atitlan

Volcan San Pedro (view from my house)

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If you read my blog you know I'm a yarnhead. I traveled all over Mexico and Guatemala and got into fibercraft all the time, including having a crochet-down with a couple of Mazatec women on a footpath in the mountains in Oaxaca. I didn't speak spanish then, so we communicated with crochet hooks. When I eventually moved to Guatemala (and spoke Spanish by then, thankfully), I bought a hostel there and spent many months hanging out on Lake Atitlan, taking the boats back and forth across the lake and learning how to weave on a backstrap loom.

As well, I am a fan of Martín Prechtel, a Native American who was inducted as a tribal shaman in the Tzutujil Mayan town one over from where my hostel was. Reading his books before I left for the lake colored my impressions of it while there - though times have changed - and the double invasions of tourism and evangelical christianity have all but destroyed the culture he writes about.

This short poem was inspired by my love of fiber, handicraft, and the beautiful place and people that make up Lago Atitlan, Guatemala. In the Mayan way of thinking, the journey you take always leads to home. If you leave home, you have begun your journey home. I am on my journey home, too - someday I will return to the lake.

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Atitlán*

sitting on the dock
waiting for the boat
across to san pedro
two women crocheted
tzotchkes for the tourist trade

they chatted, gold teeth
glinting in the sunshine
reflected off the lake they called
the navel of the universe

while they crocheted
hooks and thread flying
through their fingers
they talked to each other
and wove webs
with their hands

* meaning "place of great water"