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
ing a new place being made, with la palabra. A word I can speak here
when I return.
Sacred Ground
This is the beginning story, ending. In my learning always this lesson,
word, taking the Dog day way of going over there. But as for the start
of how I crossed the line, learned about the amazing Maya mundo,
and came back somehow somebody else, that adventure began in the
Dog days, when, for a short period in my life, I thought I knew where
I was going, and what I was doing. Ayeee Mundo!!!
Notes
1. Dennis and Barbara Tedlock (known to my compadre as tenisibarbara). She is author
ofTime and the Highland Maya (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992 ); he
is editor and translator of the Popol Vuh (ny: Simon and Schuster, 1985 ), and more recently,
Breath on the Mirror: Mythic Voices and Visions of the Living Maya (San Francisco: Harper,
1993 ), in which I appear as a character named Tunkan. My compadre also appears in that
story as the storyteller up on Patojil Mountain, not far from the Dawning Place.
2. As a “coauthorial” applied anthropologist, my recent titles include “Acompañar Obe-
diciendo: Learning How to Help in Collaboration with Zapatista Communities” (with
Jeanne Simonelli), Michigan Journal for Service Learning 10 , no. 3 (summer 2004 ); “The
Irrational Efficiencies of Planned Globalization: Alternative Development and Plan Puebla
Panama in Chiapas” (with Jeanne Simonelli), Journal of the Steward Anthropology Soci-
ety 28 , nos. 1 – 2 ( 2004 ); “Disencumbering Development: Alleviating Poverty through Au-
tonomy in Chiapas” (with Jeanne Simonelli), in Here to Help: ngos Combatting Poverty
in Latin America, ed. R. Eversole (ny: M. E. Sharpe, 2003 ); a book to come out in early
2005 :Uprising of Hope: Accompanying Zapatistas with Alternative Development in Chi-
apas (Walnut Creek ca: Altamira Press) (also with Jeanne Simonelli); and fourteen other
articles in the last dozen years on development subjects in the region.
3. The Dawning Place is where, in the sacred book of the ancient K iche , the Popol Vuh,
the people gathered to see it dawn for the first time, dividing what we might call mythic time
from historical time in the document. Once it does “dawn,” most of the rest of the book is
a history of the accomplishments of the K’iche Maya, whereas before it is largely about cul-
tural heroes fighting deities of death and pride, and such things as the creation of the world
and humans. Today this same location is used for the initiation of daykeeping shamans or
aj q ij for the nine municipalities that share a border at the peak or close by, and has shrines
and caves associated with the rites of initiation, which the author experienced.
4 .Jakavitz is about four miles from the Dawning Place, an early K iche city.
