The Rock That Remembers You: Lake Atitlan
The Rock That Remembers You
Seeking the Source: A Return to Guatemala
There is a piece of land in San Marcos La Laguna that reaches out into Lake Atitlán like an arm, like an offering. They call it Cerro Tzankujil. A nature reserve, technically. A sacred place, actually. And if you have ever wondered what it feels like to walk into a landscape that was holy long before anyone thought to charge admission at the gate, this is the answer.
You pay a few quetzales at the entrance, and then the noise stops.
That is the first thing. The village behind you is all color and motion, vendors and yoga studios and tuk tuks negotiating impossible corners, and then you step past the gate and the trail takes you up under the trees, and the world simply goes quiet. Not empty. Quiet. Birds working somewhere overhead. The lake breathing against the rocks below. Your own steps on packed earth and stone.
The path winds up the hill in switchbacks, and it is not a hard walk (though the altitude will remind you that you are more than five thousand feet above the sea, and it will remind you politely at first, then less politely). You climb, you turn, and the lake keeps appearing between the branches like it is checking on you. Blue, then silver, then something closer to green. Atitlán does not hold one color for very long.
And then the volcanoes. San Pedro sitting there heavy and close, Tolimán and Atitlán stacked behind it across the water. There are lookout points cut into the trail where somebody thoughtfully placed a bench, and I sat on one of them and did absolutely nothing for a long time. I want to be honest about that, because we have all been trained to do travel... to collect it, to post it, to prove it. Tzankujil asks for something else. It asks you to sit down.
Higher up, there is an altar.
I did not expect it to move me the way it did. It is a Mayan ceremonial site, still living, still used, and you can see it in the burn marks, in the wax, in the flowers left behind by someone who came before you with something heavy to carry. This is not a museum piece. This is somebody's church. I had spent time earlier in this same village with Luz, a Mayan guide who led me through fire ceremony and temazcal, and I came to the altar already cracked open a little, already thinking about ancestors and protection and what it means to ask for something out loud. Standing there, I understood that the reserve is not a park with a shrine in it. The whole hill is the shrine. The trail is just how you approach.
Sit with that for a minute before you go find the jumping rock.
Because yes, there is a jumping rock, and it is glorious. A wooden platform out over the deepest part of the water, a ladder, a line of people from six different countries all working up their nerve at the same time. Somebody counts to three. Somebody backs out. Somebody screams the whole way down. And Lake Atitlán, which is a volcanic crater lake and therefore colder and deeper than your body is prepared for, swallows them whole and hands them back laughing.
I loved that the two things live on the same hill. The altar and the leap. Reverence and joy, ten minutes apart, both of them completely sincere. That is the thing I keep trying to explain about Guatemala, and honestly the thing I keep trying to explain about New Orleans too. We do not separate the sacred from the celebration here. We never have. You can pray in the morning and dance in the afternoon, and nobody thinks you are being inconsistent. You are being whole.
Go early if you can, before the middle of the day heats the rocks and fills the platform. Bring water, bring a towel, bring shoes that can handle stone. Bring the questions you have been avoiding, because the trail will hand them back to you around the second switchback.
Cerro Tzankujil does not perform for you. It does not need you. It has been sitting at the edge of that water holding the volcanoes in view for longer than any of us can count, and it will keep doing it after we are gone.
All it does is make room. What you bring into that room is your own business.
With a second line in my step wherever the rhythm carries me,
Karlita
Karla Marie “Karlita” Cochran
In the Spotlight 504 New Orleans
