Tolteca #2 (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781507629925)

I am a talker, an hablador. I did not always know this. When I was born, my tongue was fused to the roof of my mouth. It had to be cut. For a long time I could not roll the r's in my given name. Like Demosthenes, I learned to speak by reciting poems with stones in my mouth. Koyote describes my spirit and my function. The coyote is a sly criminal who smuggles people across the border. In my case, I bring people across borders of consciousness. I subvert the rules, navigate spaces not many dare. The trickster aspect of Koyote applies as well. Sometimes creator, sometimes destroyer, I am always a buffoon... a Fool. The Koyote spirit doesn't allow for stability and yet sometimes in moments of chaos he brings something that gives stability. I am an hablador and my art is the Telling. The Telling is an art of immediacy. The experience is direct and in the moment and is not mediated. It's experiential. There are no scripts, no agenda, no indoctrination! This is the sound that MAKES. Where a storyteller leaves a moral, I, the hablador, deconstruct cultural icons. I don't worry about entertaining. I am not concerned about whether the story delights or offends. I only aim to bring something through from another world. I developed the art of the Telling inspired by what I've received from my lineage, which starts among Toltec masters in tenth-century Mexico and whose art was preserved throughout Latin America by drifters who told crazy stories to the children. In a way, it might have started as a way of connecting back to my roots in El Salvador, before I went into exile because my "subversive" acts of teaching war refugees to read and write put my life in danger. The sense of magick, eternal mystery, pervades every layer of my memories from that place before and through the war, and many stories clamor to come out and play in the light of this space created by words and attention.