20 June 2025 - Friday Nawal K’at Conrad’s Western Reflections for our Mind

20 June 2025 - Friday Nawal K’at

Conrad’s Western Reflections for our Mind

“I Carry the Mountain in My Breath”

A Ceremonial Introduction to Living Within Two Lands

from the Earth Remembers Series

This is a weaving through the primary themes I am sharing through these three introductory Ceremonial Stories of “I Carry the Mountain in My Breath.” These are my ceremonial reflections, honoring the depth, breath, and sacred remembering expressed through my journey.

These are the primary themes I explore within myself as I am engaging in living life. These offer me a foundation in allowing myself to be held within the mystery of my Voice 1 ramblings, and the inner stillness within my body through the emerging Light of Voice 2.

The Breath Between Two Lands

A Ceremonial Reflection on “I Carry the Mountain in My Breath”

1. A Life Carried Between Two Lands

The story begins with my invitation to create a closeness—not only physically, but spiritually. It is spoken from my heart as an elder, 77 years old male, who carries two homelands inside me:

• Santiago Atitlán, where the mountains remember me—a sacred land filled with volcanic presence, ancestral memory, and the living voices of the Earth.

• Fort Wayne, Indiana, a flat urban terrain where I remember the mountains through breath—a landscape that outwardly appears distant from my native land, but still holds me in light.

Through this dual embrace, I embody the truth that I carry various landscapes inside me, not as memory alone, but as living breath.

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2. Breath as the Thread Between Worlds

The breath becomes the sacred thread.

• “I carry the mountain in my breath. The lake in my spine. The cornfields in my bones.”

These are not metaphors—they are the literal spiritual geography of my being. Breath becomes the ceremony that allows me to live across lands, across cultures, and across dimensions of remembering.

Breath is the vehicle of continuity, the living pathway between outer landscapes (Guatemala and Indiana) and inner landscapes (ancestral wisdom and unknown futures).

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3. Living the Tz’utujiil Maya Way in a Modern Urban World

I am more then just what you outwardly see as me:

A Tz’utujiil Maya elder, who is walking among:

• The Rilaj Maam (ancestral weaver and holder of inner cords),

• The Nawals (forces of Nature and Light within the lunar calendar of days),

• The Paq’alib’al (sacred center of life and origin of Light),

• The Nab’eysiil’s (ancestral ceremonial leaders of all forms of Nature),

• And ya Mri’y Kastilyaan, the Great Grandmother of Light.

Even in an urban world of asphalt, wires, buildings, I feel their continued presence. They are never lost—at times fully in my awareness, and at times they are hidden but still present.

The sacred still speaks, in every place that I am.

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4. The Weaving Between Two Sets of Lands

Two pairs of landscapes that shape my life:

First Pair: The Outer Lands

• The volcanic ridges and highlands of Santiago Atitlán

• The flatlands and cornfields of Fort Wayne, Indiana

Both carry distinct textures of Earth’s Light, and both are threads within the Tapestry of Biodiversity—the Earth’s larger sacred weaving.

Second Pair: The Inner Lands

• The sacred Tz’utujiil inner world: the Nawals, the Rilaj Maam, ya Mri’y Kastilyaan , and the Paq’alib’al—a landscape that speaks in dreams, bones, and breath.

• The unknown inner terrain of this urban life, not yet fully known, but still breathing and receiving him.

Together, these inner and outer lands form a living map of my being, where the Light of the Heart Within flows in both directions.

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5. Voice 1 and Voice 2 – Holding the Human Condition

I am always choosing to speak from of the two voices:

• Voice 1 — the voice of suffering, sharpness, ramblings, sufferings, and fragmentation.

• Voice 2 — the quiet, emerging voice of the Heart, the Light, and the Great Grandmother’s presence of Light.

I live within both voices. And breath becomes the sacred thread that holds both together, not choosing one over the other, but allowing them to coexist within wholeness.

This is a Tz’utujiil way of healing: not escaping the pain, but weaving it into Light.

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6. Aging, Struggle, and the Light That Emerges Through the Body

I honor the reality of my aging, my body’s struggles, and my daily tasks of urban life—rising, walking, grieving, opening.

Yet within these everyday acts, I still receive the Light of the Heart Within.

This Light does not come only during ease—it emerges through difficulty, grief, and quiet perseverance.

The Great Grandmother’s Voice, through ya Mri’y Kastilyaan, continues to speak through my body.

The Rilaj Maam continues to open his inner cords being weaved within my inner cords—inviting me into the unknown, where new Light is still possible, especially in old age.

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7. This Is a Story of Weaving

I name this entire narrative as a ceremony of weaving:

• Weaving through family, work, politics, and ordinary life.

• Weaving the inner and outer.

• Weaving human suffering and divine possibility.

I speak not only for himself, but for all who walk on this Earth—those who carry both pain and memory, beauty and disconnection.

I live within this simple and powerful offering:

“May I-you see the Light that lives

beneath the pain,

within the land,

and through the quiet thread of breath

that carries I-us all back into Wholeness.”

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8. The Living Tapestry of Light

At the end, I am affirming my beingness as a tapestry of Light:

• Woven into my body and bones

• Woven into the fabric of humanity

• Woven into the sacred Light of the Earth

This is not just my personal truth.

It is a Maya truth.

A truth of the sacred interwoven life that breathes through land, spirit, grief, movement, and the quiet remembering carried by those who still listen.

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9. The Breath as a Living Vessel of Sacred Continuity

The story begins again with the affirmation:

“I carry the mountain in my breath.”

But here, the breath is revealed not only as a carrier of memory, but as a living vessel of continuity—a breath that neither fades with distance nor is diminished by concrete or city noise. It is woven into my ribs, into the very structure of my self—showing that memory is not mental, but bodily.

The mountain is not remembered through nostalgia, but lived through every inhalation. This breath becomes a sacred intermediary between all worlds.

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10. Living Between Two Skies: A Double Horizon of Light

I experience this powerful image of two skies:

• One sky above the volcanoes of Santiago Atitlán, a sky infused with ancestral fire, origin, and spiritual authority.

• The other sky is the urban sky, veined with artificial light, but still holding the same celestial bodies—the same moon and stars—that know my name when I stand beneath the medicine tree of Light.

This image of “two skies” becomes my sacred map of identity.

I live in between them, as a walker of horizons, a thread between ancestral fire and the new light of urban becoming.

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11. Sacred Soil and City Pavement: Not Enemies, but Mirrors

I explore living this profound ceremonial teaching:

“The medicine tree of Light and the concrete are not enemies. They are mirrors.”

This line redefines urban and ancestral spaces not as opposites, but as reflections of each other.

At time I experience this sacred presence hidden but still accessible. Other time I experience the dissolving of this divide: the sacred can be fully encountered in both settings—if one knows how to breathe and experience seeing.

I walk as a living thread, not only between lands, but between ways of perceiving the sacred. I becomes the conscious filament through which the two realities reflect one another.

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12. The Nawals as Living Forces Across All Realms

The Daily Nawals of the New Dawning supports me into a deeper focus on the Nawals—the sacred beings of the Tz’utujiil Mayan Lunar Calendar—not only as daily energies, but as active spiritual companions shaping transformation across broken and birthing systems.

• Nawals bless the bones of broken systems

• Nawals cut away what no longer serves

• Nawals reshape forms from within

• Nawals plant seeds from the Unknown

Each day, since 2009, I am weaved within the ceremonial invocation of the Nawals as More then just a spiritual influence but as agents of sacred action—supporting, dismantling, dreaming, healing, and emergence.

This reflects within me a Tz’utujiil Maya cosmology of transformation, where the Nawals are not passive archetypes, but walking companions through both the sacred highlands and the urban grid.

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13. The Ceremonial Thread: The Elder as a Bridge

Part of my ceremonial self-identity is as a Nab’eysiil, a ceremonial elder and spiritual weaver—walking as a prayer made visible, allowing sacred wisdom to continue across evolving landscapes.

This is more than reflection—it is a self-offering. I recognize that in living life, within an aging body, I am a walking breath form as a living ceremonial thread between opposites:

• Volcano and streetlight

• Sacred speech and urban silence

• Ancestral tradition and emerging forms

• Known origins and unknown futures

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14. The Story as Personal and Universal Transmission

I off this sacred possibility to all beings:

“Wherever my breath moves, the mountain lives.”

“And so can I-you.”

This final statement carries great emotional and ceremonial weight. It shifts the story from personal witness to communal invitation.

That we all carry this sacred capacity—to carry one’s mountain, to be a thread, to live between two lands and two skies—is not reserved for elders only. It is a ceremonial potential in all humans who learn to breathe, to feel, and to walk with remembrance.

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15. A Living Ceremony Between Dawn and Concrete

In this way if living, I experience this moment of pure stillness:

“There is a moment, just before the light stirs the water, when the lake holds still as a prayer…”

This dawn stillness in Santiago Atitlán becomes a ceremonial threshold—where the Great Grandmother’s Light is not spoken of, but felt:

• through my soles of the feet

• the threads of my hands

• the stones of my old path

• and the marrow of my bones

The Light is not an idea. It is an embodied warmth that rises through every part of my being. It reveals itself through silence, breath, water, drumbeat, and ancestral presence.

This language deepens my earlier teachings. The body is no longer just a vessel for remembering—it is the ceremonial altar itself.

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16. The Breath as Bridge and Blessing

Breath becomes the bridge, but also the blessing:

“The moment becomes altar. And I remember— I am not outside of this life. I am part of the sacred weaving.”

As I sit above the lake—not as a visitor, but as a thread within the full landscape. I am not recalling this place. I am living as this place.

“I open my chest like the doorway of a ceremonial house.”

This is a profound shift: my body emerges as a ceremonial dwelling, and the breath that moves through me becomes a sacred transmission—not just for the self, but for:

• the fog,

• the clay pot,

• the sleeping dog,

• the broken sandal.

Here, everything, even the worn or discarded, is remembered and blessed through breath as ceremony.

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17. The City Landscape as a Mirror of the Sacred

Then, unexpectedly, I am no longer on the slope of the lake—I am in Fort Wayne:

“This morning, I passed a crack in the sidewalk— and through it, a dandelion had risen.”

The sacred does not retreat here. It transforms.

These are my revelations of urban sacredness:

• The shimmer of a stoplight

• The murmur of tires

• The stillness behind the city’s voice

• A vulture above an alleyway

Each becomes a portal of the Great Grandmother’s Light. This also is my form of spiritual sight—not seeing through contrast, but through continuity.

“The Great Grandmother’s Light speaks here too.”

This is not just a parallel truth—it is the same ceremony in a new form.

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18. Nawal Bartolo Martín: The Spirit of the City Thread

I explore the living Light of Nawal Bartolo Martín as a direct spiritual presence. This Light appears not as doctrine or vision, but as a warmth in the body:

“A glow behind my sternum. A warmth in the center of my spine.”

The  Light of Nawal Bartolo Martín is the subtle guide of this path of integration:

• The voice of love that remembers through discarded plastic and wind-blown dust.

• The breath that had been forgotten, now returning with the invitation:

“Become the Light you remember. Let love meet the world as it is.”

The Light of Nawal Bartolo Martín travels within seconds anywhere inwardly or outwardly within and around the planet earth. This is part of the deeply Tz’utujiil vision of the Nawals—not as abstract days or forces, but as living kin, companions within breath and body.

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19. Not Returning, Not Leaving: Already Within the Weave

My love life lives within this trilogy so far:

“I do not return to the village. I do not leave the city. Both are alive in me.”

It is no longer about reconciling landscapes or moving between them. It is the dawning realization that my weaving is already complete. I am living as the thread, and the Light is already walking.

In my knowingness, I express a deep peace—resting inside the interwoven life of:

• clay pots and railings

• fire smoke and alley winds

• volcano mists and plastic bags

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20. The Body as Altar, the Self as Remembering

I experience my journey:

“The same Great Grandmother’s Light moves through me— through both landscapes, through both skies.”

And then:

“Her thread is the thread of my spine. Her altar is the altar of my bones.”

This is a Tz’utujiil embodied cosmology: the sacred is not outside—it is in the marrow, in the thread of breath that walks between two worlds. My emergence is the walking altar, the place where Light touches form.

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21. A Blessing: You Are the Thread

This closing section is not just reflection—it is transmission:

“I am the living thread of two lands breathing through one body.

Let this breath be a blessing.

Let this light remember itself.

Let this be the way we return.”

It is no longer a personal narrative. It becomes a universal path of return, where anyone who breathes, who walks, who sees with tenderness—can become a remembering being.

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22. Benediction: The Thread That Breathes

“I am the living thread of two lands breathing through one body.

Let this breath be a blessing.

Let this light remember itself.

Let this be the way we return.”

This is the full remembering of the story “I Carry the Mountain in My Breath.”

Not as metaphor. Not as longing.

But as a living ceremonial path for those who walk across lands, languages, systems, and generations.

©All of the material in this blog in all forms, written, audio, video, pictures, etc. are under the Copyright Conrad and Ilene Satala Seminars LLC,  Fort Wayne, Indiana USA. All rights Reserved. 2025