Last year, while visiting Santa Fe, and browsing in the famed book shop The Ark, my partner, Joe, handed me a book by Martin Prechtel who had once done a shamanic ceremony for him when he lived in Santa Fe. The dedication 'For the Watery Soul' immediately attracted me.
The book itself took my soul by storm and I plan to read it once a year around the time of my birthday (July 14).
On the back cover it says: 'Prechtel revives a ... style of learning, which calls for uncovering five additional layers of the story and diving with the reader deep into it's aboriginal richness, to bring to the surface all that is poignantly relevant to the reader's life and the present situation in the world.'
I'm full of admiration for what he has achieved here. The drawings throughout are Prechtel's own and they are astounding.
It's definitely a book to read aloud. Perhaps one I can suggest to the local community radio where I have yet to volunteer as a storyteller. I've always enjoyed reading aloud or being read to. I have a special family memory of my father reading On Watership Down to us all while we toured New Zealand on holiday.
In The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun: A Mayan tale of ecstasy, time, and finding one's true form, Martin writes:
The book itself took my soul by storm and I plan to read it once a year around the time of my birthday (July 14).
On the back cover it says: 'Prechtel revives a ... style of learning, which calls for uncovering five additional layers of the story and diving with the reader deep into it's aboriginal richness, to bring to the surface all that is poignantly relevant to the reader's life and the present situation in the world.'
I'm full of admiration for what he has achieved here. The drawings throughout are Prechtel's own and they are astounding.
It's definitely a book to read aloud. Perhaps one I can suggest to the local community radio where I have yet to volunteer as a storyteller. I've always enjoyed reading aloud or being read to. I have a special family memory of my father reading On Watership Down to us all while we toured New Zealand on holiday.
In The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun: A Mayan tale of ecstasy, time, and finding one's true form, Martin writes:
To me these Mayan stories are like water. To the Tzutujil there is only one water which rushes, puddles or is captured in a multitude of diverse forms like plant leaves, hot springs, rivers, lakes, ponds, ice, tears and streams, and like the amniotic fluid at our births, all this water is trying to get back home to the original mother of life, the Great Grandmother Ocean, the great dream pool.
Like water then, there are many, many forms of stories, more than anyone of us could ever know, but like the rivers and tears, each story contains the exact same storywater as the original "Big Story".
Like water then, there are many, many forms of stories, more than anyone of us could ever know, but like the rivers and tears, each story contains the exact same storywater as the original "Big Story".
From Martin Prechtel, The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun, 2005, North Atlantic Books, p. 4-5.
I had planned to be in Chichen Itza (close to many Mayan sites) for my birthday but at the last minute decided it was too extravagant for my current circumstances. I wonder? Time to dive back into life?
See also this post on my blog Vision Spa Retreat referencing this book.
Thomas Berry, the beloved cultural historian who died last month aged 94 years, also stressed the value of story when he wrote:
It's all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it is no longer effective. Our challenge is to create a new sense of what it means to be human.
Martin Prechtel has written one such story for me.
