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"Most of the people
in our van took advantage of the interlude to shop at the nearby
stalls set up by highland Maya who had come down to Tikal to take
advantage of the steady supply of tourists.
However, one of our group,
Harriet Gillett, a retired physician and an inveterate bird-watcher,
had other interests. She noticed a nearby tree hevy with white
blossoms and surrounded by a raucous sphere of birds and bees. She
climbed out of the van with her binoculars around her neck, and
walked over to take advantage of the unexpected opportunity the
morning had provided. Our local guide, Francisco Florián, who knew
the forest and its creatures in an unusually intimate way, joined
her, explaining that the birds came to the tree only early in the
morning. The sounds and the odd sight
finally drew my attention and I too disembarked from the van and
edged closer to the buzzing center of the action.
I stared at the screaming
birds as they fought for positions among the flowers and the
hovering drone of thousands of bees. How beautiful, I thought, and
then my gaze happened to settle on the trunk of the tree. It had
thorns and it bulged just above the ground. It was a young ceiba
tree.
(Wikipedia)
I already knew that the ceiba
tree was the model for the sacred World Tree of the Maya, but I had
never seen one in flower when I knew what I was looking at. I was
really excited because normally you can't see the blossoms even if
you're there when the tree is in blossom. The fully mature trees are
hundreds of feet high. and the blossoms are very small. 'It's a ceiba', I chirped and
began looking for a branch low enough to see one of the blossoms up
close. Joyce Livingstone, a retired teacher, did the logical thing.
She bent over, picked up a fallen branch, and held it out for me to
see. I was too excited and full of myself to listen. She tapped my
arm more insistently and still I didn't hear her. Finally, in
frustration, she grabbed my wrist and raised her voice. 'Will you
look at these?' she said, waving the branch, and finally I did.
What I saw stunned me, for in
her hand lay a perfect replica of the earflares worn by the Classic
Maya kings. Suddenly I understood the full symbolism of so many of
the things I had been studying for years. The kings dressed
themselves as the Wakah-Chan tree, although at the time I
didn't know it was also the Milky Way.
(Wikipedia)
The tzuk [partition]
head on the trunk of the tree covered their loins.
The branches with
their white flowers bent down along their thighs, the double-headed
ecliptic snake rested in their arms, and the great bird Itzam-Yeh
stood on their head. I already knew as I stood
under the young tree in Tikal that the kings were the human
embodiment of the ceiba as the central axis of the world. As I stood
there gazing at the flowers in Joyce's hand, I also learned that the
kings embodied the ceiba at the moment it flowers to yield the sak-nik-nal, the 'white flowers', that are the souls of human
beings. As the trees flowers to reproduce itself, so the kings
flowered to reproduce the world." (Maya Cosmos)
(Wikipedia) |