CB MAYA: The Mother Behind Illusion

"I didn't find my ancestors. I realized I was made of them." — G

I was listening to Maya Angelou's book about her mother, thinking about my daughters, which got me thinking about ancestors — mine, theirs, the ones still to come. I decided to go on a walking meditation — the kind that asks you to imagine inviting your ancestors to sit around a table with you. I was somewhere in that quiet, open space of trying when I went around the bend of the road and ran straight into two turkey vultures. I had never seen one before, let alone two, not up close. Not staring back at me from ten feet away on a big tree branch. For nearly five minutes, the three of us were completely alone.

This is the spirit behind CB MAYA.

Turkey vultures are not scavengers — they are healers. Cathartes Aura — golden purifiers. They cleanse the earth of death and disease so that the rest of life can carry on, live long, and prosper. But what struck me deepest was what I learned about how they mother. Both parents share the long work of incubating eggs for up to 40 days — taking turns so the nest is never left unguarded. Then they commit another 60 to 84 days to raising chicks who hatch blind, downy, and completely dependent. They choose their nesting sites with care — cool, hidden sanctuaries in rock crevices, hollow logs, and caves far from disturbance. And because they have no talons to carry meals, they offer the most intimate nourishment possible — regurgitating pre-digested food directly to their young. When the season ends, they return to the same beloved spot, year after year, with the same devoted partner.

Nature's great recycler of the dead is also one of its most quietly faithful, fiercely present, and tenderhearted mothers.

That's not contradiction. That's Maya.

In Sanskrit, maya means the cosmic illusion — the veil that makes the world appear as it seems rather than as it is. But maya is also something more. It is the womb of perception — the force that weaves the bonds of worldly attachment and simultaneously holds the transformative promise of spiritual realization. Maya is both the thing that binds us and the thing that births us. The mother who holds you so close you cannot see beyond her — and in doing so, makes you into someone who eventually can.

In Puerto Rican culture, this maternal force runs deeper than metaphor. It runs in the blood. Studies show that a majority of Puerto Ricans carry Indigenous mitochondrial DNA — passed from mother to child in an unbroken thread stretching back to the Taíno, the island's first people. The Taíno were matrilineal — social status, inheritance, and identity passed through the mother's line. When colonization disrupted nearly everything else, the maternal line endured. While Indigenous paternal lines were largely replaced by historical forces beyond anyone's control, the mothers held. They always held. What colonization could not erase, the mothers carried forward in their very cells — a genetic and spiritual legacy that persists in Puerto Rican descendants to this day.

I came to Oregon as an only child, with only a mother and a grandmother, and together we built a nest for my daughters. I didn't have to search for my ancestors. I was standing inside them.

We live in a world that separates tenderness from power, softness from strength, attachment from awakening. CB MAYA pushes back on all of that. What if the love that feels like it limits you is actually the very thing expanding you? What if the veil isn't hiding the truth — it's preparing you to receive it? What if the mothers who came before you, all the way back to the first island women, were not just surviving — but protecting the exact lineage that made you possible?

The turkey vulture doesn't choose between devotion and freedom. It lives both, completely.

CB MAYA settles into a space the way a mother's presence settles into a home — pervasive, protective, felt in every corner even when she isn't in the room. You don't notice everything it holds at once. You notice it when the walls feel like they are watching over you, steady and ancient and completely devoted. It is the ancestor at the table you've been trying to imagine — already there, already holding you.

See clearly. Love fiercely. Birth yourself forward.

CB MAYA — because the very thing that binds you is already teaching you how to fly.