✦ Sastun ✦
Story-time...
December 2023
Tonight, I finally found my sastun. The name comes from the book Sastun: My apprenticeship with a Mayan Healer, by Rosita Arvigo
This was my first Plant Book purchased in Belize after spending two months deep in the Rainforest, at an archaeology camp known as PfB. This was back in the year 2000, and I had discovered that I was staring at the Palms, Escoba trees and Strangler Figs, alongside keeping an eye out for the Fer-de-lance snakes, far more than I was interested in Mayan settlement patterns, which was what I was studying for my under-grad thesis.
It was in that book where I read about the healing Plants of the rainforest. It was there where my mind soaked up all the information held by these multi-colored green beings surrounding me. It was in that book where Don Elijio mentored Rosita in the ways of traditional Mayan Healing, which utilized the Plants for spiritual cleansing, physical ailments and so forth.
Don Elijio also used his sastun, as an anchor point, his glass marble. Sastun is translated to mean Light of the Ages, Stone of the Ages and Stone of Light. Named for a “cherished tool of divination and spiritual power used by Maya H’mens since ancient times.” (Arvigo)
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Fast forward to the summer of 2006, I’m living in SE Alaska, planting Bergenia babies I grew from seed at Jewell Gardens on a blue-bird sky and sunshine filled afternoon. It was the end of the work day, and I had a wheelbarrow full of weeds after prepping the area. After planting those babies in the Island Bed, I stepped back, admired my handiwork, gathered tools, and headed towards the compost pile. As I rolled on down the boardwalk, my eye caught a wee bitty Bergenia that I had missed.
I couldn’t not plant it, so turned around and went back. I took that itty bitty Bergenia and reached towards a spot that looked just right.
And right where I was going to plant that Bergenia babe….was a shimmering green glass marble.
It wasn’t even dirty. In fact, the sun was shining directly upon it.
Imagine my delight! Immediately, I knew it was my sastun.
This was before the glass-blowing that came later to the gardens, and we didn’t use marbles to mulch or marbles in flower arrangements. It could have been from late 1890’s onward, it wasn’t uncommon to unearth relics from the past in that gold rush town. Whenever we’d find a rusty something or other, the gardeners would holler “ARTIFACT!!” I never had it looked at to confirm its age, I didn’t need to. The way it came about was magical.
It was special.
Serendipitous.
A good omen.
I held on to my sastun, eventually placing it into an old clay lantern a dear friend had gifted me. And it lived there for over a decade.
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Fast forward to 2021. We are uprooting from our home of 10 years. From the community where I’d spent 19 years and my partner 17. Where our kids were born, where I knew all the local trails and had so many wonderful Plant friends. Leaving the graves of Clover & Steiner, the skookum chicken coop. The chickens. The rivers, waterfalls and ocean.
I packed the sastun carefully away as I didn’t want it rattling around in a bumpy clay lamp. We packed up so much, but left tenfold more behind. And we made our way south.
Now for the past couple of weeks I have been wondering where my sastun was. I had unpacked the clay lantern a while back but of course, the sastun was no longer in there. But I couldn’t quite remember where I had placed it. That time of packing and moving was an upheaval. So, it didn’t worry me that I couldn’t find it, but I’ve recently reached the end of opening boxes from our move. All of the boxes have been gone through. Not everything has found its home yet, but it’s close.
And it’s still missing…
Last night, I decided to wash off the leaves of Juanita (my Hoya plant) as we just finished painting and rearranging the living room and have a new table upon which she can reside. I also planned to bump her up into a larger pot as she had outgrown the one her cutting was planted into back in 2021.
It had been some time since I paid so much care to those waxy leaves. At one point a rouge vine gently whapped me in the face! It was odd. Like the Plant moved (which of course they do, but not quite so intentionally quick). Sure, it could have just been random, but I’ve worked with Plants enough to know that that experience was Juanita getting my attention.
The transplant process took much longer than expected. Her roots were dry (which I knew, so I gave her some water previous) but they were really dry. So, more water. I first used a butter knife to scrape down the sides of the pot in order to loosen her up. She’s in a curvy pot, where part of the pot is larger than the opening….super cute, but note-to-self, a pain in the butt to get a root-bound Plant out! The scraping of the butter knife against the clay pot irritates my ears and isn’t working, so I go to find some flexible sticks outside. This works much better, getting down to the bottom of that pot, bending around the curve. I imagine a sturdy paint stirring stick would suffice as well.
At one point during this process, I got sidetracked by some nearby dusty crystals.
And I decided then and there to go wash off those dusty crystals with the intention of placing them back where they used to live, in a ‘special wooden box’; a hand-carved/built box with a native Alaskan design which I found at the local community garage sale years prior. It holds some of my most special items.
Back to Juanita.
It takes muscles, persistence, patience and care in order to get her out of that pot. But it finally happened and I get her all tucked into her new space. Cleaned up my mess and went to bed, all the while feeling really good after connecting with this Hoya, gifted to me by a dear friend back in the mid-2000s as a little sprig of a cutting, who lived with me through 2 Alaskan homes. She blooms every year if given enough sunshine and tends to root easily in water.
Hoya vines make excellent plant curtains.
Okay, so tonight I went to put away those now dried crystals. Again, rather randomly, just needing to tidy up, but all of a sudden it became insistent that I do this.
I get the special wooden box down, open it up and start to place them in. And there’s this little yellow drawstring bag in there that I don’t recall. Upon opening, I see dried shriveled up roots, then black and white hair (oh that’s where Steiner dog’s hair went!!) and that means those are High Bush Cranberry roots (Steiner smelled like HB Cranberries to me). Oh, how lovely to find this—I know, kinda weird, but I loved my dog. And then I wondered, is my sastun in here?? I felt about, but it just felt more of the same, but decided to empty the bag to make sure.
And wouldn’t you know it…
There it was: my sastun.
Found.
I laughed.
And thanked Juanita.
How lovely <3
This was a superb read! Thank you for sharing it!