17 - The perspective that indigenous initiations puts on relationships
I've been thinking about how to write the next installment of this story for three weeks, and started writing opening paragraphs several times. Some words of Martín Prechtel are ringing in my head, about how, when the old traditionalist Mayans in his village got asked a seemingly simple and straight-forward question by a modern-minded person, like "How do I get to the market?" they would be met with a long and bewildering blizzard of eloquent beating-around-the-bush, which was meant, not to throw the visitor off the path to an answer, but to give the poor little orphan question a nest to grow up in. In other words, to put it efficiently, what is valuable is not efficiency and "getting what I want," but the intricate and delicious messiness of being related beautifully with everything. At least, that is the gist of what my poor civilized brain can remember of the pages of description he writes about this indigenous way of interacting with questions. A part of me...