Walks at Low Tide
Travel Journals : A Rainy Season in Costa Rica
I began my walk toward the mountain, noticing the blisters on my feet already forming from yesterday’s walk in wet shoes over 5 miles. I continued onward.
There was scarcely a person or two along the beach, early morning risers beginning to make their way onto the sand. One beautiful, caramel-skinned young woman doing yoga salutations toward the incoming waves pulled me out of my meditative state.
Being that this was low tide, I found a flat area of packed sand to begin my morning meditative movements and stretches. With each day in this magical place I am slowly becoming more comfortable in my own physical body again. For the past 15 months, amidst the chaos of the pandemic and a completely highjacked nervous system, I gradually became disassociated from my body, losing all connection with my physical expression and dropping pounds of weight and muscle.
Something about being here in this natural environment, just miles away from some of the world’s longest living people, I can feel a sense of health and aliveness returning, a realignment with my own nature, taking effect without effort. Perhaps it’s the fresh fish being dropped off by a local truck owned by a kind Costa Rican couple, or maybe the fresh fruits and vegetables and nuts, grown nearby, or the healthy air emitted by the infinite variety of trees and plants, or simply due to rising with the sun and walking the Pacific shoreline, or the realization of the limited need for electronic devices.
In just my short time here, the first five days into three months, it has me once again more deeply inquiring within.
How can one most fully live whatever life they have left?
I have wrestled and chipped away at this question for almost a decade amidst my journeys to China, Japan, S.Korea, and Costa Rica. My travels have been metaphoric journeys of chipping away the unimportant. Each of these adventures have allowed me the unique opportunity to explore these questions deeply, while also considering them for long stretches of time in foreign places through the lens and ways of life of completely different cultures and ways of doing things.
As I have continually discovered, there are elements which seem to consistently emerge, themes and elements that make up a recipe for a happy and healthy life which begin to appear through the various ways and traditions of very different and paradoxical cultures.
Perhaps what are emerging are the underlying elements that are most meaningful for me. And like any great explorer, I am simply discovering these during my time in these different places.
Note:
Walking an average of 5 miles per day is very good for my overall health and longevity.
Every other week during 2023 I will be posting an excerpt from my upcoming book, Five Thousand Steps: A Rainy Season in Costa Rica. It is a travelogue of sorts, my journals and observations from my initial three months in Costa Rica along the Guanacaste Coast. I hope you enjoy following the journey.
Please send a request by email if you would like to pre-order your copy of the book which will be self-published and released in 2023. Please also consider supporting the release of the book by become a paid subscriber or a donor.
Field Notes
“So here we have stood, and if we have not shuddered at the emptiness of the abyss and fled from its loneliness, it is because of the wealth of our own souls that filled the void with imagery, warmed it, and gave it speech and understanding.”
"Wilderness, A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska" by Rockwell Kent.
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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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