Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer

strapping on plastic flour sacks, machetes, picks, and water containers.
Once outside, looking into the rising sun, my sleepiness fell away. I
have always loved the early morning hour. Here it was vibrant with bees,
crickets, and other insects. The old logging road to the rainforest skirted the
foothills beneath the Mountain Pine Ridge and wound through peanut fields
and small plantations of banana and cassava. The hills beyond us were
blanketed in a vista of fan palms and crests of flowering trees in radiant
orange and yellow. The last houses, nestled in lush green land and painted
in vivid colors, mimicked the bold shades of flowers and the bright,
breasted birds.
Don Elijio stopped before a bush. “Xiv,” he said as he pulled off its
leaves and tenderly stuffed it into his sack. With each yank of a stem, he
muttered under his breath.
I remembered I now had an invitation to ask questions, so I confidently
asked, “What is this plant used for?”
Like a symphony playing in my ears, he answered. “This is Anal. You
will remember it by its bunch of flowers at the top, which are first green
then turn white and make red berries just before the next rain comes.”
Xiv (pronounced shiv), he said, is the daily collection of at least nine
medicinal leaves to be used that day for baths and teas. “I know ninety pairs
of Xiv,” he continued. “Pair by pair. Ninety males and ninety females. Each
with a name. It’s all up here in my head,” adding his customary tap on his
right temple.
I asked what he whispered while he snipped off the leaves.
“The ensalmo. You must learn many,” he said, as if I knew what he was
talking about. I was surprised that despite my fluent Spanish, I had never
heard the word before. I thought it might be a prayer, but I thought better of
asking.
Instead, I asked Panti why he did the ensalmos. He stopped walking and
looked at me sideways, shaking his head in disbelief. “It’s simple, my child,
if you don’t thank the Spirit of the plant before you take it from the earth, it
will not heal the people. Many people say they gather what they see me
gather, but it doesn’t work for them. That’s because they haven’t
remembered to say the ensalmo.”
It seemed so natural and almost too basic not to have been a part of my
thinking before. The plants are living things, and they give up their lives to