IF THE LEFT DON’T GET YA, THEN THE RIGHT ONE WILL. Or…maybe they both grab you up at once!
Before I knew the words duality, dichotomy, or mestizaje, I was at home there. Right here in the nowhere. In the there of the everywhere in the bothlands on the borderline in the neitherworld at the same time. Thus the inbetween, the transition. It is my truth, nothing fancy. I don’t know, when I think about it, how we ever became convinced otherwise. Ideas about self, time and the ethereal land on which we meet. Trying to summon impressions of stone under our feet.
That is the illusion, isn’t it? Always? That we bang into? The one that hurts, the one that only lives to die, that only arises to be broken. Over and over and over. I can’t count how many times I’ve felt I had arrived. In one way or another. Remembering that even when I do arrive it is only a plateau in relation to where I had just been standing is a personal challenge and imperative. Which is why, of course, I always come back to that truth. Remembering that the bestowing of symbols upon events and times is purposeful and important. Ritual and recognition and reverence and reification. Important. But again, the conversation about Symbol and Essence.
I love how the Aztec and Mayan calendars are round. Symbols change. Essence repeats. Beginning meets the end in the middle. Time passing as a line marching left is both a tired tradition and modern riddle.
In all the ways I can forget this, there is an abundance of shame and pain and foolishness to be had. And the pain arises, again, from clinging to that illusion of a frozen moment, to the mask, to the rotted husk. To cramp within the seed and not to split the husk in two is to die into that feeling of security, stinking, small, cemented and with a dullness that will spread through the flesh and the veins and the fingernails and the teeth until nothing stirs but flake and ash.
Change is pain.
I was born on the sixth of March, which is the day that begins the Aztec month of Tlacaxipeualiztli. Tlacaxipeualiztli is a Náhuatl word that some sources claim describe the act of wearing skins, others as the act of flaying men. Tlacaxipeualiztli was a 20 day period of festivities and rituals and sacrifice that were meant to see the change of seasons throuvgh, from dry to rainy. It was believed that the old season—the dry, spent season—had to be peeled away like a husk, like a dead skin, to reveal the new…
