Written by Kseniya Kniazeva   

The world didn't end today. It was never supposed to, despite the paranoid hype of the Preppers and the Chinese fringe Christian group. But there is something to learn from the actual Mayan prophesy, and the Mayans themselves.

I've spent the last month living in the less known home of Central America's Mayan inhabitants. Honduras is the humble little sister of Guatemala. While Guatemala postures pompously around, donning its Mayan cloak, Honduras hides behind its pauperized perilous reputation, the corruption, and (a scene ubiquitous on every street) its armed army. But here, in Copan Ruinas, the best preserved site of Mayan ruins remaining on this planet, on this day, a day many said it was all supposed to end in apocalyptic horror, there is cheer, laughter and a festival of celebration. Because the original Mayans said December 21, 2012 was the day 5200 years of murder, war, greed, waste and consumption was to end. And today forward is the dawning of a beautiful, collective era--an era of spiritual reawakening and respect and unity between all things, people and ideas.

Most of all, the Mayan belief of oneness with Mother Nature shines here, in this small town at the edge of Western consciousness. People seem to litter less here. They are kind. Loving. Will give you a room in a storage loft rather than let you sleep on the streets. The sense of community is strong. The city even fed all of its inhabitants, its widows, its grubby, barefoot children, and its,wandering with wonderment, western observers. Unlike the rest of Honduras, which is often the epitome of unfettered capitalism, there is not one Pizza Hut or McDonald's here. Cubanesque versions of Casa Particulares, the home-based lodging system in the town, nestles next to more traditional hotels and hostels and costs a fraction of the room cost for weary travelers in the US--our room tonight only costs 250 lempiras, or $12.50.

And everyone speaks to each other. They introduce themselves to one another. They listen to others' stories. The artisans peddle souvenirs kindly and graciously. The gap-toothed old woman delicately--nearly-reverently--takes the beer cans from us, and smiles gratefully for a measly two dollar offering. For besides being less capitalistic than the rest of the nation, even perhaps many parts of the world, poverty here is also rampant. Inequality exists, though it isn't as ostentatiously drastic as in Tegucigalpa, where plush apartment complexes are guarded by somber private guards next to piles of stinking garbage and barbed wine stares ominously from the top of formidable, 15-foot walls.

But all that pain, poverty and division is ending today. All that will be left is a purer, heightened state of consciousness. A better era, where the frequency of love is dominant, and the new vibration embraces our oneness with Madre Tierra. Where wasteful, polluting, ego- (and human-) centric consumption is laid to rest. An unspoken tenet of Bolivia's Mayan celebration (that today hails the death of capitalism) exists here. It's the death of the individual and the birth of collective, cooperating consciousness. And tattooed hippies in baboon-like pants walk through the streets passing Tegucigalpan Catholic pediatricians. All here, together, celebrating what is a quasi-pagan change for the better. They are celebrating the 'cosmovision Maya', what Mayan spiritual guide and expert Juan José Chiriz Cuat explained at a VIP gathering of ambassadors and Tegucigalpan leaders I attended several weeks ago as "a more profound consciousness, relating all of us to an earthly pulse of the spiritual cosmos and of Mother Nature."

"There are many reasons why we suffer natural disasters (remember, remember, Hur. Sandy's bad weather), why we have pollution in all parts of our natural environment, why global warming is indisputable and such things affecting us are mentioned in Mayan prophesies, but if human beings were more aware, more conscientious, we would not be suffering in this way," he said.

The guide explained that the ancestral prediction of the dawning of the new era, Oxlajuj b´ak´tun, is simply the end of a cyclical calendar period of 5200: 13 cycles of 400 Mayan years. The matriarchal Mayans revere the gestation period of the woman, and thus time the months around the pregnancy period (13 months of 20 days is the average gestation of a human baby).

Chiriz Cuat continued: "we have known humanity could disappear, but not by some Mayan prophesy, instead, tragically, by its own hand, and unfortunately there will not be some new magical cycle that could save us, except ourselves and our change in consciousness."

In other words, if being human continues to mean we aren't conscious of and careful with our environment, we end.

Let us not allow this peaceful, highly-developed positivity extinguish to inconsequential embers. For if we do ignore the sanguine prophesy of a better tomorrow, a tomorrow where climate change is halted because mother earth's inhabitants start to care more about Her well-being than the money in their pockets and the greed in their hearts, the world may very well end. We will destroy it. And one doesn't need an ancient calendar to tell her so. Listening to the Mayans may save us yet. Our redemptive, magical cycle starts today. We can mold a brighter future together, by our own hands.