How Far Will You Go?

What place (in all the world) that I have been to is my favorite?

#WANAFriday* theme

(In reality there are two, but because of my ulterior motive this week I'm picking only one.)

Let’s start with why I chose my favorite place:

• Adventure   

• New experiences   

• Meeting new and different people that I might not ordinarily associate with   

• The magic—that special something that happens when you expect the unexpected  

• Synchronicity

I moved to San Francisco at the end of the Beat Generation and eased right into the Flower Children generation, moving on to explore New Age concepts and higher consciousness modalities. I have always sought that artist’s edge of new ideas and explorations. 

When I read an article about the Mayans (I had taken classes on Mesoamerica that fired my imagination to learn more) and their prophecies, I felt as if there was this big secret I had to learn about.

So, I felt compelled to visit Mexico again in August of 1987, and be at Teotihuacan on one of two days, for what Jose Arguelles was calling the Harmonic Convergence. Many people in the New Age movements were talking about it, and like an itch you have to scratch I had to be there for that event. There were power places around the planet that people were heading for on those two days in August. Even though Mount Shasta was closer to me, I knew I had to be in Mexico.

There was El Tule Tree in Oaxaca,  Teotihuacan outside Mexico City and Palenque. But I only made the first two (time and distance being factors). Instead of Palenque, we went to Coba—a lesser known pyramid system close to Chichen Itza. The Yucatan Peninsula is rife with ruins and I wanted to see as many as I could in the time we had to travel (plus, being close to the beach was an absolute must for me).

Why? For what reason did thousands of people trek to these supposed power centers? I remember asking one young man I met in the Cancun airport, that had just flown in from the East Coast, that question. His answer was also my answer:

"I felt compelled by something other than logic, by some draw that goes beyond rational thought. I just knew I had to be here."

Someday I may write that memoir I've been asked to do, and explain the why better, but for now, the results of that trip (and the reason for my ulterior motive for choosing Mexico today) was my novel, 

Dance the Dream Awake. 

It was published this week! 

I hope you will check it out. More details about my novel (paranormal romantic suspense) can be found on my website: www.coraramos.com

It will be out in e-book eventually (not sure when) on Amazon, 

but for now the paperback can be purchased at:

Oak Tree Press Books  (listed alphabetically) for $10 + shipping

Amazon  for $14.20 + shipping

*WANAFriday is a group of writers that each post on their own blog on Friday (or thereabout) on our agreed upon theme of the week. The other authors participating this week will be listed below (and updated as they post):

Kim Griffin: Who Am I? Dorothy?
Ellen Gregory: What's Your Favorite Place?

Siri Paulsen: Favorite Place
Julie Farrar: 5 Reasons I Love Dijon and France

Connections

Crop Circles and a Mayan messenger

When I began my last blog on the Maya, I wanted to talk about their system of math, but decided it was too long to include in that post.

Then I viewed Kim Griffin’s blog: http://thefitnessmoms.com/2012/01/30/red-strings-connect-us/ “Introducing Mathematical Monday, a time to explore numbers and patterns and their place in the universe.”

It inspired how I would focus on Mayan math for this post. Without giving a long explanation of their system, I’ve included a chart that is self-explanatory: dots=ones, bars=fives and a shell symbol for 0. It is a base 20 system unlike our base 10 system.

These numbers can be seen on many stela in the Yucatan documenting dates of important occurrences (past and future events—like an important battle by a chieftain, a birth date, or the beginning and end of their cycle that began in 3114 BC., etc.)

On July 5, 2009 there was a crop circle that appeared near Silbury Hill in southern England that floored me. I immediately saw the distinctive Mayan numbers within this crop circle. 

I calculated the numbers but couldn’t make any sense of it—I thought it might have to do with the Dec. 21, 2012 end date (which is not the end of the world-merely the end of a cycle and we don’t know what that means; we can only speculate), but it wasn’t. I put it out of my mind knowing that sooner or late someone would figure it out.

Enter:

http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/anasazi/time2010f.html

I will let those interested, go to this site and peruse all the connections the author has made in detail. One connection is the date a comet came near earth around 32 BC and of the comet expected this year of 2012.

http://news.discovery.com/space/will-earthbound-comet-fulfill-2012-prophecy.html (nearly 300 million miles away and barreling toward us. The intruder from deep space, called comet Elenin, crosses Earth's orbit on its inbound leg and again on its outbound swing around the sun later this year.)

Does this indicate that another cycle is closing? And what of the unmistakable symbols in this crop circle for the legendary Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent messenger? Is he returning this year?

Agreed, you will leave this post with more questions than answers, but maybe it will stimulate your creativity like red string theory and the “coincidences” all around us.

An invisible red thread connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place, or circumstances. The thread may stretch or tangle but will never break.

Not limited to lovers (the subject of my novel that dips into that Mayan past) it means all the connections in the universe—so a crop circle in England is somehow tied to the plumed serpent (Quezalcoatl) and the math of the Maya indicating comets coming toward earth, beginning and ending cycles and . . . 

What does it all mean? What do you think?

Menagerie Monday

The Maya

What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think historical fiction; historical romance, suspense or paranormal? A story in Europe somewhere? Most probably, because they have a long detailed history in writing to draw from?

For a moment let’s get a sense of where the European world was in terms of their view of the earth and stars before I go into the Mayan world.

Pythagoras (6^th century BC) developed the paradigm of a spherical Earth. Pre-Socratics retained the flat Earth model. Aristotle accepted the spherical shape around 330 BC.

Even though we were taught in school that Columbus had to overcome the belief that the earth was flat in order to get his expedition going, almost all scholars in the early Middle Ages maintained the spherical earth viewpoint first expressed by the Ancient Greeks. By the 14th century, belief in a flat earth among the educated was essentially dead even though the artists of the day continued to depict a flat earth.

So, even though the Greeks believed the earth was round or spherical, they held to the theory that the Earth was at the center of the universe and all objects in the heavens revolved around it.

Figure of the heavenly bodies — An illustration of the Ptolemaic geocentric system by Portuguese cosmographer and cartographer Bartolomeu Velho, 1568 (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris)

Now, let’s sail on over to the new world and land on the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico to visit the Maya and compare what they knew to the Europeans.

The archaeological record first shows evidence of the Maya people as early as 1100 BC. They hunted local game and developed agricultural subsistence techniques until about 900 BC. Around this time, farmers of the Maya people built permanent residences (Schele and Freidel 1990: 306-307).

Archaeologists have deciphered three major periods of Mayan Civilization; the Pre--classic, Classic and Post-classic periods. For perspective, the flowering of the Mayan civilization corresponds to the later years of the Roman Empire.

So, at the earliest, while the Greeks were concerned with planets going around the earth, the Mayans were concerned with the Milky Way and the universe. They noted on their stone calendar the start of their 5^th Mayan era or world which began August 13, 3114 BC. 

In AD 775, the Maya lord  K’ak’ Tiliw Chan Yoat (Fire Burning Sky Lightning God) set up an immense stone monument in the center of his city, Quiriguá, in Izabal, Guatemala. The unimaginative archaeologists who discovered the stone called it Stela C. This monument bears the longest single hieroglyphic description of the Maya Creation ‘Myth’, noting that it took place on the Maya calendar's day 13.0.0.0.0, 4 Ahaw, 8 Kumk’u, a date corresponding to August 13, 3114 BC on our calendar. This date appears over and over in other inscriptions throughout the Maya world.

August 13, 3114 BC is as precise and accurate as one can get for a beginning of history: the first Egyptian dynasty is dated to ca 3100 BC; the first 'city,' Uruk, in Mesopotamia, also ca 3100 BC; the Hindu Kali Yuga, 3102 BC; and most interestingly, the division of time into 24 hours of 60 minutes each and each minute into 60 seconds [and the division of the circle into 360 degrees], also around 3100 BC, in Sumeria.

(Maya Cosmology at: http://www.authenticmaya.com/maya_cosmology.htm)

So why this history lesson on the Maya when we were talking about historical fiction? I wondered how many people realize that the historical world (of novels) is bigger than just the European world? Knowledge of the Maya is mostly a mystery because the Spanish conquerors burned all their books (I always shudder at the thought of burning a whole culture’s books). I hardly want to mention Diego de Landa Calderón who after he destroyed the mayan books, then wrote down what was in them--and who knows what he left out or how accurate he interpreted what he saw. I'm just grateful the Maya also left record of their world in stone.

What was your first thought when I mentioned historical fiction at the beginning? My first novel is crossover fiction (historical, romantic, suspense, paranormal) set with a back story in that Mayan world (awaiting publication) so I was wondering what you thought of when hearing the phrase, historical fiction,  (romance or suspense)?

I’d be very interested if you would share your comments and let me know.


#coraramos #writer #fiction #Mayan #historical fiction #suspense #paranormal