For me, Christianity got it right when it put the image of Mother Mary holding baby Jesus

at the heart of its sacred symbolism. This relationship between mother and child is the root of

Holiness. The way they feed each other nourishment, food, and love is the basic building block

of all life. Only, the way I learned it, it was the relationship between Adam, Eve, an apple tree,

and a serpent that laid the groundwork for the story of Creation in Christianity. Our entire

Cosmology is based upon the betrayal of a male authority, God, and what happens when you

“give into” temptation and eat what you we’re told not to eat, in this case an apple. And so, we

have been forever riddled by our own passions and our own drive toward physical embodiment, food, love, and life.

As Robin Wall Kimmerer asks in Braiding Sweetgrass (Milkweed Editions, 2013), what if

we were given a different story of creation? What if we grew up feeding on stories where God,

and Passionate Love, and the Fruiting Earth were all in harmonic resonance with how we

celebrate and birth daily life, like the Tzutujil Cosmology Martin Prechtel describes in his

books. There, in their creation story, we are one of the many layers of a fruiting tree whose

roots are our ancestors, whose branches are our spiritual leaders/teachers, and whose fruits and flowers are the village people of now.

“Canyon Village understood the internal bigness of their world. Because every rock, trail,mountain, stump, spring, and incline was either the backbone of a dead giant in an old story,or a rock placed there by a Goddess who in her grief could go no farther, the land opened up in an internal immensity that was known only to the people whose world it was. The road map to this internal Tzutujil kingdom were the myriad of stories, mythologies, legends, and histories taught to them during ritual meetings and village initiations.” (Martin Prechtel, Long Life Honey in the Heart)

The Tzutujil’s life was a living form of Earth Reverence, woven into the mythic stories, the

cosmology that they sang, spoke, ate, and fed daily to each other. Their beliefs about what held them in their deepest moments of loss and betrayal, grief and illness, were fertile, fecund, sexual, hungry, generous and, in turn, their lives were an embodied, living reflection of this.

My own personal experience has been that only when I finally adopted, lived, breathed,

dreamed, and embodied this wild and fecund cosmology, did my own fertility “click” on. Just

knowing that there is/was a people in my lifetime who, even in their language, birthed life daily

through the ritual feeding of the spirits, that reflected their arduous daily task of feeding and

harvesting the earth so they could survive, has been enough to transform my entire existence.

As Prechtel describes it: “These (ritual) offerings kept the world alive, like the fertilizing and

watering of a tree, an ancient tree that continuously bears the fruit of now.” Everything is born

into an active tense in the endless ritual of creating life.

The Ancient text of divination illuminates, once again, the importance of understanding

relational dynamics and how they influence us:

I Ching #27 Nourishment

The symbol of Nourishment reminds us of an open mouth and appropriately calls us to nourish

ourselves. Here, nourishment alludes to the feeding of all aspects of man’s self: spiritual, emotional,and physical, and while suggesting the need to nourish self, may also be a call to feed or care foranother. While food and drink nourish the heart and the body, the symbol of an open mouth alsoreminds us of the virtue embedded in our words. One is reminded to choose his words carefully. A wise man moves his jaw with care. He does not risk injuring what is important for the sake of whatis unimportant.”

When ancient books of relational wisdom offer insights into what nourishment really is and

accompany them with a symbol of an open mouth, I listen. I am always hungry for what is

true.