out of bed and blearily assembling the material components for a cup of tea. A ritual is a benchmark, a means for acknowledging and measuring change by observing something that doesn’t change. A ritual is also something you gain some emotional benefit from–otherwise you wouldn’t keep doing it.

I have climbed a lot of mountains. Not as many as some, not enough. But I’ve climbed my share. And there is absolutely a ritual to it, though I’m only really becoming conscious of it now. It goes like this.

Get up early, full of mixed dread and anticipation. Assemble what you think you’ll need to carry with you, then cull it down. The more you carry, the slower you’ll go, the harder it will be. Bring what’s essential, leave everything else. On the way to the trail, be aware of the ease of your conveyance. Shortly, by choice, you won’t be able to rely on it. At the beginning, move too quickly, tire yourself out prematurely. Rest. Tire yourself out again. Repeat until you settle into a rhythm. Time your breaths, count your heartbeats. Sing songs in your head–only the ones with repetitive riffs, those to which you remember almost all the words, and preferably those with relevant lyrics. Knocking on Heaven’s Door has always been a favorite of mine. Remember to look up from the trail from time to time–but not for too long. The higher you climb, the more careful of your footing you must be. Rationalize the exertion required. Are you a third of the way? Halfway? Three quarters of the way? At the peak, drop everything you brought with you and stare empty-minded into space for as long as it takes for your pulse to subside. Close your eyes and point yourself at the sun. Eat any food you carried with you. It will stick in your throat, but taste different from all other food you’ve eaten since the last time you stood on a peak. Drink water. Relive the ascent in your head in preparation for the return. Resist the urge to fall asleep. Think how far away the world is, how here you are, without all of it, still alive. All that stuff you left behind–you didn’t need it, even though you’re already missing it, already anticipating the moment when it will be returned to you. As you begin to descend, favor your ankles and knees. They’ll turn rubbery soon, you’ll risk falling. You’ll fall. By the time you get down, you’ll be sticky, dirty, so tired you’ll be barely in control of your extremities. The view from the summit will flash before your eyes when you blink. Stumble back to your conveyance. If you’re not driving, it’s okay to sleep. Stop somewhere along the way to eat a ridiculous meal, more copious and more rich than anything you’re used to. Consider it the first step in piling back on all that stuff you left behind. When you get home, shower. The dust and sweat and bits of stick and pine needle and sap and dead bugs that slough off down the drain–that’s your old self. Step out from under the stream. You’re renewed.

This is the tallest mountain I’ve ever climbed: Volcán Santa María, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, 12,375 feet. Santa Maria has been dormant since 1902. The smoldering protrusion on its left flank is Santiaguito, 8,500 feet, which began forming in 1922 and has erupted every few years or so since. The rocky cut in the foreground is the path of the pyroclastic mudflow from an eruption in 2008.

Variations on the ritual:

I got up at 4:15 AM. Venus and Orion were in the sky as we started hiking. I could barely see my feet. Our guide was Edgar, a 21-year-old, four-foot-tall Mayan cabbage farmer who does this once a week. There were hummingbirds everywhere, hundreds of them, sucking nectar from trumpetlike clusters of red flowers, shooting up into the heavens above the slopes and then diving madly, according to Edgar, for the pure joy of it. The locals, of the Mayan and Christian religions alike, consider this mountain sacred. We didn’t see practically anyone on the way up–it was too early–but at the peak, panting for breath and incoherent with altitude giddiness, we found altars of calla lilies and an old, old man with his wife and daughter singing laments, burning incense, importuning the saints. On the way down, there were scores of them, carrying offerings of flowers, food, huge jugs of orange soda. The boys stopped to congratulate us and shake hands. The adults looked suspicious. All of them indiscriminately tossed away their trash on the slopes of the mountain–water bottles, plastic packages of toasted corn nuts, chips, gummy candies, tissues. This saddened Edgar to no end–that people who purportedly love this mountain so much, even to the point of considering it holy, don’t have enough respect for it not to cover it with trash. For years he’s been trying to convince them to stop, organizing teams of foreigners to pick up trash thrown by his own people. But he’s young and idealistic, and his elders don’t seem much inclined to listen. So my sisters and I collected trash, filling up about a dozen plastic grocery bags in the course of our descent. We tried to help brainstorm solutions, but it’s a hard thing–there’s no way to get the word out. They speak lots of different dialects. Many don’t know a common tongue. Most don’t know how to read. My sister El Nubo, who works with community radio stations (about the only form of mass communication that works out here), said she’d try to help him get out some PSAs over the airwaves. I hope it works.

The Central American volcanic arc, looking east from Santa Maria.

Dancing rain god figure, Altar O, Quiriguá, Izabal, Guatemala

The first days of my second trip to Guatemala, everything felt weirdly comfortable, familiar. The sight of the one-legged guy nimbly navigating the steep steps of a chicken bus to ply his scarred palm and sad story no longer blows my mind. Likewise the spiderweb cracks cris-crossing the impenetrable blackness of every car windshield in the city. I have learned the appropriate words to apologize politely for being two feet taller than everybody else on the bus and my backpack clumsily wonking them all in the face. The dudes with tin shotguns on street corners and in tienda doorways no longer fill me with fear. In fact they almost make me feel safer—which may even be their actual purpose.

All of which was satisfying in a way. I felt less helpless, better able to actively participate in my surroundings. But I started to worry I was just on vacation here—that if I wanted the intensity and awe and revelation of my previous experience, I should have traveled someplace else.

I’m always looking for new setting details—unique tidbits of color or scent, idiosyncracies of human interaction that will make an otherwise mundane story leap off the page. I’m also looking for entirely new settings into which I can expand my spotty experience, the range of subjects and places about which I can “write what I know”. This isn’t the only reason I travel, but when I do travel, there’s a strong chance it’s what I’m doing at any given moment: soaking it all up like a sponge. I talked about this once before, including some caveats, in Expatriates and Homebodies.

There’s a danger, though, that I’ve run into repeatedly: falling too hard for a particular setting, loving it so much that it starts to feel wrong, disrespectful, to try to assimilate it into my fiction. I’m afraid to take liberties for fear of screwing up the truth that made me love it so much in the first place. This has happened to me most often and most painfully with respect to precolombian cultures. The Anasazi (more accurately the ancestral Hopi) have had a strong influence on my wild west centaurs setting, but all the stuff that actually includes them is in a trunk never to see the light of day. The Aztecs (more accurately the Mixtecs) I am afraid to even touch. With the Maya, it’s even worse. In the past I have been unable to stop myself writing slavish, Castaneda-influenced historical fiction about how the Mayans possess the spiritual Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything and we white people with all our rationalism don’t have the ghost of a hope. Which I loved, and even managed to sell, but which now fills me with uncomfortable embarrassment. I have endlessly blogged about them. And very recently, tenatively, I’ve been thinking about how I might dip my toe back into writing about them—though in a very different way than before.

I owe this new approach to this second visit to Guatemala.

That initial, superficial sense of familiarity never went away. But it was very quickly superseded by a whole new set of questions. I saw gradations, depth, in what had seemed uniform, and when I looked a little closer, I saw even more. I found myself thinking more and more about individuals—about character. What’s the difference, in terms of circumstance, upbringing, past experience, between the tuktuk operator who drives the white folks in circles to confuse them then tries to charge triple, the tuktuk operator who drives the white folks past his mom’s house to show them off to his nieces and nephews, asks the minimum fare without even haggling, and comes back to get them at a scheduled time at no extra charge, and the tuktuk driver who butters them up with disingenuous chatter, then veers into a blind alley and pulls a gun? (A tuktuk is a three-wheeled golf cart shaped like a giant red egg, powered by a lawnmower engine and blazoned with Jesus slogans, used as a car-for-hire for local transportation.) How do the Catholics and the Protestants get along with the Mayan traditionalists? How do the Mayan traditionalists get along with a more secular, idealistic younger generation? How does Guatemala look to somebody who moves to South Dakota to start a family, then has to come back and spend years away from them trying to secure a visa? And how does any of it develop into an integrated, educated, well-informed indigenous population, still in possession of its cultural identity, yet capable of joining forces to foster positive change, say, to effect a representative government under an indigenous president, like in Bolivia, or take advantage of digital media to foster political change, like in Egypt and Morocco?

The picture I have isn’t full enough, not nearly. I need to go back again, and again after that.

And the answer I have come upon for how to write fiction about a place and a culture I love too much to disrespect? Complexity.

Writing fiction about anything is an exercise in simplification. Words are never enough to encompass anything, the confines of narrative, of storytelling, even less so. The only way to honest about it, with yourself and with your readers, is to admit you don’t have the answers, and to try, to the best of your ability, to demonstrate why. I think the fiction that best succeeds at this (no coincidence, the kind of fiction I love most), is the kind that leaves things open. Borges, Asturias.

A king in the jaws of a jaguar-crocodile, North face of Zoomorph P, Quiriguá, Izabal, Guatemala

A tzompantli is a rack of sacrificial or ancestor skulls which often appears as a decorative motif in mesoamerican architecture and art. I think it originates with the Zapotecs of southwestern Mexico, and spread to other cultures of the region during the period of Zapotec colonialism in the ninth century. The mossy skull that is the namesake of this blog is part of a tzompantli. A lot of people over the years have misconstrued the tzompantli as evidence of the bloodthirstiness and barbarism of these cultures, and used it as an excuse to blow out of proportion their practice of human sacrifice. For modern celebrants of the Day of the Dead, it signifies the cycle of life.

I went to this the other day: Day of the Dead Tzompantli at Forest Hills Cemetery. It’s a celebration in Central and South American style, Christian and prechristian, cross-cultural, nondenominational, in memory of loved ones long and recently lost. I like the Phoenix site’s wording: “This event occurs in the past.” I didn’t take any pictures because they asked me not to, though it was vivid and gorgeous and has left an intense impression on me. But nobody told me I couldn’t write about it, so.

Across the street from my house, one of the iron fence rails of Forest Hills Cemetery has been bent to one side next to a scraggly bittersweet nightshade vine. If I duck down low and wriggle a bit I can get through easy.

The earliest graves here date from 1840, and the occupiers lean heavily to the upper class Victorian. The monumental symbolism features a lot of serene robed women with anchors at their feet, inverted torches wrapped in vines, headstones carved to look like tree stumps, lambs with heads eroded away, stone veils caught by the sculptor in the act of being pulled on or off. There are many old trees of great variety, imported by Harvard in the 1880s for the nearby Arboretum. They held the tzompantli ceremony in front of a cultivar of European beech whose boughs bend all the way to the ground and lie heavy across it like snakes, and whose yellow-brown leaves made a curtain like a reef of feathers. Before it, a broad ring of candles burned in colored cylinders surrounding a fire made from hundreds of white candles in a heap. There were four wooden altars at the cardinal points surrounded by pyramids of apples, trays of pastries, bread, tortillas, candy, flowers. On each altar sat a tall, long-haired white girl in a period smock and porcelain face paint that prevented her from making any expression but the familiar serene one of the statues. These girls, I believe, represented the Victorian ghosts. People in embroidered robes strolled about blowing on smoking copal and sage incense in heavy wooden censers carved in the shapes of animal heads. It wasn’t dark yet. The sun was in maples on the hill.

I knew an offering of food was required, but I didn’t have much in the house, so I brought a handful of red chiles dried from a couple summers ago in the pocket of my hoodie. Later it occurred to me that in the traditions of Peru, due to their potency, chiles were prohibited from certain ceremonies honoring the ancestors. And I’ve known some practitioners of this sort of religion who can get touchy on behalf of their dead. So the chiles stayed in my pocket, and I kept back from the circle a bit. They were my garlic, my piece of cold iron, holding me in this world.

It was the kind of slightly damp cold that creeps in and makes you have to force yourself not to shiver. Preceded by a slowly building whoosh like wind in leaves, fifty children with rattles tied to their ankles filed out from behind the tree, circled the fire and began to dance to drums and the trumpet of conch horns. A lady with a microphone recited verse in English, Spanish and some Aztec-descended tongue, honoring Xocomil, Pachamama and the dead.

I couldn’t get the tenor of the crowd at first. Some of the dancing kids were great showmen, doing pantomime bits about death and the spirit arising, the old resisting, the ancestors stepping in to drag them along when the time is right. They were having fun. They donned skull masks and shook canes at each other. During lulls in the choreography they busted out breakdancing moves. I laughed a lot, and the people around me did too–but there was something in their faces that quietly sobered me over the course of an hour, as the sun went down and the cold got stronger.

After the dances, the songs and the dumb-shows, everybody retreated behind the row of percussion instruments, leaving the circle open. The lady with the microphone invited the crowd to come in, stop at the central fire, and hand to the old woman who sat tending it prayers or poems or the names of loved ones written on slips of colored paper, which she would burn. Once you’d made an offering, you got a lighted candle. I stayed back. In the spirit of camaraderie–and of getting a little warmth into my bones–I climbed up over the wooded hill east of the fire ring. I watched the proceedings for awhile from up there among the pines, then circled back around to join in the parade that followed.

Out among the gravestones was a satellite altar, this one with photos of people, jewelry and candy propped against candles and unopened bottles of soda. This I guess was where the mirth backed off to let in grief. Everybody filed silently past it and on into the graveyard through the dusk. The ancestors and the pale-faced girls came with us. People around me talked about what their kids had been for halloween. Kids passed off candles to adults and then came demanding them back again before they burned down. It felt familiar, sad but comforting, like a wake among family, though I didn’t know anybody there.

We walked back to the circle. The kids danced some more with the windstorms on their ankles and sang and blew the conch trumpets, this time, I gathered, to guide the ancestors safely back from their jaunt in this world to the next. When everything was over, the lady with the microphone invited us to step into the circle and take some of the offerings to eat. I had a crunchy suncrisp apple and a piece of pan del muerto, a sweet bread made with anise seed.

She asked us to fill out recommendations saying why we valued the ceremony we’d just partaken in and why we thought it needed to keep happening. Apparently, it’s at risk. That’s why I’m writing this. Even if I’m somewhere else at this time next year, I want it to happen again, and keep happening.

By this time I couldn’t keep from shivering. I walked home alone across the graveyard in the dark, navigating by the light of Jupiter and the reflected glow of the city from the clouds.

Maize God, like Count Dracula, can travel the world only with his feet planted firmly in a fragment of his native soil.

This is about half of what I potted and brought to live on my new front porch: basil, rosemary, sage, wormwood, lemon balm, lavender, and one habañero pepper.

Time erodes all things, and new things, harder things, spring forth from their remains.

Old Maize God was made of orange-painted plaster. I bought him for a dollar from a wandering huckster kid at the Mayan ruins of Chichén Itzá and couldn’t work up the guts to toss him in the sacred cenoté. For three years, he guarded my garden from the likes of hungry wabbits, storm-felled trees and marauding bands of centaurs. But the winter of 2010 wormed its way through his plaster flesh, and he crumbled.

Young Maize God is carved from green-black jadeite, heavy and resilient as iron. I found him among the mazelike convolutions of market day in Chichicastenango, in the Guatemalan highlands. He’s done his best to take up the mantle of the old god—but come August, he and I must bid farewell to our much-loved little communal plot in the valley and travel east, back to the city, where fecundity will be restricted to a forest of pots on the back balcony.

Who knows what other change may come? Not I. Not he.

Happy solstice.