Only the present moment is real.
Every morning I wake up and look out the window first. If the ocean is still there, then I am still in this paradise and it is not a dream.
On the morning that I woke up and sat bolt upright in bed and looked out the small bedroom window in my mom’s guest room in Colorado, there was no ocean. There was no paradise. Sigh. Time to make lemonade.
It was still early, so I drove over to my sister’s house and knocked on the door at about 7:30am. My brother-in-law opened the door and my niece, Devyn, was at the end of the hallway staring. Her mouth hung open and then she ran toward me and gave me a squeezy hug.
Lemonade.
A few days later we all took Veteran’s Day off and went to the park. Devyn, Dylan, Kassidy and her cousin from the other side, Sarah. All we did was play. No cell phone. No computer. No other adults. We played on the swings and the slides and the monkey bars. 13 year-old Sarah was swinging next to me and said, “I feel like a little kid.”
Kassidy said, “I have an epiphany.” (Seriously.) She ran to the top of a hill in Bear Creek Park and rolled down it. Devyn followed her. Dylan watched. At 2… this was a new experience, and his little brain was absorbing. “Do you want to roll down the hill?” “Yes.” So Kassidy helped him. He rolled. Sideways. No up. No down. Just sideways, straight across the relatively flat hill, when viewed from that perspective. Kassidy began a hands on tutorial and Dylan was a willing student. Sarah decided to roll. And then I put down the camera and rolled. Soon after, the new game became covering each other with armloads of leaves. The weather was mild and autumny. We played volleyball and took pictures of each other. When we noticed Dylan tearing apart the contents of the diaper bag looking for animal crackers, we realized it must be time for lunch.
We spent the whole day making a memory for when we grow up. One day we will say, “Remember when we were little and rolled down the hill at the park and everyone’s pants fell down? Remember that day? That was a perfect day.”
We left to get lunch and then stopped at another park to eat it. That afternoon we went to a third park because we were having so much fun we could imagine nothing more perfect. If sliding and swinging and rolling down hills and chasing ducks (yeah… duck chasing…. It’s a Colorado past time invented by Kassidy when she was about Dylan’s age.) is your version of paradise then, after a short lunch break, all you want is more of the same.
After two weeks in Colorado teaching Fluency Fast Spanish classes and visiting my family and friends and a week in California at ACTFL with some of my favorite teacher people, a took a red-eye from LAX to Liberia. It wasn’t, though, until I saw the billboards on the highway leading to the airport as we were landing that I believed that this had not all been a dream.
The first morning I woke up and looked out the window and saw the familiar vista from my window I said, “yes!” and leaned back against my pillow, perfectly content.
Yesterday my dad, Shannon, Kassidy and I went to Borinquen. Kassidy went on the first zip line with a guide. They were clipped together and she didn’t have to do anything at all. She looked terrified, but she wanted to do it. (I love this kid!) Shannon and my dad went. I… went with a guide, too. Clipped in. Didn’t have to do anything. The guides call it going “en taxi.”
When I landed on the second platform Kassidy was beaming and saying, “I want to go by myself now.” And she did. At each platform she counted the remaining ones, “Only 8 more left.” By the last one she had watched the guides who were monkeying around and decided to go upside down like they did.
It took me three times “en taxi” to decide to go alone, and then I did the rest of them myself. The lines covered jungle, waterfalls, breathtaking views of the volcano and mountains.
I am not… the person I thought I was.
CR06-12-09.
Whatever we have done with our lives makes us what we are when we die. And everything, absolutely everything counts. – Sogyal Rinpoche
Ticht Naht Hahn is my morning replacement for my missing Sangha, and tells me today that I must look deeply into my desire and deeply at my intentions. The way I use money is important. It can be used to relieve suffering and feed the hungry. Am I motivated by compassionate ideals? Or am I motivated by greed or revenge?
The weight of that question falls between us and everything we do like armloads of books clumsily thunking the floor.
Whereas the poverty in Mexico reveals itself nakedly on street corners in the form of the limbless elderly and shoeless children selling gum, it is hidden in Costa Rica. It is possible to be here, to swim in the ocean, to walk on the beach, to shop like a tourist and never be awakened from the dream that this is paradise. The main roads are lined with houses and PulperÃas (very small neighborhood convenience stores) and the occasional shack. These main roads have unpaved off-shoots. As most of the people who live down those side roads don’t have cars, sometimes they are just trails. The trails lead into the belly of Costa Rica. Here there are many shacks. Here there is very little rice.
And here is where Kassidy and I will naturally divide between what guides our individual souls. On Saturday we have been invited to join the Secret Santa committee we’ve been working with to deliver food to one of these communities. We accepted. And then last night we learned that, because of the holidays, the vet clinic has been changed to this Saturday. Last week Kassidy de-ticked a dog at a restaurant while we were waiting for our food. This is something she is good at. She feels compassion for them. She is bold enough that she will tackle random dogs to remove the suffering caused by the ticks. This is a girl whose lap was created to exactly accommodate a lap dog. They crawl into her arms and make themselves comfortable and she pets and snuggles and scratches them. Once they get there, there isn’t anything that will motivate them to leave.
There is a ghost on her lap now, and she wears those memories on the outside as they march wispily in front of her eyes. Our butt of a dog Kuzco, who we learned in the 6 months before we moved that we were immensely fonder of than we had realized, was hit by a car while participating in the traditional butt-like activities that had earned him the nickname to begin with.
She was torn, but ultimately, she is not the person she thought she was, either. These little dogs climb into the vacated space and absorb her sadness and hear the spaces between her recollections of Kuzco fetching badminton birdies in the back yard and her lap stretches and grows to make room for both a tick-covered dog and the ghost of a dancing butt-like dog.
My dad and Shannon were here last week and went to the rain forest and the National Park. The guide told stories that I am now repeating in my informal guided driving tours of the roads between the airport and home. Sugar cane planting here is staggered. Crops right next to each other will be in various stages of growth. It is ready to be harvested when it has gone to seed and the wind has replanted for the following year. Since each crop is ready at a different time, all of the farmers can help each other harvest one at a time. I said this with much authority, too. Because “look who knows so much.”
The underlying resentment and anger that has been palpable around us since we arrived ambled clunkily away while they were here. It is hard to hold one’s ground in the face of more than one person telling you you are dead wrong. Kassidy experienced daily jumps in the pool and my dad taught her to body surf. She listens to the waves from the balcony now and says, “Do you think they’re big today?”
Kassidy and I have enjoyed the only 3 days we will spend at home alone together between now and February. Really. We started going to the gym together every night. It’s been so much fun to have a work-out partner. We miss Dad and Shannon, though. They email to ask what the sunsets look like. They have not yet noticed that each of them left one pair of unmentionables in the dryer. We think we’ll put them in the guest room in case anyone needs “extras.”
Friday night I arrived at the airport to greet a very late plane. I stood with the shouting taxi drivers and felt the glee and giddiness that the taxi drivers could not have been feeling. Diana Noonan, her son Tony and Tony’s girlfriend Meghan were winding their way through customs. Kassidy and Tony dove for coins thrown in the pool and the winner was the one with the greatest value of piled change, not the greatest number of coins. Diana went to the fundraiser with me and met people from East high school in Denver. Tony and Meghan had dinner in Playa del Coco and I forgot to tell them that the tip was included in the charge, so they triple tipped. (We also did this our first night here.) They were serenaded by a small band and when Tony tipped them, he handed them all the change that remained in his pocket – 300 colones. The musician looked at the change in his hand and said, “Muy poquito.” As they re-told the story that evening and we told them that 300 colones was about 50 cents. Whoops.
Since the very beginning I have said that being here would be more fun if we had someone to share it with. Now we do. I was right.
Information on how to donate to the Secret Santa group was posted just before this note / blog. I’ll have more pictures after Saturday, too. I’m looking for classes / schools that would like to use this as a class project. The schools don’t have internet access, so we can’t do anything live, but I can do audio and video recording, post it and then have classes audio and video record themselves and then go back and play it back for them. Internet access in schools is still a few years away. Let me know if it sounds possible.
My apologies, also, for the anemic availability of blogs. I was in Colorado for two weeks, at ACTFL in San Diego for a week and then back here with my parents. While I was in California, I told my Aunt Judy that it was hard to get enough writing done. “Don’t forget that’s why you’re there,” she said.
I finished Carl and sent it to the publisher and when my dad was here, we talked through the story of José. I was stuck on a plot point that was paralyzing me. This story happened in 2005, and I’ve always been stuck about how to write it. I’m still editing, but the book is done. Actually, two books are done. One is about Isabela, the girl from the first book. The other one is from the perspective of her mother and contains a little bit of unexpected romance. We will use it for our adults classes. Adults can handle a steamy novel, right? I’ll be looking for proofreaders and anyone who wants to pilot the kids book shortly.
¡Pura vida!
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