still coming and going

The earth turns, the tide changes, and like any other migrating creatures, all we can do is obey, and bid farewell to this lush coast we have camped on for the last cycle of our great adventure. After years of feeling tangled in impossible questions—questions of place and home and belonging, which thread inevitably into questions of identity—the way forward is suddenly so obvious our previous confusion seems absurd. The mystery has taken pity on us it seems, and put a scrap of the missing map into my hand. This scrap does not answer my impossible questions, but it does clarify the next step, which is all a wandering animal like me can ask for. On we go then, back to the land of my roots. Not my ancestral roots—those tether me to still more distant seas—but the land where the seed of me was planted, the land of the roots of this life: Canada.

We came to this little village in the Osa Peninsula almost two years ago, but we have been living in Costa Rica most of the last eight years. This isn’t the first parting letter I’ve written to this country. Our cyclical comings and goings from places that call us close and then blow us onwards feel less the result of our family’s earnest decisions, more the consequence of our helpless devotion to the flow that moves us like water drops, in rivers that surge beyond all efforts to be in control. I write in full awareness that we might loop back someday, though I hold the prayer for this next home to be the one where our relationships go deeper than ever before. We’ve been circling the idea of relocating to Salt Spring Island for years, but it’s been a process of unspooling from all we cherish in Costa Rica, dancing slowly into this new relationship with an island that has long called us, and navigating the labyrinthine questions stirred up by our continuing, albeit at times reluctant, nomadism. The decision to move to Salt Spring is not the result of a mental process so much as an inexorable courtship. The time has come to be reabsorbed into the land that feels like home, and reunited with the plants and animals that feel like family—cedars and eagles, orcas and otters, ferns and mosses —all those old friends in whose presence I feel most myself; all those I have missed during our sojourn in the tropics. 

For now, I bid this magical emerald land farewell, with a heart full of gratitude. Gratitude to the teachers who supported and guided my kids; I appreciate you more than I can say. Parenting is hard in this bizarre modern world, in this paradigm void of the support we evolved with and require—especially for people like us, whose biological families are scattered around the planet. Our journey has been motivated by many things, but most of all by the dream of the tribe we’re meant to have—this longing for mentors, cousins, aunties and uncles is the strongest force that moves us. We have always known there is another way of living, and it is the way we are meant to live. We have always felt that it would be a betrayal of this knowing to submit to the deadly normal, that monotonous, isolating grind that degrades our most essential relationships, and sacrifices our most fundamental needs. We wondered if maybe, in a different part of the world, things would be different. And things are different here in Costa Rica. But they are also the same, and in some ways, it feels even harder here, in this culture of transient immigrants, ourselves included, to cultivate the rooted community we dream of. 

I have never been good at decision-making. I am a plural, porous creature, and when I stand at the crossroads, as I often do, I am tugged by the pulse of parallel lives, like feathers in a great wing, lifted by a strong wind. The question of where to live—where home is—not only prompts a rabble of conflicting voices within, it touches wounds and dreams that predate my biography. Add the needs of kids and a spouse to this reckoning, and the calculus of possibilities expands exponentially, along with the odds of getting hopelessly knotted in the trickery of the mind. Parenting and partnership are awareness practices as bruising as they are illuminating, requiring deep study of the interplay of multiple karmas and the fluid, overlapping, always changing currents that connect and differentiate our destinies. What I have learned along the way is that this decision cannot be made by the mind; comparing the pros and cons of various locations only leaves us in a mess of cognitive dead-ends. The question of finding home in a broken world requires cultivating subtle senses, senses that connect us with the soul of the earth, and alert us to messages from ancestors, vegetal relatives, and future selves whose winks through time are stars that guide.

Gratitude to the new friends who dared open their hearts to a vagabond family like ours—I regret that I have not been more available. I came with the intention of initiating song circles, holding ceremonies, sharing transformational practices and spaces that would support us to see and honour one another, do our deepest inner work together, meet in the radiance of the sacred, and become the village we dream of. But I could barely get out from under my books and projects. I have been utterly consumed with the work in front of me and it has made me into a hermit, and maybe also a hypocrite. It takes time to transform ourselves into mother trees that can shelter the world as it falls, and I suppose we need patience and compassion, for ourselves and each other, above all. And maybe it takes saying goodbye and hello a few times, as we gather tools and gifts to share, and nurture bonds with the places that make us who we are, and inspire our most courageous offerings. 

I will never stop dreaming of the village, and I know I won’t get us there by constructing clever sentences about becoming the village. We’ll get there by breaking bread and singing together, taking care of each other’s kids, planting seeds and harvesting fruits and roots—within and without—and, most of all, by sharing who we really are—not just our sexy surfaces but also our deepest wounds—until we become garden beds for gratitude. We’ll get there by inspiring each other to be braver than ever before, and to break out of the cages of conditioned patterns of polite interaction, and meet dancing like the wild things we really are, until we dissolve crying and laughing into each other’s arms, and our shared snot and tears make us real family. I don’t want us to be passing acquaintances; I want us to be allies who will always have each other’s backs. I want us to shed our costumes and armor and Instagram personas—even when it hurts, even when it’s hard—and meet in the thrill of our most authentic multiplicity and paradox. 

The hardest part of this is bidding farewell to the more than human friends I have collected over these years: you dearest geckos who chirp greetings when I make my tea at 4 am, and then slither up the wall like the whole world is liquid for you, like you’re part tadpole part lightning—I love you. You scarlet macaws who blaze like phoenixes across the sky at sunrise, dispelling any possible doubt in the power of each new day to be a rebirth of vast proportions—I love you. Oh you blue morpho butterflies who dip and sway like the scattered body of Krishna across the sky, like iridescent azure flung from the brush of a drunk artist onto the canvas of light—I love you. Crickets whose sound baths have nourished my dreams and insomniac meditations—I will miss the way your holy hum holds me when nothing else does. Aracaris and parakeets with your conferences in the branches of the guanacaste, and your exuberant parties in the turquoise and tangerine sky—you are the real angels I know. Oropendola, with your tailfeathers the color of sunshine, and your preposterous voice—part clown twisting a belligerent balloon animal, part radio transmitting alien static—I wish I could bring you with me. Congo monkeys roaring as dawn’s glow makes silhouettes of trees, reminding us who is boss, reminding us how much we have forgotten—I bow before you.

I will miss being immersed in this flourishing tropical biodiversity—in the abundance of decaying and blossoming beings who compose this ecological carnival, where every breath feels medicinal. I will miss the goofy agouties—aka big bum bandits—and their awkward way of scampering across the yard when our dog dashes in their direction, even though we all know she will never catch them. I will miss the wise spiders who kindly knit webs in the corners and catch bugs who want our blood. I won’t miss the bugs who want our blood, or the cockroaches or pit vipers, but I have learned from these creatures too—most of all I continue to take note of how easy it is to unconsciously subscribe to aversions that prevent us from seeing that all creatures, even those who make us skittish, have a vital role in the great design, and are worthy of utmost respect, especially from us foreign humans, whose desire to live somewhere this lovely comes at an incalculable cost to their habitat. 

To you who are indigenous to this place, humans and more than humans—thank you for having us. I am sorry beyond words for how stupid and selfish my kind still often is in the way we do things. What rude guests we are, cutting down the trees to build Airbnb empires, driving SUVs that clog the air with diesel fumes, and buying pesticide-drenched products that poison paradise. I believe it is possible to live here in a different way, even as immigrants shouldering the terrible weight and great responsibility of privilege, and we did our best to embody that possibility, building our wattle and daub home in an ecovillage. Maybe if things had worked out up there with the school we could have become native eventually too—native the way Robin Wall Kimmerer describes it: “Being naturalized to place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill your spirit…to live as if your children’s future matters, to take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all our relatives depend on it. Because they do.” Maybe then, naturalized like this, I would have done a better job of living up to my aspirations, and spearheading campaigns to end the burning of plastic and clean the beaches of trash—not as a reflex of liberal guilt or savior complex, but as a way of living in this place with all my love.

Someday perhaps we’ll come back, and roll up our sleeves for this essential work of repair and devotion. Someday perhaps we will return to another iteration of that old dream of living in a cob house, in a community by a sparkling river, in this sweet green country. Someday perhaps we can all put our scraps of maps together, and a picture will emerge that makes sense of these journeys, and we’ll understand our comings and goings as essential rhythms stitching us back into a wholeness we could not have arrived at any other way. But for now, we say goodbye. All I can do is walk the path as it unfolds inside the great hand of the unknown, who is as ambivalent about my agenda as the ocean is unconcerned about the fate of the pebbles it polishes in its currents. Permanence has never been my goal, but what a gift to have shared these seasons. We will travel onwards, but we will always be connected to this place that has blessed us in so many ways, always tied by a cord of gratitude to these waterfalls and beaches and jungles. Dearest Costa Rica—I bow to your beauty and pray for your health. Feel free to call me back anytime; I will be delighted to return.

In the meanwhile, I will keep asking these impossible questions of home and belonging, and hopefully I will collect a few useful clues as I go. Clearly I don’t have much to teach on this subject, because here we are packing suitcases again, but I do have a few intuitions, hard-earned from the long road. For those of us who have been thoroughly cut off from our indigenous ancestry, those of us haunted by generations of exile, the first step is feeling the grief in the void where the village used to be. But not only grief; let us feel all the feelings—it’s not only our pain but our ecstasy that has been suppressed for centuries. To do this we must come back to our bodies—these miracles that house a wizardry no invented technics can approach, these geniuses we abandoned when we bought the lie of abstraction. Let our feelings move through our bodies like storms dance through sky, until their force has cleared us of the stories with which we keep ourselves apart from the source. And then let us metabolize our insights and grief and rage and longing into songs of love, and prayers that take us out of our lonely skulls and into our mycelial souls, out of our hardened mental habits and into the always giving, always forgiving heart of the world.

Here is the prayer that is alive in me at this junction. Oh mystery, oh holiness, oh earth—teach us how to plant ourselves in the here and now. Help us shed these domesticated shells, and recover the full powers of our authentic selves. Show us where home is, and who our people are—the humans and more than humans—and teach us to care for that place and family with all our unstoppable love. Awaken us to the marvelous fact that we are particle and wave at once, irreducible and inseparable, webs within webs within webs. Help us dispel the fiction of individualism we inherited, and heal the pain it produces; evolve us into the security and bliss and honesty of our entangled belonging. Deliver us into intimacy with the magic we come from; conduct us until we are harmonies in the orchestra of the one, and the beauty of our music dissolves the world’s armor, and the stars in us shine the way home.