Maya Yucatán: An Artist's Journey

Chapter One: The Ancient land

West Palace of the Nunnery Quadrangle, Uxmal. East Acropolis, Yaxuná. 1 Yucatán—to me the name itself sounded a golden, mythic tone. The picture that springs to mind is an image of tropical forest, bright sun on white beaches, and the churches of colonial times. But at the center of this vision the ancient Maya cities that appear, almost supernaturally , from the deep jungle are the hallmark of the landscape. In that vast limestone plain I learned early in my travels that when I saw a lonely hill standing in the flat it was certainly a pyramid of the ancient Maya, still clad in vegetation and surmounted by tall trees. I have climbed many of these temple-pyramids and was thrilled to glimpse ranked courses of smoothed stone and sometimes the sculpted faces of deities, or of kings and glyphs from a thousand years ago. Before ever setting out on my adventures in Yucatán I did not know that I was preparing to walk a spiritual path in that ancient country. Before going there I had not taken much account of my yearning to seek out sacred places. But in Yucatán I discovered this longing, for wandering among the people and landscapes of the chapter one The Ancient land 2 / Chapter One peninsula, I eventually understood that there was an invisible spirit world of the Maya that animated their stories, their old ruins, and all their works from three thousand years of living in that ancient land. Alongside that unconscious quest for the spiritual, I was also looking at the ancient Maya through the eyes of its artists, for those people who could read and write hieroglyphs, design buildings, paint and sculpt the programs of public expression all sought to embed the strongest emotional and cultural power in the arts of the city. Though I was only dimly aware at the time, it is these powerful arts that reveal the spirit world, and I realized in the end that it was therefore their arts and their spirit world I had set out to understand. I grew up in California’s Mother Lode. This is the gold rush country , that foothill region of the Sierra Nevada where gold-laden quartz veins plunge deep inside the metamorphic hillsides. Coming from the mountains, I thought that beautiful geography was mountainous. Yet, the first time I arrived in Yucatán I drove for hours on the straight Mission Church,Yaxuná. The Ancient Land / 3 roads in that flat land, and my first impression was of monotony. I had come prepared to love the place, this Yucatán with its rich name, redolent of mystery and adventure. But it turned out to be a flat plain of jungle, where you could not see more than twenty yards into the twisted vegetation, and whose hot and waterless trails seemed a dangerous labyrinth, even to a country boy like me, familiar with the mountain forests of home. However, that was only my first, and very briefly held, impression. A few days exploring the ancient ruins set me straight. Upon seeing the people of the traditional pueblos, the Franciscan churches, the secluded remnants of old haciendas, I understood that the subtle complexity of the land far exceeded the plain flatness of the place. My prejudice for hill country against flatland was quickly overcome by the sacred air of the place, the beauty of its tradition, and the effect of the ruins on the imagination. I realized that the beauty of Yucatán rested in the historic layers of Maya culture, past and present, as well as the promise of a future by way of a resilient and tough Maya people. Over the longer run I needed to experience the daily rhythm of Yucatán, to enjoy the daily change of sky and sunlight, and to explore the hidden byways and corners of the history found in the scattered ruins. With its stern sun and the monsoon clouds of the rainy season as a background, and with the ruins of several historical episodes all strewn about the country, in the end it was the enduring character of the Maya people that spoke to me of a place not so much of sheer physical beauty but of an ancient land that has at its core the spiritual integrity of the Maya race. Later I would find that Yucatán also had some hills, densely populated...