Another season , another reason to write ! Last year, after a challenging health event that left me in the hospital and in recovery back in my childhood home for almost a year , I found myself with free time on my hands away from my demanding job and spent much of 2022 embarking on a spirituality quest of sorts.
I found a lot of relief in books like Entering the Way of the Bodhisattva, and the Bhagavad Gita and followed those concepts to more new age western renditions of them including Tarot and Astrology . From Buddhism to Hinduism, concepts of regeneration, oneness, and essential truths about life revealed themselves. In a very uncertain year of my life, they guided me and helped me release control as I slowly built myself back up, with the inevitable winds that spin the wheel of fortune of life.
At the same time I was interested in the metaphysical realm, I looked at the physical one, studying physics, and looking to nature for answers . When all was said and done, I realized something I missed and it was something I thought I already knew about -my own religion. I grew up in a moderately Catholic home and while the texts never truly spoke to me then, I largely appreciated the cultural Mexican concepts it brought with it.
And so, for this collection, I thought to myself I want to both take a deeper dive into that history and the ways that indigenous religion enmeshed itself with Catholicism to create the brand of Christianity I grew up with. Aside from the politicization that comes with most if not all religions today, I truly believe in a spiritual essentialism, and that in many ways most belief systems tend to have these deeper truths that then are factioned into the kinds of neat boxes primed for tribalistic disputes between each other.
Drawing from shared imagery such as obsidian mirrors, the sun and stars, sanguinity, as well as the differences between them, the collection offers a historical and spiritual unification and explores both cultures' attempts to understand and identify the totality of the universe through the human experience.
I explore the concept of the 13 layers of heaven in Aztec mythology, and pair each with a corresponding concept in christianity. It starts with the Sky, then the Stars, the Sun, the Moon and into deep greens and blues. It speaks of death and life, of fire and light, to the home of the gods and finally, to the dualistic nature of the universe.
Below is the first poem, the rest you can find here:
Padre en el Cielo x Ilhuicatl-Meztli
Tierras Profundas
El temblor de los mares sube y baja
Olas como cielos
que se quiebran
que se colorean con su espejo
Colores cerúleanos aparecen en el mar
Especies sedentarias somos
Simplemente sutil es nuestro Dios
Reflejando su luz en nuestros ojos
Ilhuicatl-Meztli
Cielos que se mueven
Con soplos dionisíacos
Todos se unen:
Ehecatl y su Escuadra
Los Dioses direccionales
Nuestros Sacerdotes Cardinales de los Cielos
El viento nos envuelve y
Las panzas de las nubes se abren
Las zampadas por Tlaloc
Abriéndolas con sus manos y dejando ir
Lluvia que da vida
De cielo a tlālli
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