A Guest Post by Nathanael Carroll Horton
My mother is an indigenous Kaqchiquel and my father is German-English/American. I was conceived at the lake during my parents’ honeymoon and was born in the middle of the winter in Boston, Massachusetts. I have been coming regularly to Guatemala ever since I was a toddler, through my adolescence, and now I just finished living on Lake Atitlán for a year as a grown man. When the pandemic first started in early 2020, my flight home was canceled. I decided to stay in Guatemala and not return to the US. I saw this twist of fate as an opportunity to explore the lake and be an adventuring yogi & writer.
I stayed at Casa Jaguar retreat space after my yoga teacher training ended with the Mahadevi Ashram in San Marcos, did a couple of cacao ceremonies & ecstatic dances at the ecstatic event space Eagle’s Nest, stayed at the mushroom cultivation school Fungi Academy in Tzunana and ate lunch at permaculture farm Granja Tz’ikin for a month, worked online teaching computer coding to kids with the WiFi at Hostel Del Lago, served three months of karma yogi service at the Mystical Yoga Farm, and then visited my family in Patzun when the state of calamity ended in early October and I could travel to see them. After my visit, I returned to finish the year on the lake and stayed at Hotel Kaqchiquel in Panajachel through the holidays and New Year.
I mention all this because, as a Guatemalan-American, and as a potential expat who would like to live and work in my mother’s home country, as well as having lived at or visited so many different communities and projects on the lake, that I have a unique perspective to offer.
The Atitlan Alliance is the brainchild of Jo Gi. He is a business planner and strategic analyst as well as a computer wizard. I met Jo about four years ago at the Cosmic Convergence festival where he introduced me to my first virtual reality experience. He has continued to pioneer the use of tech in art, business, science, and community organization on the lake for the past four years.
Recently, I took a course with the Fungi Academy in which Jo was also a participant. That gave me the opportunity to speak more with Jo. It was curious to me that he was constantly filming between the times he was enjoying the course. I was wondering how he was going to edit all those hours of footage, but now I understand that he will use AI techniques to arrange the footage automatically. “People need to see what is happening here,” he said. I took him to mean people need to see how the transformational work done on the lake can be extended to the whole world for healing. I feel like Jo and I see eye to eye on many of the issues and benefits of living on the lake. Principally I have been curious about the health of the natural ecosystem, the constitution of the social fabric of the growing population, and how travelers are attracted and directed to the magic available on the lake.
I think people enjoy a lot of freedom in Guatemala to set up projects that wouldn’t work elsewhere. This place, the lake, is unique. However, I feel a leadership vacuum and a sort of Wild West attitude. People largely do things independently without oversight, standards, community support and with limited coordination on places like Facebook groups and with some local municipal direction.
The overall question that has emerged for me is, “Where is the leadership?” Is there any greater vision of integrating the international with the indigenous and nature with the digital? Where can I plug myself in to interface with others and do my part for the future of the lake? Everyone seems to be doing something really cool, but to what end? What good could be cultivated with more coordination and cooperation? How can you avoid neocolonialism and have equitable and respectful economic development and cross-cultural exchanges with the Mayan people?
What I like about the Atitlan Alliance is that it is a soft approach to leadership. It is a civic service. The program generates goodwill by fostering and facilitating connections between the many communities and businesses on the lake, online & in-person. The concept behind the website and the Alliance itself includes lots of aspects that weave together by:
- creating an online marketplace for local goods,
- providing a forum for discussion and arbitration,
- helping incubate new projects, creating a strong digital presence online for marketing and educational purposes,
- and eventually, Jo wants to set up a physical campus dedicated to the mixing of the tech and the tribal.
- And so much more! You can look “under the hood” and read the technical details in the Atitlan Alliance FAQ.
When I asked Jo why he was doing all this and what drove him, he said, “Because the spirit called me here, I like being the tech guy, and it’s what I could afford.”
I find myself aligned with Jo on these points. I too, feel the call.
I hope you do as well.
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Nathanael Carroll Horton is from the San Francisco Bay Area in California, USA. He spent all of 2020 traveling & quarantining at different locales on Lake Atitlán, Guatemala. He is a yogi, writer, and custodian of a cat named Alice. His blog chronicles his adventures with Alice, the co-founder of his business, the Calico Catering Company. You can read his blog at https://calico.catering
