The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic

The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic
The Parallel Lives of People as Plants: Keeping the Seeds Alive

Martín Prechtel’s experiences growing up on a Pueblo Indian reservation, his years of apprenticing to a Guatemalan shaman, and his return to the U.S. after fleeing from Guatemala’s brutal civil war inform this lyrical blend of memoir, indigenous wisdom, and spiritual call to arms. The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic is both an epic story and a cry to the heart of humanity to keep alive the seeds of our “original forgotten spiritual excellence.”

Prechtel relates our current state of ecological crisis to the rapid disappearance of biodiversity, indigenous cultures, and shared human values. He demonstrates how real human culture is exterminated when the real, non-genetically modified seeds of the plants that feed us are lost. Like plants that become extinct once their required conditions are no longer met, authentic, unmonetized human cultures can no longer survive in the modern world. To “keep the seeds alive”—both literally and metaphorically—they must be planted, harvested, and replanted. The viable seeds of spirituality and culture that lie dormant within us need to sprout and grow into real sets of cultures welcome on Earth.

“While it may sound strange to some, the greatest blessing in life is that none of us are born at the beginning of time, not God, not Moses, nor any of them types, not atoms, not light, nor heat, not matter nor antimatter, not seeds, not stories, nobody, nothing, nowhere. Nothing real is born at the beginning of Time.” — excerpt from The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic