Love and Gratitude

Barring the most heroic of journeys, Mt.Everset and Kiliminjaro included, and more inclined toward the trials endured by your average intrepid voyager, airports and the myriad ways of discomfort and delay they are adept at administering by the resulting  demand to our practice of patience and fortitude, surpass the most challenging of situations.

We have arrived safely, contentedly, and nourished in ways we are still yet to know, back to Ashland. Spring arrived during our departure, and we are welcomed back by blooming daffodils, quince, flowering almond, camellia, and in my opinion, the queen of this time of year’s heavenly scents, daphne odora. Our hearts rejoiced in grateful union to the snow pack and swollen rivers we viewed from the metal bird that carried us.

It will be a long while before the taste of agua pipa ( fresh cold coconut water) leaves our memory. However, regardless of what earthly pleasure we might be embracing at any given moment, our shared quiet and often laughter-filled delicious harmony is what has penetrated most deeply into my heart.

Sophia, David, and I created a place of mutual consideration and beauty only to match that which resided around us in both the natural and social environment. We found that Pachamama responded to our peaceful heart song by sharing openly her countless ways of exquisite expression at the places we visited. The people that we encountered responded to our joint mirth with ease and acceptance.  We treated each other with baskets and urns and botellas full of the same, of course, and slipped easily into a soft, malleable configuration of ways to travel and stay and play and dance and cook and eat and sing and breathe together.

Sophia ventured forward to continue her quest with another member of our ever growing family, Ari. After traveling  all together to the border crossing at Los Chiles C.R., we bid them farewell to enjoy the boat ride along a small river gliding through the jungle that would eventually take them to the town where David and I ventured together last year, San Carlos, Nicaragua.

That David and my intended plans for Bali and Australia ended in Costa Rica with Sophia and me doing ceremony together and deepening our ever-growing adoration of each other, and then the three of us  traveling together culminating with the additional light that is Ari, speaks to the path of the heart that is always choosing the correct course, the course of highest intention, regardless of what we think we are doing or where we believe we are going.

This pathway of highest intention, of course, is borne of, resides within, and expresses outwardly through gratitude and love, love and gratitude.  We watched a beautiful video while we were gone called “Water”, which showed among other many beautiful aspects of water its capability for response to even written words of positivity or negativity.  The clarity of both color and crystalline structure bespeaks the way that we humans also respond.  The conclusion of the film spoke of all of the gifts that water bestows upon us and  that all it asks in return is “love and gratitude”.  How perfectly clear and simple!  Water is such a great teacher for pathways and flow.  Be like water, she says.  We respond with love and gratitude.

H-Om

Wherever I travel my destination is always the same. Home.

I look for it during my daily forays into my repeated attempts to simply listen without my  mental chatter interrupting the divine choir around me. I yearn to be 100% present to the howler monkeys' call. To receive with full awareness even the most subtle songs. The wind gently kissing the leaves.. Yes, kissing. You must know that nature is one enormous ode to love.

I search in my wanderings for an exquisitely simple place.  Each dip and dive into the Pacific, a river, or a lake that has caressed my being aids in the purification toward ridding myself of anything that is not of my uncompromised essence. Walking through the jungle and seeing an unknown flower for the first time allows me to experience that moment as completely new and helps me to remember that truth, lest I ever become complacent in my awareness of the gratitude I owe to life for my life. It is through my aliveness that I am able to feel awe and wonder at creation.

What I seek is simply to see vividly with eyes unhindered by automatic labeling which degrades the magnificent splendor of butterflies, hummingbirds, toucans, red macaws, rosette spoonbill and the roosting tree where hundred of egrets go to their communal dreams.

I love the way traveling, in the way we do, allows me to adopt the rhythms of the land and its people. It teaches me another way of being that encourages spaciousness. I could be wrong but I’m pretty sure I’m not because smiles are a universal sign of happiness that the people here are way more laid back with less stress in their lives. It’s a relief and pleasure to be surrounded by a culture that has “pura vida” (pure life) as its greeting. I learn how to take my time in making decisions. I practice feeling what is around me to guide my decision making. I practice spaciousness so that I have room to breathe deeply which helps me expand my awareness.

Similar to the vision quest where one journeys not to have holy communion, which one certainly does, but to take the gifts received and bring them back to your people, I travel to rejuvenate, learn, and grow so that I can be and do my best.

I travel so that I can return to my home which has never been anywhere else than my own heart.

Okay, you caught me. If you know me, you know that the true reason I do anything is to fulfill my pursuit of joy. Maybe as I get older the inner callings will turn my attention more inward but for now I am admittedly a hedonist for sensory pleasure. Bring it on: sights, aromas, tastes, sounds, a million feeling sensations, the wind kissing my cheek.

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Lake Arenal

Two days before flying out of Juan Santamaria Airport, we see our first howlers of this journey when we stop at a group of cabinas owned  by a Swiss woman named Erica at a fresh, breezy, garden-enclosed knoll above Lake Arenal.  The following morning the howlers joined David in his orgasmic yawp, though we didn’t see them again until a couple  of hours later when Sandy stood up and wordlessly disappeared.  I’ve taken that to mean that she has been called out by nature.  She explained later that there was the cuuuuutest little howler infant being cuffed around by its mom, but I’m sure that the original reason was that she was simply drawn outside to feel the presence of the trees.

 In honor of my buddy Robbin and his eternal quest for finding the best breweries that combine great beer with outdoor sports, we’ve booked a lakeview room for the night at a local microbrewery that bills itself as “The best (and only) microbrewery hotel in Costa Rica”.  We’ve already sampled their excellent breakfast coffee and look forward to trying their prize-winning pale ale. 

This blog is currently coming to you from a tree-shaded hammock beside Lake Arenal, where we finished off last night’s delectable pizza from Gutierrez Family Pizzeria in Tronodora.  We are enjoying the chortle of oropendulae in the orange-blossomed poro tree across this small inlet whose view reminds us of Emigrant Lake until the howlers start branch-waving and ooh-oohing across the way. The frogs chorus in with the cicadas and cricket blending as well.  All on a field of blues and greens.  Meanwhile a great egret gracefully, but ever so slowly lifts a foot and extends it smoothly with barely a ripple, hunting along the edges for quick-darting morsels. 

We go for a leisurely swim in the refreshingly cool waters, forgetting that Lake Arenal’s altitude combines with the brilliant reflection off of the water to create a bit of a sunburn.  So I go to dinner later that evening with a face glowing from the sun and the beauty of my surroundings, a face glowing with love.

 

Divine Weaver by Sophia Jones

Above our heads 

A gateway to the infinite is waiting

Patiently the moon shines 

Demanding attention only from those who are willing to face the night.

The darkness consumes 

Form a memory forgotten by shapes that have dissolved into 

Something more than self 

More than you or me 

Eternity lingers 

Patiently Waiting for fear to step aside 

Goddess of the moon 

 now we have awakened 

In this darkness we have surrendered 

To your light within ourselves 

That shines in complete harmony 

With the night we have embodied

Divine feminine -weaver of the fabric of life

Thank you for wrapping us tenderly in your web of space and time

We honor you as our sanctuary of renewal, peace, and stillness

We see you as the child, mother and crone 

Who nurture our subtlest energies

We give thanks to the moon

Celebrating her divinity within ourselves

By honoring her undulations 

Waxing, waning

We too wane within- complete surrender to the formless 

We honor our own temple with sacred revelation 

And we wax - overflowing with energy we reflect the light back to the earth 

So that even in the womb of night 

Light and dark intertwine in complete balance. 

Envision or Invasion?

After the Singing Alive weekend, we spent a couple of days of energy recovery and relative solitude prior to heading down to the Envision Festival where we would be encamped surrounded by 7000 festival goers, often with a scant few inches between tents.

  Sandy and I were conservative in our approach, reserving time each day to escape the throngs by  walking up the beach far enough to  find a quiet place or taking a taxi to the waterfalls above Uvita, and climbing high enough above the main pools to find a smaller pool that we shared with toucans and freshwater shrimp, but only the occasional festival goer who had wandered our way, usually with the same intention (of finding a more quiet place to enjoy the river).  Hence, after a dip in our pool, and perhaps a short conversation, they each continued upstream to find their own quiet pool.

This energy renewal allowed us to fully jump into the festivities daily, but especially on Saturday and Sunday nights when the festival lineup was at its juiciest.  Sandy and Sophia's friends from  Guaria joined us at our camp, bringing with them a Boruca elder, Don Memo and his granddaughter, Sandra. Sandy and I took Sandra under wing for an incredible night of dancing on Saturday, creating a tribal dervish  space of whirling, interactive bodies within the crowd of listeners and dancers to Beats Antique, the band at the Sol Stage.  We danced to every song in the 1 1/2 hr. set, then found a DJ at the Lapa Stage who had the mob jumping, so we created space again and resumed the energized revelry.  We finished out the night about 2:30 or 3:00 after returning to the Sol Stage for Santos and Zurdo, a spectacle of pole clinbing and cloth crawling among Latin-infused rocktronica where we again refused to quit dancing until after the final encore.

Sunday night began in a slower fashion.  Once again, Sandra and Sandy and I forayed into the crowd  at the Sol Stage, finding space close in, and readying ourselves to dance.  However beautiful the musicality of Elephant Revival, though, it didn't inspire the type of dancing that we were ready for, Sandra and I, so Sandy sent us packing, allowing her to find rhythm that we weren't privy to.  I went back to the camp for some hammock time to ready myself for the next band, Dirtwire.  Once again, Sandy found the connection with the music, but Sandra and I wanted something faster  than the swaying that we found around us in the milieu, so we exited.  However, I hadn't stayed up until midnight to be a non-participant, so I walked Sandra to the camp, infused my brain with some meditative breathing, and returned to the fray to dance to Dirtwire.  The breathing technique worked its magic, and I stepped into the rhythm of Dirtwire's final number and several of their encores.  Those few songs helped bring me to a space of acceptance and open-mindedness for the next band, Dimond Saints, on the Luna Stage.

They turned out to provide the perihelial dance event for the two of us. We wended our way slowly back to the camp, wanting both sleep and dance, with no clear course as to which would win out.  But the festival goers would be leaving that morning in hordes or red taxis and  private cars, queuing up to return rental tents, and retrieving valuables from the secure lockers,  so our plan was to arise  at 5:00, grab coffee, and decide whether to break camp or go dance to the Human Experience on the Luna Stage at sunrise.  Practicality won out.  After coffee, we broke camp, turned in tents, retrieved valuables, and were ready when one of the Guaria friends, Scott, collected us to give us a short ride up the coast  in his rental car to our next accommodations in Matapalo Beach.

San Isidro and Beyond!

To San Isidro ... And Beyond!

Somehow in the blissful slipping-into of TicoTime, I managed to lose the business card of the delightfully present, joyful young man who had driven me out from Jimenez to Matapalo, so Ramon, the caretaker arranged for Arturo to pick us up on Thursday morning about 11:00 to take us to the bus station. As with every taxi driver we've met on this trip, not only was Arturo pleasant and knowledgeable, but he also had no usuriousness in his nature. Furthermore, he had a more accurate understanding of the Jimenez bus schedule than the online horario, so we got to the station shortly before the bus left for San Isidro.

The bus from Jimenez, were it straight through, would take about 4 hours, but it was the local, so we stopped often to pick up passengers, only to drop them off a kilometer or two farther along. Shortly after leaving the peninsula, we began paralleling a wide river with occasional little drops that had me regretting not bringing an IK on this trip, until later on, when I found that this river, the Rio Grande de Terraba, had crocs. The Rio Grande runs along the base of a barranca that was part of La Amistad National Park, the wildest and largest natural reserve in Costa Rica, extending all the way across the border into Panama.

130 km and 70 stops later, we were deposited after dark at the end of the line, the plaza of San Isidro, where a bullfighting, cow, and orchid feria was in full swing, making the crossing of the main drag with our bags an adventure in itself. We secured a taxi driven by another good-natured young man who drove us 5 or 6 km up into the mountains to La Princesa, our hotel for the evening.

The view from our patio in the morning was a spectacular vista of the entire valley and mountains beyond, seen through a floral rainbow foreground. The bougainvilleas, especially, with their hyper-naturally rapturous hues had Sandy swooning. Until she saw the daturas. And the roses. And the ginger. And the bird-of-paradise. We wandered the garden, eyeing and identifying exotic birds until the heat reminded us that we were headed to Finca Amrta that morning to begin 3 days of singing for peace and harmony with a group of like-minded people. Another taxi driver took us to the centro to buy goods before heading out into the mountains west of town. He took us down a steep, dusty, rocky drive into the finca, where we were admitted, signed in, and pointed in the direction of the various places to camp. The generosity of others contributed to our good fortune, as we found that they had left to us the most beautiful campsite on the property. It was within a grove comprised of 4 clumps of magnificent green bamboo, up to 12 inches in diameter at the base.

 The spacing was such that we created a small enclosure with our two hammocks, and set up the tent just outside of that. We were some 10 meters from the river, at a spot that had been hand-dammed the prior week by 5 industrious young women from the finca, so that we had a beautiful, pristine swimming hole at our front door. As soon as the hammocks were strung, we shed our clothes and spent the next two hours alternating our revels in the crisp, clear waters with our languid sunning on the boulders alongside.

Prying myself away from the river, I found the singing circle, and began the happy work of learning my first song with the group, Costa Rica Singing Alive. They use a lot of call and response, as well as repetition, gesture, and precise enunciation to help the newbies such as myself to learn the songs. Included within the price package for the weekend were 3 organic meals daily and more infusion of goodwill than a heart can take without bursting into tears or laughter or both.

 Friendship bonds notwithstanding, the culminating event on Sunday evening was the highlight of the weekend. It was a 2 by 2 caterpillar line of hands cradling, supporting, nurturing each person as their turn arose at the head of the line to walk slowly, slowly, slowly, with eyes closed through the line as we all sang a loving, healing song to them, over and over, until they had heard the song sung to them individually at least a dozen times, before ending up embraced in a final hug that allowed the swell in our hearts to subside enough to open our eyes and become part of the singing caterpillar to infuse the next gentle heart coming through.

Planes, Plans, and Polychromatic Paradise

Greetings of joyful salutations to the precious friends and family that read this text. Before I begin to tell of my journey thus far, I want to acknowledge that if I have sent you the blog address that you are important and treasured to me. Each of you in your different ways touches my life and therefore my heart and helps to make me who I am by your individual gifts to me whether they be of example, encouragement, appreciation, or support in so many ways. . The one attribute that is unknowingly shared by all of you is that each of your sparks offers additional fuel to the fire that you help tend… which is the passions of my heart: namely love, but in this context to be mentioned, travel !

The first bit of news is that I am neither in Bali nor Australia as first intended but in the beautiful Golfo Dulce region of southern Costa Rica.

Three days after a very long travel to Bali, David’s father passed on. He was 90. It was a peaceful transition in his own bed surrounded by family. Nevertheless, a funeral follows a death and a good son, which David most assuredly is, heeds the call to attend even when half way across the world. He invited me to continue on in Bali, with the generous heart that he is known for, but I gratefully declined his offer and instead chose to stay by his side.

                           

We arrived in Dallas a day before a most beautiful service replete with military presence and honor. Needless to say, his 90 year-old mother as well as the rest of his family were very happy that we were there to join in the honoring and passing of William Nolen.

After about a week there David decided to stay in Dallas for a few weeks to help his mother, and I decided it was time to join Sophia in Costa Rica. She was scheduled to start at Naropa, a small college in Boulder, in January but decided to extend her time here and defer her start there until the fall.

Even though we’ve been here together for weeks now, I’m still astonished at how our paths have brought us once again to Costa Rica and more exactly to joining our friends at Guaria de Osa  for ceremony with the Secoya elders whom we’ve been working with for the last few years.

Our experience there with ceremony, with friends, and with the elders from the upper Amazon in Ecuador has once again generously provided us with a great renewal. In many various and wonderful ways our bodies, minds, and souls have been renewed, deepened, healed, and expanded. Our hearts are further along toward claiming the full experience of divine love and joy that is our birthright.

Each day unfolds with a greater awareness to the many miracles that are always in front of us when our eyes are open to truly seeing. The lush vividness of the jungle here beckons full attention. From the red regality of the scarlet macaws to the acrobatic antics of the spider and capuchin monkeys, there are vibrant and iridescent colors to behold. Hummingbirds of many varieties, each with their own hues are abundant. The flowers, oh the flowers, above and below! Many such as ylang ylang with scents that demand to be noticed and, in my opinion, deeply breathed in and cherished, are everywhere. The shades of blue waves that dance with a billion rainbows in the sunlight in this part of warm water Pacific Ocean becomes a dark background at night to reflect the moon’s light and the plankton. Colors, colors, colors.

Now to the sounds. The first are the roosters, 3:30 a.m. sharp. Fortunately, they’re slow to wake and only call out a cock-a-doodle yawn sporadically before their more serious early morning vibrato. Next, also while it’s still dark, come the howler monkeys. They generally live further up into the jungle so are seen less often than the spiders and capuchins but make their presence known by their vociferous howls. Next is the moment for which I greet with a child’s eager excitement, the birds’ gift of melodic early morning prayer songs. My god, this music is like a long-awaited expression of a very specific tone that I need to be truly whole. My practice is to open my hearing as wide as it will go and to be vigilant with the wanderings of my mind. The longing to drink with a parched thirst each drop of nectar that is the sweetness of their chorus helps me to simply breathe, be present, embrace, enjoy, and give thanks to the new day. Waves lapping and cicadas chirping are always in the background. Sounds.

Tastes.  FRESH COCONUT WATER !!! Given to us from above by the capuchins, whose efforts to slurp its amazing delights, often result in dropping the cocos to the ground where we scoop them up.

And now ?

David joined Sophia and me shortly after our arrival at Casa Dulce, an incredibly perfect place that we’ve rented for the week. I look out from our hammock-strung balcony past the gardens to the ocean. David and I awoke in the open-air upstairs loft to the sight and sound of the ocean, two agoutis, a small mammal that inhabits this place and, of course, our love together, with Sophia, and all that we cherish and hold sacred, nourished by the early morning bird song.

In Love with Joy,

Sandy

                            

The Gaze of Others

We choose words carefully, each of us.  Or the words choose us.  Each of us a word for the day.  Mine?  superlativo.  Sandy’s?  alumbrar.  Sophia’s?  tornasalado.  We toss a salad of phrases mixing in these new words.  Las diosas lead me through kundalini yoga on a stone tile platform six inches below water level in the palm-shaded pool.  I am distracted by monkeys, wondering (I, not they) whether they might be the elusive howlers that we hear near and far before dawn, announcing their unseen traverse through the treetops.  Toucans touch Sandy’s eyes only.

A hunchbacked agouti startles into flat-spined posture, motionless.  The birds and animals who live here meet our gaze for long moments, scan and translate our relaxed movements into something recognizably undaunting, seem to accept us into the neighborhood, then continue with their searches: the agouti scouring the lawn, the spider monkeys levering and jumping and flying towards small orange fruits, the capuchins slurping coco water through a gnawed crater.  Each gazes upon me and continues, except the black hawk. 

Sensing the hawk’s presence, I turn to find him perched solidly on a low branch eight feet away, willing my gaze into his own.  We hold there, converting moments into currents of energy.  I introduce my camera to the willing hawk.  He stares into the large new eye and is unafraid.  Noiseless photos shift to video, and as I stoop to get a different angle, he flexes legs and lifts wings.  But stays there as I slowly regain vertical.  He gifts me a long hop to a nearby branch, so I return the favor by moving on.  On my return path, I catch a glimpse of fleet movement, a skitter through the leaves, heavy wings lifting small burdens for dinner.  Later I look upward from my hammock to find him watching and assessing once again.  “Do I have the power to conjure another mouse if I rise out of the hammock and edge around the yard?” he perhaps wonders.  He is assimilating me into his life, I am sure. 

Raucous macaws are supplanted by hoots and roars from the waveset in the golfo where a surf class, for any new move or stance gained, shouts approvals carried on the mosquitoless breeze, cooled as it sails atop the cobalt to cerulean water, blowing in from the east shore where purportedly a two-mile long wave construes itself somewhere near Punta Banco.  This day, this Valentine’s Day continues its languorous, lovely stroll toward its amorous conclusion. The love of nature teaches us much about the nature of love.

Awareness of Home

Awareness of Home                      

Just before leaving Dallas for Costa Rica, I treated myself to a new pair of lightweight Nikon binoculars which, like most things in our lives, has turned into both a blessing and a curse.  Of course, some curses are so benign as to be ALMOST benevolent, and such is the case with the binoculars.  The scarlet macaw in the distant tree becomes a red leaf.  The whale cruising slowly along halfway to the other side of the gulf becomes a wayward log.  Such is the occasional disappointment that reality brings to imagination.

But the blessings, ah the blessings of clarity from these far-seeing glasses completely outweigh those minor hiccups of the imagination.  An indistinct object on a limb becomes a nuanced study in avian behavior, the view through the lens affording the capability to denote the difference between a look of curiosity or a wariness, a readiness to fly, a preference for a certain type of hopping, a quickness of purpose.  Birdwatching is such an acceptable form of voyeurism, even including the scatological aspects.  I mean, there’s absolutely no reason to be embarrassed and look away as the sergeant bird lifts its tail to defecate, eh?  Or to disguise a fascination with observing the upside-down mating habits of macaws?

On a day such as today, after a night of frenzied, frenetic homage to the local DJ at Martino’s Buena Esperanza bar, observing the world at close-hand from the comfort of a reclining sling chair on a shady porch is a welcome activity that has so little emphasis on the “active”. My day is focused on two distinct goals, the first being the aforementioned immobilized observing.  The second goal is interwoven within the first in that I am continuing to explore the pura vida concept that time and goal-orientation become relatively meaningless when appreciating the awareness and harmony of the now.  It is the Tico mantra, their salutation and leave-taking, their daily grail.  By now, my gentle, intelligent reader, you are expressing your …. delight?...confusion?  in catching the obvious contradiction.  How can my goal be to eschew goal-orientation?  What an oxymoronic endeavor, with the emphasis on “moronic”!  Of course it is!  But we start with baby steps for every undertaking, and give ourselves credit for the small incremental change in our learning. 

So here I recline, beside the resident basilisk lizard, allowing the hawk to observe me observing him, allowing this place of fierce sun and verdant beauty to become, briefly, my home.  These days, for me, it is the most important aspect of what I do to change the way that I relate to the world in a joyful way:  I try to make wherever I am my home, a baby-step in discovering that home is within my heart; therefore, I am only as far away from home as I choose to believe in my imagination.  Maybe Nikon will soon make a pair of binoculars that will allow me to peer inside there as well.  To become a voyeur of my own behavior, thereby remembering more often how closely my own resembles that of everyone and everything else.  I am home.

Hero and Fool

The hero and the fool awoke together in my bed this morning, a chill, misty gale blowing down through the cloud forest of the Parque Quetzal of central Costa Rica.  Somehow they had each been summoned by the echoes of my lover’s voice warning that we should get to high ground as the ice caps melt.  Today was the day of which she had foretold, had premonisced.  And I had no way to find her.  No means of communication from here to wherever she and her daughter had decided to land within the maelstrom. 

As he served breakfast, Don Bernardo confirmed my suspicions, “This is not the normal weather.  It is rainy and cold throughout the entire nation.  The hills, the cities, the coastlines, all are rainy and cold.  No es normal.”

What to do then? 

The hero calmly started formulating a plan as he arranged the minimal amount of gear to assemble in order to travel lightly and swiftly.  Or maybe that was the fool who was readying himself to travel.   For his lover knew where he was and would try to make it up the mountain, surely, to safety and to his waiting arms.  If.  If she could.

And if she couldn’t?  Which would go in search of her, the hero or the fool? 

The fool must rely on luck for his good fortune.  But during time of ultimate catastrophe, isn’t luck the equal of determination and fortitude?  Was luck forged in a cooler fire than courage? 

Would that there actually were two of me, one to leave behind to embrace her when she arrives, to enfold her in my relief, to nuzzle down into her hair and breathe in the tranquility of having no parts missing, of the whole, the entirety ready to face whatever comes, together.  The other to wave goodbye, briefly and sternly, to myself that was staying behind, resolved of footstep, heading towards the unknown trail, but steadfast in the image of finding a hint, a scent of where she had been.  Closing in, approaching her essence, sure of finding her before the tragedy befell.

After breakfast, the hero and the fool both etherized and the daily me remained, holed up with a head cold, swaddled in blankets within my unheated cabana.  My lover is out there somewhere along the coast, but I’m sure she needs no rescue.  I am here for healing and cleansing before she and I somehow wend our way to that point and place where one of us arrives and is waiting, smiling when the other comes into view.