0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
Dog Days
who will give a more conservative perspective on the efforts at ra-
tional change. It gets quaintly domestic, off on the agency motorcy-
cle at eight, after the morning breakfast of tortillas and chile around
the comal, back by five or six for more of the same. The language
starts coming, I am removed from the dining room and relocated to
the kitchen, somewhere between the teens and the newly married in
the food serving order. After six months I find I am almost the wall
fly, helped, I have come to believe, by my enthusiastic participation
in anything and everything when home, including a lot of religious
activities. I am careful to get my own offerings and keep up with the
Joneses as regards offerings made to the Sacred Earth, among other
hungry entities, and I follow along with the treks to this shrine and
that, some local and some farther away. Sometimes a project vehicle
gets procured for a difficult peregrination, and sometimes it is just the
old shaman and me, on a dirt bike, leaping through the landscape to
some millennial shrine.
Inner Earthquake
Then, one Sunday afternoon, amid the lights and shadows of ado-
be, beams, and tiles, the melodious voices of children and the slap of
the loom beater, old Don Lucas takes the divining table out, and in
a strangely excited state, casts, again and again, those shiny red and
black beans across the cloth. Shajenam, always the same. Validation
through repeat identical outcomes of a demonstrably random proce-
dure. Likelihood, initially one out of four times, continues to dimin-
ish with each throw. I once saw him do twenty-three throws with the
same outcome, but that is another story. “You see,” he says to me,
“no change, the same message, the same news. You have to receive
the bundle, you have to gather the path.” “Do it again,” my feeble re-
poste, in my panic and surprise. Lo mismo.Shajenam.
Shaman’s Ambush
How about a second opinion? My head rebounds with this possible
way out. I have already asked my compadres, Don Lucas says, with
a tickled sort of resignation. Here is where I learned that compadres
are made in shamanic initiations, not just weddings and births, but
