This continues the story of the second blue marble and of my journey into the strange territory of the Mayan calendar. It took me four months to go receive what I knew to be a second Sastun. Fear of future grief mixing with present elation created a swirl of shifting feelings. “What color? What size? What do I do? What do I know?” When finally I held the gossamer pouch within which the Sastun nested in copal, I saw with amazement that although it was countries and years away from the first one, this marble was the same size and color, with little twinkles of turquoise light moving on its surface.During the time of the first blue marble, I began receiving songs in sounds that had no apparent connection to human language, yet had their own internal logic and order. This receiving happened very slowly, and I treated their remembering more like a game than a lesson. A psychic mentioned a most important object I had; something with a blue cover. This was the little notebook where I wrote down this vocabulary, and so I gave this study priority.
I struggled to accept the Sastun teaching me, and to stop believing I was in charge. I spent six years of thinking I had been shown a clue, following its scent with hopeful action, only to find the surface of the marble growing dim and vacant before my efforts. Something liquid, a candle nearby, songs of greeting, the strange language, different systems for ‘reading’ the lights: all shifted and transformed, became deleted and reconnected. A few clients would indicate an interest in a session, and I would enthusiastically gallop in my most current direction, believing their request was confirmation of right action, only to discover patterns of light that didn’t fit my system, and messages I couldn’t translate.
The juxtaposition of a children’s book and writings about time in Mayan reality created a breakthrough. In The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman, Lyra understood images on the compass rim by seeing a three dimensional ladder of possibilities from which she was able to intuitively select the correct meanings. At the same time I was studying the Mayan deities of the days, months, years, and other time measurements, because of this Sastun’s origin in Guatemala. I came to understand that every moment is a manifestation of forces, however favorable or adverse, that are always divine. Are the lights the arrivals and departures of divine forces within the many kinds of time that govern all existence? Is the Sastun a three-dimensional world of Time? Is recognizing the gods of day and night in a situation a way of describing the forces moving within that situation?
Another doorway opened when I discovered a Mayan poem in Shaking the Pumpkin, edited by Jerome Rothenberg, in which a man describes going to a wizard who reads a Saastun before giving advice. Now I understand that the liquid is liquor given with the candle as payment; the strange language is my gift of effort to the gods who move in five kinds of time, and that the lights are, at least, the faces and locations of these gods, and certainly much more. As I continue to investigate I am beginning to ask, “Why is this coming to me?” Probably not to satisfy my ego that likes to imagine lines of clients holding pints of whisky and candles. Maybe so I can share that the simplest of things—a blue marble—is awake. And perhaps it is we who are not.
