Mayan Mythology: Ixquic

One and Seven Hunahpu must face a night in Dark House, which is totally black inside. They are given a torch and two cigars, but they are warned to keep these burning all night without consuming them. They fail this test, so their hosts sacrifice them the next day instead of playing ball with them. Both of them are buried at the Place of Ball Game Sacrifice, except that the severed head of One Hunahpu is placed in the fork of a tree that stands by the road there. Now, for the first time, the tree bears fruit, and it becomes difficult to tell the head from the fruit. This is the origin of the calabash tree, whose fruit is the size and shape of a human head.
Blood Woman (Ixquic), the maiden daughter of a Xibalban lord named Blood Gatherer (Cuchumaquic), goes to marvel at the calabash tree. The head of One Hunahpu, which is a skull by now, spits in her hand and makes her pregnant with Hunahpu and Xbalanque. The skull explains to her that henceforth, a father's face will survive in his son, even after his own face has rotted away and left nothing but bone. After six months, when Blood Woman's father notices that she is pregnant, he demands to know who is responsible. She answers that "there is no man whose face I've known," which is literally true. He orders the owl messengers of Xibalba to cut her heart out and bring it back in a bowl; armed with the White Dagger, the instrument of sacrifice, they take her away.*(17) But she persuades them to spare her, devising a substitute for her heart in the form of a congealed nodule of sap from a croton tree. The lords heat the nodule over a fire and are entranced by the aroma; meanwhile the owls show Blood Woman to the surface of the earth. As a result of this episode it is destined that the lords of Xibalba will receive offerings of incense made from croton sap rather than human blood and hearts. At the astronomical level Blood Woman corresponds to the moon, which appears in the west at nightfall when it begins to wax, just as she appeared before the skull of One Hunahpu at the Place of Ball Game Sacrifice when she became pregnant.
Once she is out of the underworld, Blood Woman goes to Xmucane and claims to be her daughter-in-law, but Xmucane resists the idea that her own son, One Hunahpu, could be responsible for Blood Woman's pregnancy. She puts Blood Woman to a test, sending her to get a netful of corn from the garden that One Monkey and One Artisan have been cultivating. Blood Woman finds only a single clump of corn plants there, but she produces a whole netful of ears by pulling out the silk from just one ear. When Xmucane sees the load of corn she goes to the garden herself, wondering whether Blood Woman has stripped it. On the ground at the foot of the clump of plants she notices the imprint of the carrying net, which she reads as a sign that Blood Woman is indeed pregnant with her own grandchildren.

(Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of life,
translated by Dennis Tedlock)

DOHA

Namaste!

This morning, when I was walking to take the microbus, which would take me for the last time (this time, I hope) to the TUTH, a bird shit on my head. They told me, it is a lucky sign. I really wish it's so. I wish it means that I'm coming back, maybe soon, maybe in some years...

I'm at the airport in Doha now, waiting for my flight to Frankfurt... thinking about the past four months, thinking about before that time... remembering everything. To be sincere, when I just arrived I didn't like the city Kathmandu, I didn't like Thamel and I didn't know much about TUTH. With the days, getting used to many new things, finding some others which reminded me about my own place (Guatemala) and above that, after the trip to Palpa (with many off the surgeons), I started feeling more and more confortable in Kathmandu, in Thamel, in TUTH! And now, as I'm leaving I can only say that I don't know exactly how to feel. On the one hand, I'm feeling happy to see and meet many beloved people in Germany again (my brother, my family, my friends), on the other hand I'm feeling sad for leaving Nepal, but also glad and happy that I'm sad, because being sad means, that I'm missing Kathmandu, to miss it means, that I enjoyed, that I'm leaving a part of my heart there... and it makes the possibility of coming back much more bigger!

I'll try to improve my English, to feel the same joy writintg as when I'm writing in Spanish or German and so, make the reading more enjoyable! Oh yes, I'll be very very happy to get some comments or mails!

Hope to hear or see you soon, either in Nepal or in Germany or in Guatemala!