in culture, in connection, in friendship

Uvita, CR

Hola from Costa Rica! 

Terence and I arrived a little over a week ago—I can't believe how quickly time goes by when exploring new places! Were we really just recently in Australia?.... Time is so weird.

Wifi out here is rare and spotty, so I haven't been able to update the blog as frequently as my creative side would like. Which, a part of me actually LOVES, because it means that I'm allowing my body to drop into the the land and the totality of my very physical experiences of travel and heat and discovering and carrying our bags from place to place to place. ​Ah, Pura Vida! And the other part of me is going fuckkkkkkkk I have so much I want to write about! So, in rare moments such as this, sitting in a quaint and surprisingly happened upon little vegan café in Cahuita, the blogger in me is happy and grateful. And the foodie in me is equally grateful!

Terence and I spent last week in Uvita, attending the 4 day Envision Festival with a lively crew of friends, sweetly captured above. Surprisingly, Envision was a super mellow festival experience for me. Not really what I had anticipated when imagining going to a transformational festie in Costa Rica. And, this was all absolutely perfect. Perfect in the way that the Latin root of “perfect” is “complete”. Not good or bad, just complete--how lovely is that? And how perfect is that. Credit goes to my awesome mama for pointing out this delightful new awareness of this word. There were of course plenty of opportunities for staying up for sunrise sets, playing with medicines, taking a plethora of workshops, and buying the gorgeous clothing and jewelry being sold by vendors and locals—but it wasn't that kind of festival for me. Where the completeness existed for me at Envision was in the people I spent it with...

This is one of those beautiful realizations of life—that our fellow humans truly are, and become, the spaces we are cradled by, the homes we are loved in, and in this case, the jungle of creativity where I was brought to laughter, tears, discoveries, universes, surprises, and, often, delightfully comfortable stretches of time of sitting in each others company, just simply being. The Envision crew (myself, Terence, our friends from SB Aaron and Sarah, and new friends Abigail, Shmoo, Lorin, Dan, Rowyn, Kris and Julia) decided to rent an Airbnb together for the week of the festival. It was absolutely lovely to get to know these humans, and to allow for the ebbs and flows of sinking into rich conversation and connection, and doing our own thing. 

There is a kind of joy I feel in my soul when I meet people for the first time and within 24 hours I am witnessing naked yoga and invited to play games of authenticity and revealing....this kind of joy is giddy and bright and connects to the roots of my humanity. The roots of me that have embraced literal nakedness as a space of comfort and liberation and acceptance over the last few years, and goes ahhhh soooooo beautiful when I witness others doing the same. And the roots of me that have embraced emotional and metaphorical nakedness, all the weird and exuberant and sometimes shadowy parts of myself as perfect/complete and welcome when I am meeting people for the first time. 

And, there is another kind of joy that I feel when I am specifically adventuring with friends from home, Aaron, Sarah, and of course, Terence—these friends who get me, friends who see me, friends who accept me and support me as I am. And this kind of joy is felt in my soul, too, but also emanates from my heart, and fills up my entire body with this sigh of ease, rippling out in colors and patterns and smiles that start to hurt my cheeks. I suppose another name for this joy, simply put, is love.

We jive very well together. Our little foursome, of me Terence, Aaron and Sarah. The highlights of the entire Envision experience for me were roaming the festival grounds with them. We lazed about in hammocks and sang to my ukulele. We drank cacao and then people watched, because festivals are prime grounds for this kind of thing. We danced—and when I say we danced, we DANCED, and it was booty-shakin good. We sat in the shade of trees—trees that were dropping flowers on us, which sounds delightful, but these flowers were so strangely heavy that each time they dropped it felt like a personal attack. And we talked. And hung out. And relaxed. And Sarah and I flittered about the festival like two fabulous fairies because that's what we are. And within all of this, not necessarily doing anything hugely different from how we might do it back home in SB. And that was so much of the beauty for me—we were ourselves.

The Envision crew has gone our separate ways now, and Terence and I have been traveling with our sweet Sarah before she heads off to a permaculture course in Puerto Viejo. The journey continues, as it always will, changing, shifting, blossoming, unraveling. And as Sarah always shares gratitude before she eats her meals, I'm inspired to share a gratitude here:

In this moment, I'm grateful for the unpredictability of travel. I'm grateful for the richness of the human experience in culture, in connection, in friendship.