As we began the new year this week, kids refreshed from an extended break with plenty of time to play and bake and celebrate, I realized that the week is all about time. Just as the new year is about renewing time.
The kids learned about the Central American peoples of the 500-600 period (Mayan, Zapotec, and the kingdom centered in Teotihuacan with no known name). All of them with societies focused not on the story and influence of kingship but on complexities built upon time. Imagine having over 18,000 distinctly different days with importance tied to each as a consequence of overlapping two different means of tracking the passing days (a 260 day Sacred Round cycle and a 365 day calendar). That would take all your focus, much in the same way that we count the days down in December as we focus on Christmas and it’s meaning. But for us, as for the peoples of Europe and Africa and Asia throughout history’s winding path, the focus is over with the new year, our sights set upon another year and stories of leaders (political, religious, and social). We lose our focus on time for a while. But not the old civilizations of the Central American bridge. They had their noses to the calendars constantly.
And what that focus led to was a way of living absolutely contrary to the values and principles and morals that we understand today. We do not embrace the concept of blood and death giving rise to life. For us, death is the end of life as we understand it here. For them, it was an integral part of birth (tonalli).
And the focus on time was reflected in a distinct lack of written story traditions, like the fables and tales that have come from nearly every other culture on the planet.
My kids already knew all the ‘gory bits’ associated with the Mayan’s thanks to a very, very well read set of Horrible Histories books we have in our living room. But what they had not thought about was that the very focus those peoples had on time at the expense of human stories of good and evil, might well have led to their decline and eventual extinction.
As so in our little homeschool we began the new year learning about a society of long ago that perhaps spent too much time tracking time and not enough time enjoying stories of good and evil where the good guys win.
