Isolation and Solitude
Travel Journals: A Rainy Season in Costa Rica
I had long forgotten just how hard it can rain in Costa Rica. For fifteen straight hours, beginning yesterday afternoon, the rain came down. It poured, and poured…and then poured some more. The roofs here are thin sheets of metal and so the sounds are like heavy pings pummeling down on my tiny little casa. I remember writing about this some years ago when I was here during the rainy season. Then and now there is a sense of isolation and solitude unlike any other.
Playa Grande is already a remote and isolated area along the coast. It is surrounded by a National Park, so there are lots of varieties of trees and species of wildlife that encompass the area. When the rain comes down and you find yourself inside your tiny casa with nowhere to go, with no escape, it can be unsettling at first.
Today I chose to go more deeply into it, simply listening. It became a very intense form of meditation. There is no escaping yourself or your thoughts and absolutely nothing to numb yourself with as a form of escape. The more deeply I sat and listened and began to merge with the rain it became peaceful unlike anything to which I can compare. I was in synchronicity with the flow and expression of nature. I wasn’t distracting myself with mindless busy activities or the preoccupation with one of the many things we so often fill our days with that ultimately do not add up to much. Finally, amidst the continuous downpour, I fell into a deep sleep.
When I woke around 6am it was still raining, but beginning to lighten. I felt a bit of disappointment not to wake to the sun and take my morning walk. I fell back into a sleep. Less than an hour later the sun was beaming through. I looked out the window and the ground was already beginning to dry. I eagerly threw on my trunks and slipped on my shoes to head out for my morning walk.
The incoming tide was muddy brown and murky from all the rain. I walked my usual 5 miles. I took the slippery road back
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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.
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