Forever

I wrote this when I was still in Costa Rica dreaming about a life I would potentially have when I was back in the USA. I randomly came across it today and felt like sharing it because I have now found what I was then seeking. It deals with themes of impermanence, permanence, presence and letting go. Enjoy!

I’m in Costa Rica, November of 2020. The rain is pouring outside, unusual for the Pacific Coast in November. The rain drops will not cease. My dog is crying, tied up because she tried to eat my shoe. I waited for rain all rainy season, sometimes it came, but only in short bursts. Not the crazy all consuming fury of thunderous waterfall that I have been used to, living in Costa Rica now for two and half years. On a typical rainy season night I stay up so late, listening to the fury of the gods, contemplating my small existence amongst the power of the heavens. This year’s rain is different, mild and yet infuriating. Mold has begun to consume everything I own. I read books in the order of “moldiness.” Whichever book I have that is the most moldy I read first so I can throw it away. Owning things gives me anxiety. I find joy in selling things and sometimes in giving them away. I wake up each day thinking about which books I can read, which art supplies I can use, “what can I complete in order to make me lighter?” This is not the existence that I am used to. Back in Minnesota, where the temperature plunges down to 40 degrees below Fahrenheit, things last forever, frozen into their environment like snowflakes. I clung on to things: clothing, books, dishes, perfumes, makeup, blankets… some I have had my entire life, some I still have in a storage unit near my hometown. Where I am from things seem to last forever. I still have books left to read that I bought when I was 9 years old. I believe there is still a bottle of olive oil, unfinished, in my storage unit that is likely still good to eat, I could leave a t-shirt in a closet somewhere and return years later with it still smelling brand new. Oh, how life is different here. Clean clothes stay fresh for half a day, jewelry disintegrates before your own very eyes and things I didn’t even know could, have become, rusty. It’s the jungle. I look all around in nature and I see it there too. Life and death, death and life, surrounding me.

In Costa Rica I have been forced to face that ever present cycle, to let go of people and things that I thought I never could. I do not know if it has made me a better person, but it has made me lighter. With life blooming and death rising at full speed at all times you simply cannot put off for later what today is asking of you to do. I wasn’t set up right for this kind of life. I have learned the hard way to not put too much on my plate here. If you buy a book you must read it without delay. You must use the sketchbook you have quickly, wear the beautiful clothes as they won’t be beautiful long and eat the food in front of you without thinking of storing it for later. There is no such thing as saving or storing here. Sure, there are a few tricks that make things last just a tad longer, but playing that game is an endless battle with no winner. The warmth and moisture consume everything. These days I feel like a drenched towel, with nothing dry left of me to soak up more.

I wasn’t set up well for this, as I said. I lost a lot of things of value because I didn’t know they would decay without safe keeping, or due to the wrong environment. I was losing for these reasons even before I came here, but back then it was the loss of relationships, love, although that happened here too.

What is dead here will become eaten by the moho. This made me think strongly about how many dead things I still keep in my life, whether they be physical objects or ideas and relationships that no longer exist. It would embarrass even you to hear about how long I have lived in the company of soulless objects and the ghosts of relationships’ past. In the constant drenching of the tropics I’ve seen it more clearly, begun to fill my life with life, that which is alive cannot mold. Once, I started to get moldy I realized I had to change quick. I did not know that I too, was already dead.

I think sadness and catastrophe aren’t always evil. I think they have been my friends this whole time. Right now I sit here like a wet rag dreaming about a dry Minnesota winter- that feeling of correctness when the car’s heater finally warms up the car, looking out from the cozy amber light of a warm cafe into the darkening blue of a midday stormy sky, the feeling of soft pink skin after a bubble bath and the fresh baked cookies and almond milk made to enjoy while watching a movie. I dream of these things, I day dream. I think about a room where I can have all of my art supplies, my paintings, my sketches, my books open and organized where no one will steal them from me, no neighbors or mold. Where there is peace and quiet for days like that of the eery silence of a winter’s first snowfall, when the Moon is so bright and the air so still that you can hear the snow touching the Earth. I day dream about things that can last, things that want to last, maybe not forever, but some type of forever. Maybe not in Minnesota, but maybe somewhere people still do believe in marriage, believe in maintaining quiet, believe in mold prevention, that want warm baths and dry heat and stillness.

This old wet rag doesn’t know everything, but at least I have pushed myself to my limits. Like a navigating mouse I have explored my territory and I have mapped out all that it is that I can see. Not everyone can claim to have done so. 

A climate of life and death in constant pursuit of each other is a beautiful thing. The white throated magpie jays, the howler monkeys, the delicious waves that form and crash and that I have learned to ride along — they are all a few examples of this pursuit, among so many others here. This chase is alluring and magical. So many people here call it paradise. I know why they do. I fell in love with it too.

It is a rush, like the feeling of being on a wave, but I want a slow ride. I don’t want to die so soon. I am not ready for that wave, of good bye. I want things that last. Not for forever, but for this forever and to be in union with that endless part of me that felt much more tangible when I was in my up north cabin than it does here, now.

I’ve never been homesick and I am still not homesick, but I want to go home, to feel clean and dry, to return to where I started and to feel what it might feel like without the baggage of the past. To go back and let go of what I left there too and to no longer get stuck in the endless spinning, but to find a point in time where I want to remain for my forever and make a home there. That is to say, to feel time suspended truly, in the process of creating something beautiful and when time starts up again to hold that something in my hand and to keep it for as long as it exists.

I appreciate and deeply love the jungle and the jungle heart that has begun to beat in me and I look forward to going home, to the slow, to those that can seem to stop time, to find the ones that still believe in a type of forever, wherever it is that they may be.

To my happily ever after,

the End.

Poem