While the alignment of mind and heart speak intrepidly to the truest nature of our scalar consciousness crucible (indeed, the mystic mind + heart ascension gateway can be seen with great clarity in the Bible, Quran, Vedas, Tao, and many other spiritual works that echo across our discrete histories), the conclusion that giving your heart "to each and every thing" will destroy it seems to indicate a fear-based response to the joys of unconditional love. Assuming that Nahuatl society was structured on this conclusion (along with the tragic accompaniment "can anything be found on earth"), we could be led to perceive the Nahuatl tribes as a conditionally-loving people, who discriminate with their love instead of pouring forth its eternal abundance.

This would be a tragedy, a discredit, in direct opposition to their known virtues.

Hence, I am hesitant to allow the works of one poet to define the kulturgeist of the greater Nahuatl-speaking Mesoamerican cultures, diasporic and intra-national as they were known to be. This is, of course, in alacritous awareness of the fact that the name Nezahualcóyotl translates to Fasted Coyote. In every culture throughout history, fasting has been revered as mystical, enlightening, and requiring of tremendous discipline, while coyotes have deep trickster archetype context in native Meso heritage. Though we should be cautious in elevating this noble warrior scholar, poet, and warrior king to the rank of singular cultural emissary, it is safe to assume by the context of his name and history that Nezahualcóyotl is deeply revered, flawed though his conclusion of the heart's self-destruction may be.


I offer the Hopi treatise on unconditional love as the essential refutant (though clearer context on unconditional love can be received from Christ's teachings).

The Hopi, after all, were only ever separated from the Nahuatl nations by the Chichimeca-Raramuri border tribes, and largely existed in parallel to the Nahuatl-speaking empires of central Mesoamerica. Through the harmonious Mongko ideology of the Hopi (a tribal doctrine that presents the honorable Hopi code and their intrinsic awareness of man's spirit-mind-body trine nature, deciphered several centuries ahead of Descartes et al), a clearer road can be seen weaving through the shadow-stricken corridors of limited love than that which the Coyote King was able to auger from the fractured mosaic of Humana's trembling histories, his vision blinded by the veil of violence that the Aztec warrior nation drew like an obsidian curtain over the dawning eyes of our dearly-beloved native ancestors, his heart doubtless wounded by woes we can only speculate.

May this ancient Nahuatl poem, credit unknown, stay and seal your woes as it has mine, for truly our pains are trifling when compared to the looming, pre-colonial fears that ravaged the old world:

"Where are we going?
We came only to be born.
Our home is beyond,
in the realm of the defleshed ones.
I suffer:
Happiness, good fortune
never comes my way.
Have I come here to struggle in vain?
This is not the place to accomplish things.
Certainly nothing grows green here:
Misfortune opens its blossoms."

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Fall 2023