Costa Rica

NYC, 2002

Costa Rica.

I wrote Costa Rica down for Cassie on the twenty-third of December. One email, the toe and the party and the blood in it.

Months went by and this torturing relay of emails spurted across fiber-optic cables and bounced off satellite dishes; I wanted her to come back to me, to leave him and bring back the flag. But she never did, and my spite surfaced in exuberant bursts of me having the time of my life, or in pouting and sulking email behavior. Sometimes I would write and think of her every day, then I would go on long retreats detoxifying myself from her spell. Her emails would pop up amongst the other notes, tips, and disclosures that wove my path as I tumbled down Central America into the south.

14 Dec 2001

Are you ok? I had a terrible dream about you last night. I was living with some terrible girl from my freshman year dorm, I don't know where we were living but I had a puppy that pooped under the bed all the time, and my parents were around, but I don't think it was Seattle.

Anyway, you came to find me, and you were so soft-spoken and quiet and peaceful (you weren't talking a lot so I knew something was wrong :)) and you were having a meal with me and my grandparents and brothers and sisters when you starting talking to me about your addiction. You looked so sad and were just looking for me to help you. It was a bit shocking.

I am going home in a week and I am looking forward to it. I have been really depressed lately. Sometimes I get in a funk, it's so chemical in me and I have a hard time functioning, or wanting to function for about a week or so. I am just trying to shed it by meditating, doing yoga, and walking a lot; I figure I should be rid of it in a day or two. It’s funny how we start to recognize and feel our bodies.

I am thinking of you.

Sun, 23 Dec 2001

I guess it is Dark December so I will share something more with you before I go back into the jungle but south this time To the Wizards of the West World....

The swollen flowers glowed with color and the smells of the jungle tantalized every part of me. The girls of course pick up on this aroma and the culture is saturated with a sexy vibe and a carefree breeze. Waterfalls and monkeys, chattering birds and me trying to get in touch with the Tarzan inside me. As the scenery looked like a comic book strip of the perfect secret beach I let the naive playful child inside me to convince me to climb the vines of a 20-meter tall waterfall. I broke my baby toe... which could possibly be the worst thing for a backpacker in the hiking paradise of Central America. I also ungracefully flopped over the edge of the waterfall hurting my nuts. Ooh! As my limping body was not in the mood for too much more action I checked myself into a spa and sat in a Jacuzzi for a week. The volcanoes in the distance (Arenal) fumed and gurgled steam and lava and I fulfilled my childish fantasy of looking at an eruption, maybe it is the secretive and occult power that a volcano hides inside it that drew me, kind of like eating a hot enchilada and feeling the brewing spice in the upper most part of your stomach.

Climbed a mountain and zipped through the sky on a pulley above the tree in the clouds of this frequently wet rain forest, animals animals animals. Then surf, reggae and the Caribbean side, blacks and rastas, chilling and beach cruising on bicycles, a Costa Rican chick and a few mushies and acid. Puerto Viejo is the spot for the kids of endless summer, a surfer's heaven with infinite good Caribbean weed, steady breaks and retired pro surfers... good looking people.

The broken toe was a reminder.

I spent two weeks there, surfing every morning, reading in hammocks every afternoon, and slowly remembering how to not try so hard.

It was in Puerto Viejo that I finally understood what I'd been chasing.

Flow.

I'd heard the word before, athletes used it, musicians talked about it, ravers described it when the music was right and the crowd was one organism. But I'd never experienced it directly. Not like this.

I was out in the water at dawn, just me and two locals. The break was perfect, clean, consistent, waist-high waves rolling in with clockwork precision. I'd been surfing for maybe an hour, my arms burning, my mind empty in that way that only happens when your body is doing something it knows how to do and your brain finally shuts the fuck up.

And then it happened.

I paddled for a wave, felt the pull as it caught the board, popped up, and everything slowed down. Not in a dramatic movie way. Just... slowed. I could feel every micro-adjustment my body was making. The shift of weight from back foot to front. The angle of my shoulders. The way my arms extended for balance.

But I wasn't thinking about any of it. My body knew. It was responding to the wave, reading the water, predicting what would happen next, adjusting before my conscious mind could even register the need to adjust.

I wasn't riding the wave. I was part of it.

The wave wasn't carrying me. We were moving together.

No separation between me and the water and the board and the sky. Just one continuous flow of energy, and I was a temporary pattern in that flow, manifesting for a few seconds before dissolving back into the ocean.

Like the zero becoming one, Akiko murmurs, getting it.

When the wave finally broke and I fell into the whitewater, I came up laughing.

That's what I'd been searching for. That state. That dissolution.

THE HISTORY OF FLOW

The euphoria faded as I sat on the beach afterward, watching the sun rise over the Caribbean. But the question remained. What was that state I'd just experienced? And why had humans been chasing it forever?

I thought about all the different names we've given to this experience.

The Greeks called it ekstasis, standing outside yourself. The Hindus called it samadhi, absorption. The Sufis called it fana, annihilation of the ego. The Taoists called it wu wei, effortless action.

Meditation. Prayer. Dance. Fasting. Psychedelics. Extreme physical exertion.

All different technologies for achieving the same state: the dissolution of the boundary between self and world. The temporary death of the ego. The experience of being a wave in the ocean instead of a separate droplet.

Poets and artists know it too. That moment when the words are writing themselves, when the painting is painting itself, when you're not creating anymore, you're channeling. You're a conduit for something flowing through you.

Musicians especially. Jazz musicians talk about it all the time, that moment in improvisation when you stop thinking and start listening, when the music is playing you instead of you playing the music.

And dancers. God, the dancers. I'd seen it on the trance floors. People dancing for hours, eyes closed, bodies moving in perfect synchronization with rhythms they weren't consciously tracking. They weren't performing. They were disappearing.

THE SCIENCE OF COOL

But here's what I couldn't figure out: Why do some people find flow and others don't?

Why are some people drawn to the edge, to surfing, to climbing, to dancing until dawn, while others are content to stay safe, to watch TV, to live in their heads?

This state can be achieved only after rigorous and lengthy practice; it is through discipline that one finally is able to bend the rules that they obeyed all along, but there is a crucial other element to developing this state, that being intuition. Feeling one could say is the primary tool one uses to develop this sense; this is why it is considered an extension of the tactile sense. As one develops a particular sport or art form through practice and repetition, one gains control over the physical outlines of their body; this awareness of space and movement within it leads to a comfort and sense of belonging within the environment. This translates into openness, one that is very similar to an indigenous person in their natural habitat. This sense of openness and belonging invokes an erotic participation in the environment, one in which the participant is no longer threatened and has faith in himself and the moment. At that point, without losing his/her uniqueness (actually amplifying it), the performer surfs a cosmic wave, unfolding and manifesting creatively in the Now.

In many ways the person is a vessel at that moment, a medium between the inner spaces of the human mind/soul and the exterior world of phenomena; there is a connection which is so evident that it is instinctively admired and appreciated. But this does not remain in the realm of athletics; in fact it is the crucial element in developing any and all art forms. In eastern cultures this is expressed within the martial arts tradition. Ranging from tai chi to judo, and yoga to kung fu, ritualistic repetitive movement brings the person to a state of heightened awareness. After many years of practice the practitioner develops a sense of individual style within the rigidly prescribed boundaries of the particular discipline. The act itself becomes a form of cleansing, fine-tuning, and offering an act of grace and has many physiological, psychological, and spiritual benefits.

That was the journal's answer. Mine, on the beach that morning, was shorter.

The travelers.

TRAVELER VS. TOURIST

Puerto Viejo was my wave. The spot where everything aligned. The water temperature, the break, the vibe, the people, the weed, the music, the Costa Rican girl whose name I've forgotten but whose laugh I can still hear.

I'd been traveling for three months. And I finally understood what I was doing. I wasn't sightseeing. I wasn't finding myself.

I was learning to surf. Not just the water. Everything. Life. The invisible currents that move beneath the surface of reality. The rhythms and patterns and flows that you can only perceive when you stop trying to control them and start responding to them.

At the very beginning of my trip I feel this incredible excitation, but still careful because you were traveling, want to be careful, don’t want to get hurt, don’t want to get robbed or anything like that. So you start off very slowly and you are very cautious. But as things progress you start to find your flow more and more. And as you find your flow you start to be more comfortable and take bigger risks and go into bigger adventures until you are fully immersed in that realm and your life is like, without a cell phone, without email you can somehow cross continents and always have a place to stay and be at the right place at the right time and have crazy, beautiful stories to tell.

The I-Ching had taught me that reality is responsive. The internet was teaching me that information flows through networks. And now the ocean was teaching me that you can't force a wave, you can only find your spot on it and ride.

That's what flow is. Finding your spot on the wave and surrendering to its momentum.

I'd found mine.

The letter to Cassie goes on.

I went to a trance party from the mountains and after a grueling 8 hour trip on a bumpy road and 100000 stops by the bus driver who seemed to have a relative he had to say hi to in every village on the way, I got to the hellhole called Alajuela. A ghetto so big and dark I would have definitely gotten mugged if it weren't for Michael. A kid with a dark aura, and troubled eyes... he had looked straight at me when I had gotten on the bus but I was too busy settling in that I didn't make the effort to talk to him. He was the combination of dark paranoia and torturing inquisitive mind. I had finally had to ask him where to get off and he had told me to follow him cause he was going my way.

He was crazy... as we say in Greece crazy, with papers, he was manic-depressive and had tried to kill himself a number of times and almost succeeding the last 2, that had only been almost a year now. His hands were filled with deep scars and burns and bad quality tattoos covered his shoulders and forearms. He was an artist and had been living in the mountains since his last release from the hospital, he took antidepressants and smoked weed, he used to smoke crack. He had built a little house on the hill and he said he painted.

I was peculiarly drawn to this kid maybe cause he reminded me so much of my friend Christos, but I felt a strong interest on his behalf also even though he was pretty shy. I had thought the party was going to be in a club in Alajuela, but as I soon found out it was 45 minutes outside the city by another volcano. His home was half way and he offered to guide me till his village and from there I would take a short cab drive to the party. He was going home to visit his parents who he had not seen for almost a year. We arrive at his home after talking a lot about depression, life, death, art, Christos, suicide and other dark but fascinating things in broken English and Spanish. I now wanted to know more about this mysterious Costa Rican. He knocked on the door and his mother surprised quickly invited him in and after a quick glance at me, the gringo, invited me in too. His wife and 3-year-old kid were there also and he had not seen them either in some time.

We spoke and he left the room briefly, coming back with 50 paintings!!! They were rolled up canvases and he laid them on the floor. I crouched down and flipped through them and slowly an amazement I have rarely felt before grew inside me like a wave ready to break on the shore. They were amazing, honest, full of his pain and the issues that plagued his mind and his culture, they were dark and surreal. His themes raised issues of globalization, imperialism and cultural deterioration; painted with coffee he illustrated historical grievances covering issues of slavery, urbanization and dependency. It was obvious this man had unbelievable talent and was a true avant-garde artist living in Costa Rica.

I asked him to join me at the party I was going to, and he quickly accepted. We got there, and an hour later I could not believe I had arrived at a genuine trance party in a small village in Costa Rica. It seemed too odd, how the whole story had unfolded, and now with Michael at the party I wasn't sure what to do, how was he going to react? Was he going to like it? I strolled around for a while looking to find the promoters of the party to see if I could get permission to film, when I got back Michael had found his brother.

He had not seen his brother in 2 years! Now this was getting a little too weird for me. The Halloween party was full of 17-18 year old lolly-sucking ravers and the music was dark trance. As all was going well and I had met the people that had invited me I was going to play a few tunes I have.... bam bam bam.

Yes you guessed it shots fired 3 meters away from me and then screams lots of them and blood lots of that too. One guy on the floor bleeding like the animals I see slaughtered so often over here. The party came to a halt and before I know it I am hitching a ride in the back of a truck and on my way to the bus station I had gotten off at 12 hours earlier. The same bus driver with the family spread across the highlands of Costa Rica was there freshly woken up and looked at my drained body with some sort of amazement. I finally got some sleep. The 8 hour drive I had done the day before I did once again in a glazed limbo of dreariness, each bump a jolt to my unwinding mind, which fizzled away as the motor roared up the steep mountains of the Costa Rican countryside. The door opened and there at the same café I had left Peter having breakfast 24 hours ago, he had just sat down for some rice and beans. I sat down and joined him.

THE DARK NIGHT

Michael. I can still see him. A kid on the bus with troubled eyes, who had looked straight at me before I looked back. Scars and burns on his hands, cheap tattoos up the forearms. Fifty canvases rolled up in a house he'd built himself on a hill, all of them painted in coffee. He reminded me of my friend Christos, and I had taken him to a party.

I didn't tell Peter what happened. Peter, the friend I'd left at breakfast in that same café the morning before, who surfed and asked no questions. I just sat there, eating rice and beans, watching the morning traffic in the streets of Puerto Viejo. Tourists on rental bikes. Locals setting up fruit stands. Everything normal. Everything continuing as if nothing had happened.

Someone had been shot three meters away from me. Michael, the manic-depressive artist with coffee paintings and scars, had disappeared into the chaos. I didn't know if he was okay. I didn't know if his brother was okay. I didn't even know the name of the guy who'd been bleeding on the floor.

And I was sitting here. Eating breakfast. Safe. Unharmed.

Peter asked me how the party was.

“It was fine,” I said.

The lie sat in my throat like a stone.

I spent the next three days in a hammock.

Couldn't move. Couldn't think. Couldn't do anything except lie there and watch the jungle canopy above me shift in the breeze.

The broken toe from the waterfall had mostly healed. My body was fine. But something else had broken. Something I didn't have a name for.

Michael was painting the suffering of his entire country. His entire people. All the violence and exploitation and degradation that had been inflicted on Costa Rica by forces he couldn't control.

And what was I doing?

Surfing. Smoking weed. Talking about flow like it was some kind of spiritual achievement.

A bird landed on the edge of my hammock. Small, bright yellow. It hopped closer, tilted its head, then flew away.

The jungle kept moving. Leaves rustling. Insects buzzing. The hostel's tin roof creaking in the afternoon heat.

And I couldn't stop thinking:

Michael sought flow in painting. In art. In creating something beautiful out of his pain. But his flow was constantly interrupted. By depression. By poverty. By a society that didn't value his work. By a mental illness he couldn't afford to properly treat.

And me? I sought flow in surfing. In traveling. In dancing at raves.

And I found it easily. Effortlessly.

I sat up in the hammock. My head was pounding. I needed water but didn't want to move.

I'd spent that morning on the beach philosophizing about who finds flow and who doesn't.

But that was bullshit.

The real answer was simpler: The people who find flow are the people who have the luxury of seeking it.

I had money. A passport. White skin that let me move through Central America without being stopped at checkpoints.

Michael had none of that.

I thought about the scuba man in Lagos, the dead man in the river. The dead body floating in the river outside the port. The 12 million people living in that city, most of them in conditions I couldn't even imagine.

Were they seeking flow? Were they trying to lose themselves in mystical experiences?

No. They were seeking survival. Food. Safety. A roof that didn't leak.

Peter walked by carrying a surfboard. You coming to the beach?

No.

He shrugged and kept walking.

I lay back down.

Three months into a journey where I was supposedly finding myself, talking about consciousness and the noosphere and the internet as the modern I-Ching.

While Michael was painting with coffee.

While someone bled out on a dance floor at a party I'd traveled to for fun.

Who the fuck was I to talk about flow?

The darkness got worse.

The I-Ching and the internet, was that a profound connection? Or was it just privileged Western appropriation of Eastern wisdom?

The noosphere and Gaia hypothesis, real understanding of collective consciousness? Or just New Age mysticism for people who had enough money and time to read Teilhard de Chardin?

The global village and we're all one organism, true? Or just a comforting lie that rich people tell themselves?

I watched the sun move across the sky. Felt thirsty but didn't get water.

Flow. Synchronicity. The wave. Sacred geometry. Mayan calendars. Psychedelics. Shamans. Temples. Trance parties.

A mosquito landed on my arm. I watched it for a long time before brushing it away.

Was this spiritual freedom? Or just imperialism wearing beads?

I thought about the hippies who'd walked the Silk Road in the '60s, the ones I'd romanticized. They'd traveled to India seeking enlightenment, cherry-picked the meditation and yoga and psychedelics, ignored the poverty and caste system. Treated it like a spiritual theme park.

Was I doing the same thing? Shopping for mystical experiences like souvenirs?

The questions spiraled. If flow is just neurochemistry, is it actually spiritual? If we're all part of Gaia, why does individual suffering exist? If consciousness is evolving, why are we building weapons that can destroy the planet?

And the darkest question: What if I'm not a seeker but a tourist? What if there is no wave, just a fantasy to avoid facing that life is random, meaningless, and the only thing separating me from Michael is luck?

Peter checked on me occasionally. Brought me food. Didn't ask what was wrong.

On the third day, I finally got up.

Not because I'd found answers. But because I couldn't stay in the darkness anymore.

I walked down to the beach. Watched the surfers in the water. The same break. The same waves. Still perfect.

And I realized something.

The darkness wasn't wrong. The questions weren't invalid.

Everything I'd been thinking was true. I was privileged. The journey was only possible because of structural advantages I didn't earn. The mystical experiences didn't erase the suffering in the world. Flow wasn't a solution to anything.

But here's what I also realized:

The darkness and the light aren't separate. They're both part of the wave.

Michael's paintings were beautiful because they contained his suffering. The flow he accessed through art was real even though, maybe because, it existed alongside his pain.

The surfers in the water weren't ignoring the poverty and violence in Costa Rica. They were responding to it in the only way humans have ever known how: by finding moments of grace in the middle of chaos. By creating pockets of beauty and connection and joy that make survival bearable.

The woman who takes care of her children, makes them good meals. I can’t explain it. It’s about not giving up and saying fuck this. Fuck life. God is evil. It’s the person who in the most crazy circumstances can be human. Have his humanity and have honor, dignity. I was dealt this hand and I am going to play it. I’m going to wear my tie.

And I’m not saying that we aren’t privileged. I just think you can find your flow in any circumstance. That’s the point. You land in some fucking country, in some family and everyone can surf. Anyone can find their flow. There’s not a human being on the planet who cannot dance. I’ll put it that way. We are made to dance, just as we are made to fuck and have children. So you have your flow inside of you. Everyone can clap to a rhythm. Circumstances are much harder.

Flow isn't escapism. It's resilience.

It's what humans do when the world is too heavy to carry. We find the wave. We ride it for as long as we can. And then we wipe out, and we paddle back out, and we try again.

Who gets to access flow and who doesn't? Who has the time and safety and resources to seek it? And what responsibility do the people who find it easily have to the people who can't?

I didn't have answers to those questions.

I still don't.

But I knew one thing: I couldn't turn back. I couldn't pretend I hadn't seen the scuba man in Lagos or Michael's scars or the blood on the dance floor.

The journey had to continue. But it had to be different now. Less naive. Less certain. More aware of the cost.

Wed, 14 Nov 2001

There is a book I read a while ago by Carlos Castaneda, it was a fascinating book which taught you how to control your dreams, you can wake up in your dreams and travel, did you know that? And even though I won’t claim that I consciously do the things the book says one can, I feel as if after reading it I subconsciously let myself go and off I go. It is like the real world we live in is a mass hallucination due to us having our eyes open, the real world is that of our dreams and it is only because of our eyes that open that the illusion appears. What would happen if all people in the world blinked at the same time would the world disappear? Its like each eye has a thread connected to the real world and keeps it there under our feet, I dream of you and some times I say to myself before going to sleep, i pray to find you in yours, so we can play and dance like we used to, but I don’t remember my dreams… I know I see you, I know.

I had a dream about you last night... you and I were playing chess on a beach somewhere, just playing. It was warm and calm and we were so at peace.

I miss you terribly sometimes. I can feel you, down to the texture of your skin. The way you feel, it almost hurts, because I know what it should feel like but you aren't here. Does that make any sense? I hope you are well. Love.

I left Puerto Viejo the next day.

Didn't say goodbye to the Costa Rican girl or anyone else. Just packed my bag and got on a bus heading south.

Panos came with me. A Greek American I'd met after the party, my age, the same swagger.

Toward the Amazon. Toward whatever came next.

The darkness hadn't lifted. It was still there, underneath everything, like a bass note I'd never stop hearing.

But I'd learned to surf with it. To ride the wave even when I couldn't see where it was taking me.

And I'd chosen to keep surfing anyway.

Costa Rica was a pause. A breath. Between the intensity of Mexico and what was coming in South America.

What was coming?

She nods. Keeps typing.