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It’s a jungle out there. It’s a jungle in here too.
By
Published: Mar 24, 2014
Category:
Beyond Classification
To get to Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula, you fly to San Jose, stay overnight because you can’t connect on the same day, take a small plane and land at a airstrip with a cemetery as its neighbor. A short, bumpy drive — there was no highway from San Jose to the Osa until the 1980s — and you’re at an eco-lodge so intelligently designed it seems to have been carved out of the jungle. Think: a vast, open air massage/yoga studio that would be right at home in Bali overlooking a pool with a deck made out of coral.
But still… it’s a jungle out there.
And as I discovered around midnight of our first night, it can be a jungle in here too.
The howler monkeys and cicadas were whispers compared to the noise in my head — for the first time since forever ago, I had no “to do” list. And that left me with nothing on my mind but… me. “In reflecting on our problems, we should include ourselves,” Shunryu Suzuki says in Crooked Cucumber. I finally understood; my head was filled with inconsequential knowledge. I had no inner resources.
Where do you go in the middle of an unhappy confrontation with yourself in the jungle? Nowhere. You’re stranded. So you suck it up and hope for healing.
Healing began, mercifully, with the new day. Interesting strangers at breakfast. Tide pools at the beach. Yoga. Expeditions. Or, in my case, nothing — I took a notebook and a pile of books and went to the pool, and there, standing in chest-high water, made an office.
I didn’t swim. The words in the books did, and I pushed them away. But I had an idea and a title, and soon I had pages of notes, and then the words of the story formed on the page. I usually think of writing as a blue collar job and words as bricks; at the end of the day, I look at the wall I built and feel a certain satisfaction. But only at the end of the day. Here I felt an unfamiliar joy: pleasure from beginning to end.
Along the way, I had fascinating poolside conversations of the kind you kinda sorta remember from late nights in college. In a location with few electronic diversions, every conversation and experience is unusually vivid. And no matter what you’re talking about, one message comes through: surfaces deceive, people are not who they may seem to be.
I cherished the visit to the animal preserve and the sight of monkeys in the trees and the great meals. But what I took home was that, given time and distance, powerful connections are possible even for those who spend their days alone and count people they know only via e-mail as close friends.
But enough about me.
Did I learn anything in Costa Rica of possible use or interest to you?
Yes. I mean: I think so.
What I faced squarely in the pool and in the middle of the night is that most of our politics, much of our enterprise and a distressing chunk of our culture are in a death spiral. But it’s not enough to know what’s wrong, I have to do what I can to fix it. Not on the grand scale, but in my own life. What I try to do on this site is part of that project, but there’s more I need to do. And — don’t laugh — it involves real estate. The “preppers” have it half-right; there’s a shit storm coming. But the rural retreat I want doesn’t have guns and a year’s supply of canned food, it has its own water and a garden.
I know: this rural Eden sounds alarmingly like a First World boomer cliché. If so, I’m not the only one who feels this urgency. In which case, it’s possible to create communities around the idea of living lightly on the planet. And, lo and behold, I stumbled upon this New York Times article about communities built around farms instead of golf courses.
So, first, a query. These communities seem better than suburban developments. I think they could be much better, and I’d like to be involved in the process of creating one. Or more than one. If you are a real estate developer with an itch to build something that is both different and profitable — or if you know a developer with a gleam in his/her eye — I’d love to start that conversation.
Second, a slight modification of Head Butler is ahead. I’ve looked through the catalogs from the big publishers and have found only a handful of books that seem worthy of my time and your attention. So I’m going to look more diligently at small publishers and writers you may never have heard of. And if you can bear it — if you write me and tell me you hate this, I’ll back off; if you like this idea and have suggestions, I’ll follow up — I’ll look a bit harder for books that might be guideposts to a more satisfying life.
Which is not to say I’m turning Head Butler into a distance learning experience. Books, movies and music are what we do when work is done; whatever else they bring, they must deliver pleasure. Life’s hard enough. I don’t come here to add to it.
It was good for me to go far away, to goof off with the child, to see my wife relax, to hear the stories of lives that I could never imagine. It’s just as good for me to be back. And to be in this conversation? I’m very grateful.
