The Maya (Ancient Peoples and Places)

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As a curious amateur (I have no training in anything remotely related to anthropology or archaeology) I have been fascinated with the native peoples of the North, Central, and South American continents. The maize preparation traditions are still relevant, of course, but other traditions are necessary to provide the requisite variety for survival. Complete with poetry-related meditations and writing prompts, this collection of lively, elegantly written essays can be read as a standalone book or as a companion to the author’s acclaimed anthology The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy. There is even a god of drugs, Xochipilli, the Corn Flower Prince, whose magnificent statue sits in the National Museum of Mexico draped in a variety of calming and invigorating plants and mushrooms.

Sandy first taught at Antioch College’s Buddhist Studies in India program, then at the University of Michigan and Denison College, before joining the faculty at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York. I feel like having a thorough background in history and an academic mindset makes me the perfect audience for this book. This book also tells the stories of real-world people—from the Dalai Lama to Congressman John Lewis and more—whose lives were changed forever by forgiveness, including for themselves. It’s still a great primer if you want to go deeper into understanding the Maya, and it’s worth looking at for the collection of images alone, but… it’s not the most entertaining book I’ve ever brought home from the library.Among these is the Popal Vuh, the Mayan account of creation and the divine presence, with its interesting parallels and alternatives to Judaic sacred scriptures.

This book encompasses a wide range of landscape, portrait, and editorial photographs sure to impress and please any reader interested in travel, photography, and/or Himalayan culture. This seems almost inevitable as the Mayan and Christian scriptures agree on many key points, including the divine displeasure with the ‘proto-type’ humans and their annihilation by flood. The Codex receives its alternate name of the Tro-Cortesianus Codex after the two parts that were separately discovered. The Maya world, which covers Guatemala, Belize, and parts of Mexico, Honduras, and El Salvador, contains over a hundred ancient sites that are open to tourism, eight of which are UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and many thousands more that have been dug or await investigation.One wise teacher quoted in this book, Pema Chödrön, offers a simple practice for cultivating forgiveness: “First we acknowledge what we feel—shame, revenge, embarrassment, remorse. And through this incessant talk they create the key to their adaptive success: tradition, that is to say, the unquestioned lore of how things are done, the rules and regulations of how to live, routines about how to stay healthy, and, ultimately, how to survive. From this it follows that a particular day in the 260-day count, such as 1 K’an, also had a position in the ha’b, for instance 2 Pop.