A Passion for Peace

San Jose certainly is a different pace to Lima, and we're enjoying it a lot. Once again we're living in a studio apartment, but this time with an epic view of city in the valley below on a mountainside. Like growing up in a big family I imagine, this is our way of practicing creative ways to carve out personal space and accept the spectrum of moods humans can express. There's no place to hide! Here's a photo of Luke's "office set-up" to show the view a bit. Often we find hummingbirds and butterflies flitting around the foliage, squirrels that appear to be a mixture of brown and gray with varying color schemes such as gray body and brown tail, or brown head and gray body, colors in large swatches only, not calico like a cat or patched like a pup. (Photo by Luke)

Being tropical, Costa Rica is full of amazing flowers and trees and animals and insects we are becoming better acquainted with. This week upon opening up the wardrobe, Luke was greeted by an army of ants surging out from amongst his clothes. "You need to stop listening to Marc Maron and come help me immediately!" he screamed. The specificity of his request caught me off-guard and I turned around to see him standing in front of the clothes' closet with an army of ants surging out towards him and into our apartment. I grabbed his flip flops and together we set about eliminating them one by one, resulting in quite an ant Holocaust. One flew into my eye, some escaped under the bed and had to be chased down, and in the end we felt terrible for all the deaths, but the boundary had to be set. I put some garlic on the shelves to keep them away and burned sage as a peace offering to the ants while listening to the rest of the Marc Maron podcast. (He, along with Louie CK and Bill Burr are our favorite comedians at the moment.) (Photo by Luke)

Last week we were at the beach, the Caribbean coast in a place called Puerto Viejo. It was beautiful, calm, and slow. I enjoyed it immensely, and also find such environments a bit confronting because they highlight my ever-present opportunity to learn the art of relaxing. I feel such a strong pull to be working and doing, it can drive me crazy and be hard to balance with letting go. I'm practicing deeply, though, and back in San Jose in addition to quilting, writing, meditating, cooking, shopping and keeping house, yoga, being with Luke & making some friends here, dancing, reading spiritual texts, keeping up with friends & family, and future planning work, I am volunteering on an organic farm in the suburb where we live, an hour's walk across town from our place. Here is a picture from their facebook page which shows a bed and a bit of a much bigger project. Three young friends started planting on a lot owned by one of their uncles who's in a legal battle at the moment so the only allowable use of the land is organic farming as luck would have it. At the moment there's lots of lettuce and kale, radish, cucumber, herbs, green onion, hot pepper, and eggs from the chickens. I meditate to the sound of the chickens clucking with my hands in the earth. I love it. (Photo by Slow Farms Escazu)

From our perch we watch the clouds drift across the city bringing afternoon showers this rainy season. The drip of rain and Luke's guitar-playing fill my ears as I click away at the keys. I've been wondering why we didn't come here first instead of a big city like Lima, but then we wouldn't appreciate this as much if we hadn't done that first. So I'll just love where we're at and dream of moving up even more when we move to the US later this year. Thanks for reading this, sending lots of tropical love to you. <3 br="">