2025-08-19, 05:41 PM - Word count:
I stand in a tomb in which someone of importance was buried thousands of years ago.
Someone Irish, or whatever people in Ireland named themselves before they named themselves Irish. This matters: people call me Mexican, but I belong to people who used the name Meshika before the Spanish mangled the pronunciation and imposed an alphabet.
I do not stand here for the dead person. My people sacrificed warriors on pyramids whose faces we threw them down after to appease and honour gods. I know nothing of this dead man's traditions.
Save one: the dead man's people made his grave with very particular attention to the sun. This I respect. My ancestors raised temples atop pyramids such that you would recognize the day of the spring equinox by the sun passing between them. If this dead man's descendants live, or those of the men who buried him, they too paid attention to the sun's movements: on the morning of the winter solstice, for a quarter of an hour, the sun's rays reach all the way to the deepest part of this barrow. They knew the sun and they knew the seasons and they knew the connections between these things.
I have lived in Mexico among my people my whole life, amid Christians whose beliefs still include older practices from Meshika ways in them. But I try to live entirely by the older ways. This is tolerated because of my gifts at soccer, which reflect well on my family and community.
Now my gifts at soccer have brought me, Tlacaelel Tepoztli, entirely out of Mexico, away from everyone who speaks Nahuatl, to Ireland. I see efforts to reclaim the old Irish language and give it greater life. I sympathize. And in a dead king's barrow, I quietly cut my bicep with an obsidian knife to thank my sun god Huitzilopochtli, who this old dead man may have known by another name.
Either way, we have sun-worship in common. Perhaps I will think of him on the next day of the dead. By then, I will have been sent to a still-further island off the coast of Africa, for soccer. Maybe I can find people guided by the sun there too, and their kinship. Maybe kinship begins with my teammates in Ireland or Antananarivo.
Someone Irish, or whatever people in Ireland named themselves before they named themselves Irish. This matters: people call me Mexican, but I belong to people who used the name Meshika before the Spanish mangled the pronunciation and imposed an alphabet.
I do not stand here for the dead person. My people sacrificed warriors on pyramids whose faces we threw them down after to appease and honour gods. I know nothing of this dead man's traditions.
Save one: the dead man's people made his grave with very particular attention to the sun. This I respect. My ancestors raised temples atop pyramids such that you would recognize the day of the spring equinox by the sun passing between them. If this dead man's descendants live, or those of the men who buried him, they too paid attention to the sun's movements: on the morning of the winter solstice, for a quarter of an hour, the sun's rays reach all the way to the deepest part of this barrow. They knew the sun and they knew the seasons and they knew the connections between these things.
I have lived in Mexico among my people my whole life, amid Christians whose beliefs still include older practices from Meshika ways in them. But I try to live entirely by the older ways. This is tolerated because of my gifts at soccer, which reflect well on my family and community.
Now my gifts at soccer have brought me, Tlacaelel Tepoztli, entirely out of Mexico, away from everyone who speaks Nahuatl, to Ireland. I see efforts to reclaim the old Irish language and give it greater life. I sympathize. And in a dead king's barrow, I quietly cut my bicep with an obsidian knife to thank my sun god Huitzilopochtli, who this old dead man may have known by another name.
Either way, we have sun-worship in common. Perhaps I will think of him on the next day of the dead. By then, I will have been sent to a still-further island off the coast of Africa, for soccer. Maybe I can find people guided by the sun there too, and their kinship. Maybe kinship begins with my teammates in Ireland or Antananarivo.
