Journals from the Jungle I: Chasing a Feeling

On the threshold between vacation and profound peak experience

Welcome to Journals from the Jungle—a series of stories from my recent travels, drawn straight from the pages of my journals. These are reflections on breaking free from a life of structure, convention, and societal expectations, and finding my way back to an embodied, authentic self. Through journeys in nature—and into the nature of self—through adventure, challenge, rest, and the dramatic dismantling of old beliefs, I explore themes of freedom, pleasure, love, and the strength that comes from shedding what no longer serves us. I hope these stories inspire you to embrace change, reclaim your vitality, and live more freely.

DAY FOUR

What a great day. I did expect to be asleep by now, but some energy has me. A sensation like avoiding … work, writing (the book), and maybe avoiding sleep—wanting to prolong these days. Already I want to stay longer—I leave a week from tomorrow which feels suddenly so much shorter than not. How wrong I was about this trip being long, too long! And why was/am I so wrong about how it feels once I get here? Don’t I know by now? I also feel like time is moving quickly enough that I have not yet been able to fully connect here. As if there is some film between me and this exploding nature. Some gauze preventing me from the present, exactly. There’s a sensation I’m seeking. One that I know. I trust it will come. There is time still. It’s a sort of sync. A shaking off of dust, perhaps. And I wonder what it is that’s between us now? Screens? Routines? Conveniences of this comfortable place? Or even that this place is familiar and so, some novelty absent (or lessened—certainly not absent), which allows the eyes to glance over rather than being more intently drawn to—more clearly seeing? Is it some sense of liminality—knowing I leave in a few days? Is that truly soon, or actually far off? Should I resolve to do nothing down here rather than hoping to write? I only worry that I would regret not writing if my book doesn’t feel perfectly complete come delivery time.

I think … I will resolve to fully rest, and edit.

I love it here. I’m so relieved to feel well again, aye.

DAY FIVE

Blustery jungle morning. Delicious. I’m already imagining coming back again this season. And thinking that I should actually try to write—at the very least to see how it feels. To prove to myself that I can—so that I can in the future, if not now.

Connected in a bit better today. Long walk through town. Jungle paths and green juice. Swam with the pelicans twice—so special. No work. No writing. I want to stay here.

DAY SIX

Still chasing a feeling. Somewhere between arrival and departure where I am so full in, and so fully feeling/being that there is nothing else. It is certainly a peak experience. It may be presence ultimately. Not anticipation, preoccupation, otherwise.

~

Feeling very excited to surf. I think it will be quite moving. I feel emotional in general today—some tears during yoga. And at breakfast when they asked to hear the story of Dad. And probably there will be more while surfing.

~

Nothing new to say and yet I feel compelled to write that. Have spent the entire day reading, chatting, dazed in watching the sun behind glowing green and blue. My favorite colors. My favorite things. This place is what makes me cry. To have found—after so many years of traveling, searching, feeling myself in different lands and ways—that these are my things, and then to have found my way to them, consistently, reliably, with the freedom to be in them … Do we, do I just stop here? Ought I to?

Only sort of asking.

Surfing soon.

~

Omg that surf. Omg my heart. My whole everything. I am beside myself. Weeping and happy and stunned and …

The surfers are silhouettes against the setting sun. We paddle in gold. Float atop liquid light. I feel safe even in the far-out deep—trusting this person keeping me alive, trusting my body, myself. Some nerves but no real fear, even when a big one surprises us all and I have to turtle-roll out there—lose my board—but surface to reassurance and queues for getting back on and getting the next one. I didn’t even know how to do that roll a week ago.

Afterward, sitting on a beached log watching the sunset finish all the way from the sun’s submergence to the streaking glow that fingers up into the sky overhead, I am pacified. Washed in peace, nearly drowsy. I walk to it, I watch it, I see the green flash for the first time in my life. I cry.

Standing alone on that beautiful fucking pink and orange beach, I cry.

I feel everything at once. Elation, joy, happiest sadness, overwhelm. I don’t even know what. High. I feel so stirred, sensitive, and incredible. I feel like I just fell in love with this entire place, and surfed the best wave of my life yet, at once. This is a peak. I thought it might be. And I had to be alone to feel this. It is so beautiful. Breath-stealing, heart cracking, annihilating sublimity.

And the pelicans …

This is my life.