Synopsis

When Jan moves to Guatemala with her young daughter to run a medical clinic on the heels of her divorce, she knows the experience will be difficult and life-changing. But she doesn’t anticipate all the ways she will change. To make sense of her professional, personal, and parenting turmoil in a country with plenty of its own turmoil, Jan finds herself adopting a Maya worldview that weaves together concepts of duality (there can be no light without dark, no joy without pain), harmony with nature, and the importance of connecting to the past to understand one’s present self.

Awash with elements of Mayan mythology, history, and culture and innumerable revelations of the compassion, intelligence, and resilience of the Guatemalan people, Bird’s-Eye View is a coming-of-middle-age story that shows how viewing life through the prism of a different set of myths can help an individual understand the familiar tales they have unwittingly followed.

Amazon

Excerpt

Everything has a spirit

In an animistic cosmology such as the Maya world view, the natural and supernatural realms co-mingle, and all things are imbued with a sacred essence. Everything has a spirit—the rocks, the lake, the trees.

The spirits of trees are evidenced by the fact that they grow back when they are cut down, so it is forbidden to sit on a stump because that would be sitting on a spirit. Also, because the tree has a spirit, before cutting it or using its wood, one must ask permission of nature and wait until a full moon. If not, the tree’s spirit can harm the logger or his family.

I heard of a man who wanted to clear the land but did not recognize the hallowedness of the tree spirit, did not consult the guardian of nature, and did not wait for the full moon. Instead, he capriciously chopped what was in his way and stepped over the stump. The trunk tumbled, the branches broke, and the crown collapsed. Rising from the stump was not a spirit, but a ghost. The man only wanted to clear the land for his crops. He did not care for the wood he left on the ground, so he burned the stump and left the trunk there to rot. The stump’s ashes turned to mud, and its ghost haunted him.

If all natural objects have spirits, do intangible things such as relationships have them as well? If so, how had my relationship with Wade (my former husband) sprouted? How had it grown? How had it died?

For many years, the heartwood held our tree upright. Our daughter was a new branch that grew out. We bought a little house, delved into countless projects, and planted our garden. I sowed the seed of the idea of our little family traveling, living, and working in Latin America, perhaps because I thought if we were doing what we loved with each other, we would prune the decaying limbs and new growth would sprout. The early version of us lay inside, but layers that grew year after year made it harder to reach.

Holding on to the hope of reviving what was dying between us, I stayed at a job I hated for years to save money for our trip to Latin America. Every year that passed, I thought we were a little bit closer, but in reality, every year that passed, we were a little bit further apart. After a decade together, the heartwood rotted, and a hollow pith formed.

Still, by force of my will, our family held together. When Wade canceled our trip and soon thereafter split apart our family without consulting the powers that be, our marriage was felled.

Was the spirit of our failed marriage left standing? Did it haunt him the way it haunted me? And yet, out of the stumped of what had been carelessly cut, new life was emerging.

About the Author

Jan Capps has been a public health advocate for immigrants, farmworkers, domestic violence victims, and people of color in the US, Guatemala, and Mexico for over thirty years, focusing on building local capacity and health equity. During her two stints living in Guatemala, she organized and trained community health workers and midwives, managed a medical clinic, and studied the Maya Tz’utujil language. She has presented, trained, and written for national audiences. Her greatest joy and most humbling experiences have been being a mother and watching her glorious daughter grow and launch into the world.

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