This is the third anniversary of moving to Santa Fe, and I am writing it from a table that is not in Santa Fe. Three years to the day from the move that changed the rest of my life, I am sitting in a borrowed home on a borrowed coast in Costa Rica, drinking borrowed coffee out of a mug I have already become attached to. None of this was planned. All of it is because of Ron and Vicki.
Ron and Vicki own this house. They also own the vehicle in the driveway, the towels in the closet, and, by all available evidence, the moods of the dogs across the street, who appear to consult them daily. They handed me their entire Costa Rican life for twelve days as a thank-you for the month I spent in Texas helping them earlier this spring. The proportionality is, frankly, ridiculous. I helped at two resorts for thirty days. They have given me a country for almost two weeks. The math will not balance. They know that and gave me the keys anyway.
I should explain, before going further, that my dog Pipes was supposed to be here too. There was, at the last minute, a paperwork issue. The vet had filled out one form correctly, and another form not-quite-correctly, and the not-quite was the one that mattered. By the time we found out, there was no fixing it in time. I had to leave her behind. She watched me close the carry-on. She did the small body-pivot she does when she has registered the situation but has not yet decided whether she is going to forgive me for it. I am, at the time of writing, still under provisional review.
The first morning here was disorienting in a good way. The light is a different temperature than New Mexico light. The air carries water that the desert cannot provide and would not know what to do with if it could. The geckos do their tiny bureaucratic patrols on the walls. I stood on the porch for ten minutes with no plan and no notebook and let the place introduce itself.
Jaco Pulse
Palm fronds bend above warm sand, Blue swells break with steady grace. Boards wait upright, lean and stand, Salt wind moves through open space.
Read the full poem →I am not a person who arrives well in paradise. I have, historically, brought a small worry with me to most beautiful places — about whether I am using the time correctly, about whether the work I came here to do will get done, about whether I deserve the lull. Costa Rica is doing its slow, patient job of dismantling that worry. The country has a quality I have not encountered anywhere else in quite this combination — gentle without being soft, present without being aggressive about it. The phrase the locals say is pura vida. I have heard it three times today already, mostly from people who clearly mean it.
I miss Pipes more than I knew I would. The beaches here are exactly the beaches she would have lost her mind on, in the particular way she loses her mind on beaches — half terror, half mission. She would have refused to step in the water and then immediately fetched a stick out of it. She has done this in Galveston. She would have done it here. I will write that entry separately, because she deserves her own.
Three years in Santa Fe. Twelve days in Costa Rica. One dog at home in Santa Fe is doing the slow work of pretending she does not love whoever is feeding her this week. I do not know what to do with the gift Ron and Vicki gave me except to use it well — to actually be here, to actually rest, to write what wants to be written and not chase what does not. That, increasingly, is how I am trying to receive any large kindness. Not by trying to repay it. By honoring the impulse behind it.
The kettle just clicked off. The light is doing whatever it is going to do until lunch. I am going to put the laptop down for a while and let the country do the work it is so clearly trying to do.