One cannot love what so quickly flees.
Love quickly, the sun told me.
José Watanabe
I.
These, then, are the first words, the first speech. There is not yet one person, one animal, bird, fish, crab, tree, rock, hollow, canyon, meadow, or forest. All alone the sky exists. The face of the earth has not yet appeared. Alone lies the expanse of the sea, along with the womb of all the sky. There is not yet anything gathered together. All is at rest. Nothing stirs. — Popol Vuh, translated by Allen Christenson
There is a place before thought. Before the story about what is happening.
I have touched it in grief. In silence. In the fire.
It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t argue. When you are there, everything becomes more real. Nothing disappears. What we feel does not become smaller. What is happening does not change.
Something else opens that can hold it.
You remember.
An Ajq’ij learns to recognize when the sacred passes. A moment, says Nan Faviana. If you are not there, you miss it.
Ama rápido. Love quickly.
This is not a state we create. It is something we recognize — and then, slowly, something we learn not to leave so quickly.
Not a method. Not a destination.
Now.
And now.
II.
II.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind. — C.P. Cavafy
Every island. Every monster. Every clever escape.
Ulysses finds a way.
He always does.
And so the sea continues.
—
We do the same.
Storm after storm.
A new problem. Another test.
We adapt. We survive. We become better at it.
And still, we are not home.
—
Years pass.
The path grows longer with every solution.
The battles change. The loop doesn’t.
—
When Ulysses returns, he is unrecognizable.
Worn. In disguise.
She knows him.
Not by his glory.
By his scar.
—
She never moved.
III.
Inner work without soul becomes a loop. Spirituality without ground becomes bypassing.
Nan Faviana once told me that the sun and the moon never quarrel. An eclipse is not their war, she said. It is their meeting.
There are ways of working that open more than they can hold. Sensitivity becomes a credential. Love becomes a method. And the person leaves more open than they arrived, with nowhere to land.
There are ways of working that understand everything. Map it precisely. Name it well. And still, nothing moves.
Neither is a failure. Both are incomplete.
What becomes possible is not a combination. It is something else — a presence that does not lose the body and does not reduce the invisible.
The eclipse is not a problem.
It is where the light changes.
IV.
13 Tz’ikin.
At the top of a pyramid in Mixco Viejo, Tat Pedro asked me to lie down and look at the sky. Then he went silent. I understood the language in the shape of the clouds.
Then he asked me to stand. From there, everything looked different. Clearer.
He didn’t explain. He didn’t need to.
He showed me a door. The rest, neither of us did.
Healing is not something you do. It is something that happens when you stop doing something else.
Most inner work is about effort. Better coping. More sophisticated strategies. Better language for the same loop. It works. And it stays inside the same loop.
What changes this is not more effort. It is access — not created, but allowed. To what was always there, before the effort, before the story, before the loop.
The conditions for that access can be tended. The opening cannot be forced.
Like Tat Pedro on that pyramid — you go silent. You add nothing, and something opens.
What is true in you cannot be given. It can only be revealed.
V.
This is not a promise of transformation. The word has been used too freely, by too many people, in exchange for too much money.
There is a direction for the work.
Toward a relationship with yourself that is no longer organized around the fear of what you might find.
Not the absence of pain. A self that, when it loses the thread, knows where to return.
The loop reappears. The story tightens.
This is not failure. This is the spiral.
What changes is not the difficulty. It is the distance between losing the thread and finding it again.
Underneath all of it — before the effort, before the story — the stillness remains.
All is at rest. Nothing stirs.
It is always there. Not waiting. Not leaving.
Like fire.
Now.
And now.
If this resonated — the work continues at andresjimenezmontoya.com
Kavafis e historias de lxs abuelxs. Perfect match! (Amo leerte, siempre).