#Martin Prechtel

[innervoiceartblog]

“Courtship is to sit next to someone and discover what they love.”

~ Martín Prechtel

Artwork: Catrin Welz-Stein

[ancestorsalive]

"Because most of us have been orphaned from our ancestral land and the ways of our people, we suffer with the restlessness and ache of not-belonging. Instead of trying to regain what has been lost, Martín Prechtel teaches that we must learn to live in the way our ancestors lived; in reverence and indebtedness to the Holy in Nature.

One powerful practice is to create a place in your home where you know the origins of everything. Not just where a thing came from, but who made it and with what skills, and at what cost to its roots. This Place of Origin may be small and sparse at first, but you add to it over time and, when the young ones come up around you, you tell the stories that you’ve collected in the hopes that one day, where you stayed put becomes a place of Belonging again."

~ Excerpt from “Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home” by Toko-pa Turner (belongingbook.com)

[juliansummerhayes]

These amazing individuals have their greatness suspended like emergent butterflies entombed in the clear plastic of the surrounding culture’s infatuation with endless mediocrity held motionless by a stratified business culture of mediocrity managed by clever thieves who know that the love, grief, generosity, and well-developed sense of life’s wonder of such people do nothing to maintain the necessary state of constant desperation and urgency in a population terrified by scarcity or of being left out of the herd, for lucrative business to expand.

Martin Prechtel

[astranemus]

This Hole of the original tree was in the middle of the village around which a small temple had been raised long ago. When the Spaniards built their monument to their God, they built it right over that temple. The Hole was now right in the middle of that church and had miraculously survived there for over four and a half centuries.

Ironically, once a year on Good Friday the old-time Catholics had used the Hole to brace a heavy timber cross two stories tall on which they reenacted the crucifixion of their God-man Christ, with a well-articulated image of Jesus killed. The Mayans saw the cross as the original tree and Jesus as the diverse fruit of that tree, so they covered the dead Jesus at Easter with millions of beautiful flowers so that he was entirely hidden in beauty. When the Catholics lifted him nailed to his tree, the Mayans saw a flowering tree whose fruit was God's-gift-son crucified, whose blood ran down the tree into the Hole to feed the roots of creation.

It was not the original Tzutujil method, but since the Hole was left undis turbed the rest of the year there was no conflict. When the Franciscan fathers saw the hierarchy weeping, praying, placing fire, flowers, liquor, and incense into the Hole throughout the year, they assumed the Indians were venerating the Passion of Christ.

The sacred Hole was about words coming together and about longing, remembrance, and feeding what needed to live. Ma Um, Spider, was the official in charge of this portal. He would hold this position for life or as long as he wanted until he chose to pass the role of guarding and maintaining this Hole onto a shaman with the desire and knowledge. Ritually, we called this Hole the Umbilical Stump of the Earth Fruit and, like the navel on an orange, this spot was the memory of the ancient flowering.

Martín Prechtel, Long Life, Honey in the Heart: A Story of Initiation and Eloquence from the Shores of a Mayan Lake

[soakinmidiamonds]

I had drunk so deeply of grief and innocently gambled so hard with fate and irony that a special kind of vision was gathering in my eyes, not entirely clear just yet.

-Martin Prechtel

[godfatherofsol]

Turn that worthless lawn into a beautiful garden of food whose seeds are stories sown, whose foods are living origins. Grow a garden on the flat roof of your apartment building, raise bees on the roof of your garage, grow onions in the iris bed, plant fruit and nut trees that bear, don't plant 'ornamentals', and for God's sake don't complain about the ripe fruit staining your carpet and your driveway; rip out the carpet, trade food to someone who raises sheep for wool, learn to weave carpets that can be washed, tear out your driveway, plant the nine kinds of sacred berries of your ancestors, raise chickens and feed them from your garden, use your fruit in the grandest of ways, grow grapevines, make dolmas, wine, invite your fascist neighbors over to feast, get to know their ancestral grief that made them prefer a narrow mind, start gardening together, turn both your griefs into food; instead of converting them, convert their garage into a wine, root, honey, and cheese cellar--who knows, peace might break out, but if not you still have all that beautiful food to feed the rest and the sense of humor the Holy gave you to know you're not worthless because you can feed both the people and the Holy with your two little able fists.

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

[idiotthewise]

Listen to The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic by Martín Prechtel on Audible. https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/1623176360?source_code=ASSOR150021921000V

Very good. Martin Prechtel.

[sevenseptember]

Grief expressed out loud for someone we have lost, or a country or home we have lost, is in itself the greatest praise we could ever give them. Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.

Martin Prechtel

[something-that-needs-nothing]

We are already facing mass extinction. There is no removing the heat we have introduced into the oceans, nor the 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere every single year. There may be no changing what is happening, and far worse things are coming. How, then, shall we meet this?

“The question is not are we going to fail. The question is how,” author and storyteller Stephen Jenkinson, who has worked in pallative care for decades, states. “The question is, What shall be the manner of our inability to care for what was entrusted to us? The question is our manner of failing.” Jenkinson, who now makes his living by teaching about grief and the acceptance of death as an integral part of living, spoke eloquently about grief and the climate disruption during a lecture he gave at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. When he talks about our failure to care for what is entrusted to us, he is also saying that the time to change our ways is long past. “Grief requires us to know the time we’re in,” Jenkinson continues. “The great enemy of grief is hope. Hope is the four-letter word for people who willing to know things for what they are. Our time requires us to be hope-free. To burn through the false choice of being hopeful and hopeless. They are two sides of the same con job. Grief is required to proceed.”

Each time another scientific study is released showing yet another acceleration of the loss of ice atop the Arctic Ocean, or sea level rise projections are stepped up yet again, or news of another species that has gone extinct is announced, my heart breaks for what we have done and are doing to the planet. I grieve, yet this ongoing process has become more like peeling back the layers of an onion-- there is always more work to do as the crisis we have created for ourselves continues to unfold. And somewhere along the line I surrender my attachment to any results that might stem from my work. I am hope-free. 

A willingness to live without hope allows me to accept the heartbreaking truth of our situation, however calamitous it is. Grieving for what is happening to the planet also now brings me gratitude for the smallest, most mundane things. Grief is also a way to honour what we are losing. “Grief expressed out loud for someone we have lost, or a country or home we have lost, is in itself the greatest praise we could ever give them,” thinker, writer and teacher Martin Prechtel writes. “Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honours what it misses.” My acceptance of our probable decline opens into a more intimate and heartfelt union with life itself. The price of this opening is the repeated embracing of my own grief. Grief is something I move through, to territory on the other side. This means falling in love with the Earth in a way I never thought possible. It also means opening to the innate intelligence of the heart. I am grieving and yet I have never felt more alive. I have found that it’s possible to reach a place of acceptance and inner peace, while enduring the grief and the suffering that are inevitable as the biosphere declines.

Dahr Jamail, The End of Ice

[radical-revolution]

The fact that commercial culture always panders to the lowest common denominator of awareness and taste should not stop us in our personal revolution to become real human beings.

—Martin Prechtel

[innervoiceartblog]

The gods drink at the heart like a deer in a river.

~ Martin Prechtel, Secrets of the Talking Jaguar.

Artwork: Deer Heart Spirit of the Ancient Woods © Raine @ Inner Voice Art

[lioninsunheart]

“We live in a kind of dark age, craftily lit with synthetic light, so that no one can tell how dark it has really gotten. But our exiled spirits can tell. Deep in our bones resides an ancient, singing voice who just won't give up making it’s beautiful, wild noise. The world won't end if we can find them.” ~ Martin Prechtel- Artwork by: Alessi Lannetti

[astranemus]

At the center of the net of sacred mouths was a Hole through which all of creation as we knew it had originally gushed, spreading and growing the mighty net like vines of the far-reaching universe on whose stems the buds and flowers of this creation blossomed into all the lands, plants, weathers, waters, animals, and winds, the veritable tangible reality of this existence. Out of this Hole had grown and flowered a magnificent vine, and a tree and vine on whose summit perched a gigantic eagle, which some said had two heads, one male and the other female. This original mother tree had flowered and then fruited, covering herself first in diversity. She gave birth and made fruit, of which there were no two alike. Then each fruit of that first flowering seeded itself in the surrounding earth and grew its own vine shoot, or umbilical cord.

Now avocado trees bear only avocados; deer don't give birth to falcons; birds don't hatch avocados. All things exclusively reproduce their own kind. Having achieved diversity, the old vine died back, the old tree dried up, and, over thousands of years, died and rotted into a humus that became the Earth. The vegetal memory of the old tree in its humus continued to fertilize the old tree's dream of diversity through its decay.

The places on this network of vines - the mountains and valleys, springs, oceans, and volcanoes where the first seeds took root, dawned, and sprouted this world into life - were the locations of those hollow knots in the maze of sacred places in the village streets.

Having died back, the vines and trees that bore all life left us with hollow places, mouths that had to be nourished, where trunks had once stood. This nourishment was ritual itself, and ritual fed the deified earth and the network of time carried from each of these old places as spiritual humus, allowing the ancestral roots of all things to absorb enough ritual nutrients to keep the earth alive in the diversified and motion-oriented forms we live in today.

When the Original Trunk and Vine had died back, she left us with the most powerful Hole, mouth, hollow knot of all, right in the center of the universe. Out of this Hole our lives still flow. We the Scat Mulaj fed the world there, and began and ended all our rituals there.

Martín Prechtel, Long Life, Honey in the Heart: A Story of Initiation and Eloquence from the Shores of a Mayan Lake

[wiebkerauers]

Hi friends,

I am so glad to be part of this cool project: its a calendar to set awareness of the climate change. every sold calendar supports „Plant-for-the-Planet“

Go and get one and enjoy illustrations from all these artists: Günther Jakobs (Illustrator), Regina Kehn (Illustrator), Nina Dulleck (Illustrator), Stefanie Jeschke (Illustrator), Pe Grigo (Illustrator), Wiebke Rauers (Illustrator), Dirk Hennig (Illustrator), Isabel Kreitz (Illustrator), Felicitas Horstschäfer (Illustrator), Florentine Prechtel (Illustrator), Martin Baltscheit (Illustrator), Mila Marquis (Illustrator)