God made everything beautiful.

There is a time for everything,
    and a season for every activity under the heavens:

2     a time to be born and a time to die,
    a time to plant and a time to uproot,
3     a time to kill and a time to heal,
    a time to tear down and a time to build,
4     a time to weep and a time to laugh,
    a time to mourn and a time to dance,
5     a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
    a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
6     a time to search and a time to give up,
    a time to keep and a time to throw away,
7     a time to tear and a time to mend,
    a time to be silent and a time to speak,
8     a time to love and a time to hate,
    a time for war and a time for peace.

The section above is from the powerful book of Ecclesiastes, one of my favorite books in the Old Testament. Narrated by the most renowned man of Israel, King Solomon, it centers on the themes of vanity and the vexation of the spirit.

I am a historian, and I love anthropology—especially tracing ancestry lines and the origins of things, from words to flora and fauna. This helps me understand the fabric of human society more deeply through language, and also reveals the connections between continents through migration and the ways we have profoundly influenced one another.

My lineage comes from different tribes that were eventually unified under the Roman Catholic Church. We are Spanish-speaking, Catholic Native Americans.

We were unified by the Nikan Mopohua—the story of an Indigenous man and the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe, who is our mother.

Guadalupe is a profound blend of Indigenous symbols and Roman Catholic imagery. When our ancestors saw her, they knelt, and they converted without questioning, it was indeed her, Tonantzin, the Aztec mother goddess of earth and corn.

She stands before the sun, which symbolizes the greatest Aztec god, Huitzilopochtli—announcing a God greater than the sun god. She stands upon the moon, the crescent that symbolized Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent moon god, showing she has overcome and defeated him. Beneath her is an angel with eagle’s wings supporting the Mother of God. The eagle, known as the “bird of the sun,” is here shown as the servant of the Virgin. With one hand she gathers her mantle and with the other her robe, signifying that the Son she bears is from both heaven and earth.

A couple weeks ago, I had this huge call to spend día de muertos in México with my family and the intention to visit every church and every chapel and ask for a miracle for my friend Lydia and for all human kind tbh while we move through this moment in time. *******

My faith in the catholic symbols have never been as strong, I think I have seen that the only thing that will truly fill my heart and soul is the love of God through devotion and loving thy neighbor.

While I was in the cathedral of my hometown, next to the image of Guadalupe there was a scale model of the stages of pregnancy, inviting us women to see ourselves as the protectress of children, and to see ourselves as the sacred vehicle for life.

I was raised by the pop mentality of the late 90´s - early 2000 MTV culture, the message was always that having children was perhaps the biggest mistake of your life, that your life would be ruined. And I think that’s true if you have a baby with the wrong man.*****

And this raises the question that being pro-life also means educating women about the quality of the men they are choosing even to fuck around, the men they are raising to become men, fathers, and lovers. It also means educating women to know that we are so fertile and so juicy that a single drop of semen is enough to create life, and that life is sacred, and that becoming a mother is a gift. Not all women are meant to be mothers, and having that freedom is so important—to decide for ourselves. But decide by using a condom, although in some cases, like with some of my friends, they still became pregnant even with a condom. And that is where tracking fertility through temperature and moon cycles becomes the most accurate way. We would be another kind of race if we had that level of empowerment and attunement to our own bodies and creating babies from that place..

*****My grandmother Musa always wanted to make sure we were close to God. Every night on the phone she would ask, “Are you praying?” I would always roll my eyes and say, “Yes… grandma.” I lied so many times. I don’t advocate for dogma or any kind of rigidity—the kind that incites violence more than compassion and understanding—but I do believe in truly deep faith, the kind of spirituality that actually makes the world a better place.

I am also not advocating that Judeo-Christianity is the only portal to the Divine yet this way is one of a kind.

My journey into my home and into the house of God, now at twenty-eight years old, is helping me understand that the things our parents and societies teach us are often given to us in a mediocre way. Especially religion and ethics, which are supposed to be part of our moral code. When we learn them this way, they don’t land the same. They don’t touch us. We have to come to them in our own way, through our own experience.

And this is why the presence of teachers, guides, and people who are truly gifted can alter the entire course of our lives.

Love,

Maria