This book is meant as a gift to that thing in original humans, which at one time made them a welcome sound in the symphony of all Nature.

Martín Prechtel’s experiences growing up on a Pueblo Indian reservation, his years of apprenticing to a Guatemalan shaman, and his flight from Guatemala’s brutal civil war to life in the
U.S. inform this lyrical blend of memoir, cultural commentary, and spiritual call to arms. The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic is both an epic story and a cry to the heart of humanity based on the author’s realization that human survival depends on keeping alive the seeds of our “original forgotten spiritual excellence.”

Prechtel relates our current state of ecological crisis to the rapid disappearance of biodiversity, indigenous cultures, and shared human values. He demonstrates how real human culture is exterminated when real (not genetically modified) seeds are lost. Like plants that become extinct once their required conditions are no longer met, authentic, unmonetized human cultures can no longer survive in the modern world.

To “keep the seeds alive”—both literally and metaphorically—they must be planted, harvested, and replanted, just as human culture must become truly engaging and meaningful to the soul, as necessary as food is to the body. The viable seeds of spirituality and culture that lie dormant within us need to “sprout” into broad daylight to create real sets of cultures welcome on Earth.

Set into the matrix of the chirping, storming, growing, dying, dew-covered, immense crushing wheel of the wildness of the universe, the stories of how all things went together—or not—lay like a massive clutch of eggs of culture hatching beneath the warm heavy breast of the Holy in Nature, in a nest called the world.

“The Unlikely Peace at Cochumaquic is like one of the seeds Martin Prechtel describes. When planted in fertile ground, the words and thoughts and images and prayers will grow into a life-giving complexity. This is a wondrous and powerful book.” —Derrick Jensen, author of A Language Older than Words

A master of eloquence and innovative language, Martín Prechtel teaches at Bolad’s Kitchen, his school in
New Mexico. Through music, ritual, farming, sacred architecture, textiles, tools, and story, Prechtel helps people in many lands to remember their own sense of place in the daily sacred through the search for the Indigenous Soul. Among his other books are Secrets of the Talking Jaguar and Long Life, Honey in the Heart.

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