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Their old eyes blinking and dreaming like a large herd of resting peccaries, the entire body of the hierarchy, both men and women, the royalty of the village, had been waiting in front of the long hut since dawn.

The town drummer, Ma QoQuix, and I, their new flute player, had "piped" them into this compound after our predawn meeting in front of the sixteenth-century church.

Each of these wrinkled creatures was a jewel of memory. Together with the younger middle-aged officials, they formed a treasure chest full of the memory synapses needed by the Tzutujil to keep themselves together as a culture. These royal spiritualists, who remembered the village back together every year, today went scrambling and giggling over the threshold into the compound to the rhythm of our songs, to sit and stand waiting for the initiate boys.

The hierarchy was good at waiting. All Tzutujil had to be good at waiting, but the hierarchy were the best there was because their waiting was sacred.

They knew after years of ritual that waiting beautifully and well was a major part of every ceremony. Each aspect of a well-done ritual was part of what they called food for the spirits. Because spirits ate mostly beauty, a body of ancient ritualists like these had to dress in the most delicious way and wait in such a manner that the beauty of their waiting could be feasted upon by the gods.

Today the image of the grand old chiefs and Xuoja' was irrefutably a feast for the spirits as they waited peacefully for the newly initiated boys.

The big initiation ceremonies for the youth were finally coming to a close but only after the boys had spent a year of separation from their families. These families now gathered off a ways beyond the mounded rock walls of the young chief's compound as it was the custom to continue the ritual separation and respect on this last day of the initiates' road out of childhood.

Out of the cave-like darkness of their enormous thatched initiation house, from the village's spiritual underworld, the initiates began to emerge like newly fledged birds from a nest of tangled ritual smokes and smells.

Their faces the color of new copper ax heads, with billows of copal and tobacco smoke rising off their backs like mist off a pond, each boy glowed from a source deeper than the ancestral pride that held up their exhausted bodies.

Reeking with a mysterious birth-like aroma of pine needles, tule reeds, jungle melons, wild cacao, dahlias, palm flowers, wild bananas, portulaca buds, orchids, and months of living together in the other world, they poked their way out of the darkness and smoke of their old nest, squinting in the bright April morning, finely dressed as Men for the first time. Fresh off the backstrap looms of their mothers and female relatives and out of the hands of their sweethearts, all their man-clothing was woven and embroidered specifically for this day.

Trembling and tottering, they pulled into a line, face to face with the hierarchy, each shouldering a split cane basket from the Village of Hummingbirds filled with a fish, an adorned cacao pod, a decorated jungle melon, and new plantains over which were piled flowers and honeycombs.

The Maya are different from other peoples in that they guard and protect the spirits, the gods who gave them life.

Standing behind the initiate boys the thirteen chiefs and sub chiefs began to whisper in the initiates' ears. The basket-carrying boys repeated these words in unison out loud in a sacred form of male speech of such heart-piercing depth and majesty that the hierarchy began to weep. Men and women alike, mentors, all the parents and the relations of the boys who were held at a distance by the previous years' initiates, were touched.

At the squeal of the flute and the thundering of the drum, everyone, in an ancient involuntary habit, moved to adjust their blankets, shawls, headcloths, flowers, sashes, and baskets, readying themselves to process to the center of town where the village at large awaited the New Men.

Walking at a moderate speed, QoQuix and I, with the small official who carried the drum, headed out of the initiates' compound with the young men following us, two by two, at the head of the procession.

Pushing along behind them came the large body of hierarchy, wide and long. The clattering din and barbaric beauty of this majestic column was soon engulfed by hundreds and hundreds of relatives and neighbors who poured in on us as we oozed up the stone-and-cinder arteries of the village toward the plaza, the middle of their world. The initiating chiefs had arrived before us and had brought Holy Boy (Maximón) to his place on the plaza.

Shouldering their baskets of the fruits of the earth, which they had rescued from the Underworld, the initiates and their escorts came to a complete stop in front of more than twenty-five thousand Tzutujil and neighboring Mayan peoples.

When the initiating chiefs had quieted the crowd, the trembling youth began anew the ritual of speeches and prayers, so clear and loud that their words echoed off the old stone walls of the church and cabildo, the government house.

This time they spoke from their hearts, with no help from their teachers or elders. Many wept to hear them, and all the people's hearts were touched. Some were jealous, and others amazed, but none were left unaffected by their own courageous village youth speaking out their own big thoughts using ancient words in traditional forms in front of the whole world.

The New Men were incensed with copal by the initiators and then disappeared into the sanctuary of Holy Boy who, dressed like a chief himself, was waiting to fertilize their fruit in a secret ritual.

I'd never seen anything like this. Where else could you find a group of tired teenagers who actually desired to touch the hearts of their entire gathered tribe and elders?

I couldn't know yet that the fruit in those baskets was the boys' souls, nor was I aware that each of these boys' souls was a fragment of the Bride of the whole village and the world. It would take three more years before I'd be taught enough by doing what these tired shiny boys had done, literally risking life, limbs, and sanity to descend into the Underworld to face the Gods of Death, to help retrieve the Goddess of Water and Growth back to her rightful throne here on this earth in our village, Santiago Atitlan, the Umbilicus of the Universe. All of these things and a thousand other necessary understandings were as yet missing from what I would need to know to become a full human being in the sense that the Tzutujil understood. But I, like hundreds of uninitiated Tzutujil boys that day, saw what these initiates had done and what they'd turned into, and we who witnessed this were aching with the desire to become just as visible, noble, flowering, able, courageous, and useful to the village.

Infected with ritual desire, I was saturated with a delirious comprehension of community and magic from which I've never recovered. Sinking into my pile of aromatic reed mats at dawn, I slept to the sounds of water birds and roosters, determined to serve this dusty flowering village until I too could become a village man.

Check out the Fruit of the Tzutujil photo gallery on the Oscar Palencia tab.