Perspective
Travel Journals: A Rainy Season in Costa Rica
Throughout my travel experiences over the years I have been fortunate to have glimpsed life and the world through a myriad of cultural perspectives. When I was 18 I experienced Southeast Asia, later I found my way to Europe and Scandinavia, then China, Korea and Japan, and of course, Costa Rica.
I have learned this: Perspective is everything.
We are so very limited in our experience and understanding of life and the world around us when we are only exposed to one culture and one perspective in the whole mandala of life.
Perspective.
It is now Friday, Viernes, and I am already experiencing such a huge shift in my own perspective of time. Life in Costa Rica moves very differently in relationship to time. There is nothing that is ever happening quickly. Time is like air or space here. It seems endless. There is never a shortage of time. It is only in how we orient ourselves toward time, self-created schedules and calendars that we experience the world in a dramatically different way.
I have always been fond of saying to people that a week in Costa Rica is like a month anywhere else in the world. This has proven to be true once again on this journey. I have been here only 5 full days and time seems endless and the hours and days do not move in a linear or structured way.
The early morning sounds of exotic birds, monkeys and nature in movement begin to gently pull me from my sleep. Faint memories of my dreams fade as the sunlight begins to make its way through the thin curtains of my window. Instead of sluggishly wanting to pull the covers over my head and go back to sleep, I am inspired to move and meet the day.
This morning on my walk to the beach I passed Grace. It was barely 5:30 am and she was walking to work at Cafe Mar Azul for her double shift with a huge smile on her face as if life couldn’t be any better. She had already taken a bus for an hour to get here. It was a face I have never seen in my life on a person heading to work in America.
“Buenos Dias, mi Amigo,” she waved with a smile.
Field Notes
“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book…or you take a trip…and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken. We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”
Anaïs Nin
From the Archives
Revisit A Way of Being from the Archives
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Zen and Ink Journals represents hundreds of hours of writing over the past decade, sometimes from a train in remote China or a coffee shop in Kyoto, a hammock in Costa Rica or a simple cabin on a mountaintop in Boquete, Panama or Ciudad Colón.
On these pages, I share my observations of kindness and beauty from my adventures in the world and invite you to listen quietly for the call within you to explore the places that beckon your soul.
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