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Dog Days
diviner.^1 I was an applied anthropologist with worlds to fix.^2 No one
had ever explained to me that in addition to the divinations (check),
the dreams (check), the special sickness with the appropriate visions
(check), all these “impersonal recruitment” indicators, the one other
sure sign of divinatory destiny besides my sacred calendar birth day
is extreme reluctance to take up the beans, to count the days.
Death’s Opening
The world changed. Now every day was like a flavor, not just anoth-
er day, or the simplicity of weekday versus weekend, as I had previ-
ously lived time. Now all of time had another frame placed around
it, in twenty-day rounds, and with the dance of the thirteen intensi-
ties. Deer days hard to get on top of, Dog days of desire and intuition,
Bird days of fortune, so many influences to look for, so many signs to
read, ponder, read again at the table, at the chair. Magic and mean-
ings everywhere, everywhen. Now through the focusing lens of Maya
time and holy space the opaque world of traditionalism emerged, and
when I looked out on the projects we were attempting from the bor-
rowed vantage point of my compadres of the table, it seemed suddenly
all wrong, culturally misaligned, illogical mistake upon ignorant mis-
take, half a dissertation’s worth of well-meaning disasters. But that is,
or was, another long story.
Healer’s Mount
Not long before leaving the Forest People, after I had quit Save the
Children in disgust, but before the time of the evil men and their geno-
cidal violence, I was walking alone in the area where Robert Carmack
had discovered some of the early Kíicheí settlements, taking my vision
to the ethno-archaeological map to see what arose. I was brought out
of my intellectual reverie about the Place of Dawning in the Popol
Vuh, the far mountain peak where I was initiated, and, locally speak-
ing, time as we know it began, by a small agitated man with limited
Spanish, requesting my help in the aid of a sick child.^3 Now, in Guate-
mala, I had often been approached by people seeking medical advice
