Long life honey in the heart

Mayan tradition does not teach that the Gods want people to be sinless or perfect, but they believe that the Gods love beauty,eloquence,fine clothes, great music, fine poems, bravery, high animal spirits and gratitude. These human qualities taste like honey to the Gods and the Gods are like bears who have come into the village whenever they smell that honey. The mayan's main and ancient job is to be beautiful and grateful.

From these metaphors of honey, of Gods crazy about smoke and dancing we get a scent of the "original flowering of the earth," that is the fantastic fragrance that can come into human life when despite madness and greediness old women and old men help the young ones to embody beauty and eloquence...

It is good for each person to be in debt economically and spiritually to every other person in the village, it is wise to give paybacks to the spirits and to mother Earth constantly, every ten minutes, it's good to weep generously when a human being dies so that he or she can make it all the way across to the other side.

It's enlivening to understand that the Gods are charmed by us human beings because we have thumbs-which spirits do not- and so can carve masks, weave cloth, invent musical instruments, play them, whittle sticks and make paintings.

It is good to know that what is needed most in the world, more even than food or warmth- is eloquence.

~foreword to Martin Prechtel's Secret if the Talking Jaguar by Robert Bly