Journals from the Jungle III: What broke?

On the force of it when it releases.

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 EIGHT CONTINUED

I am moving so slowly now. Not reading, not working, just staring … being. The stillness from last night is here again. I cry again, struggling to describe what’s happening.

I had another thought that I came here to write about but seem to have lost it. Thoughts hard to hold, which is such a rare and precious state for me—a relief.

Maybe it was something about the waves of energy finding their way out of me. First with the hard landing here, and the trouble unwinding, and then the severity of the sync. The force of it when it releases. Maybe too I am letting go of what was happening in New York. From this distance, it’s a little harder to feel the things. This dense and sensual jungle eclipses it all.

I am going to stay a few more days.

Oh! The thought returned: Some of this elation is also because I am now secure enough, have built myself a stable enough base professionally and financially to be able to have these experiences without other obligations requiring me away from them. That alone, which I remember from my first trip here to Costa after the pandemic, feels like a state worth weeping over all its own. What an incredible journey, of so much determination and day-in-out effort, ceaselessly, in order to break through and be, well, free—which is what I’ve always wanted most of all.

“Life is for living, not thinking. Tomorrow is dead. Pura vida,” a stranger says.

Also, the contrast of this place against New York Fashion Week, which is happening there now, looks like my two lives, my two halves, my selves cracked apart and from between the two, I am now, feeling. Such a distance from the NYC scene. From social media and content and all of the stuff. It’s a world I came to conquer, and have in some ways, and also there will always be new ways to “need” to, in order to keep up. I am uniquely suited to do that, but I am also uniquely suited to do this. To strip down to nothing and let go. To exit society and culture, which I have never actually engaged fully or comfortably with. I worked so hard to get there. And, I worked so hard to get here, which is to say that I worked so hard to get out of there. I study myself both because I am one of you, and not like you.

I run down to catch sunset and it’s so worth it. Cotton candy sky, sea mirror, pelican silhouettes, softest blue and delicate pink, pastel and peaceful—so perfectly beautiful, as it always always is. The beach is full in a lightly scattered way, everyone there to see this scene, every single night.

“What broke?” my friend asks. I think … all of the ties. I feel like I’ve exited some matrix. My heart broke. The bind and attachments and habits and patterns snapped, too. My mind, me, suddenly cut loose. Free to feel and be … here … now (ha). But not only now, in the future too. Like being knocked to sense, slapped into seeing, struck. I am experiencing some other way of being—some other dimension of life, which I’ve tasted before but perhaps, por fin, know now that it is real.

There is something akin to psychedelic trips in this. In directly experiencing bliss, by way of the simplest things. Not that it isn’t spiritually beautiful here too, but to witness the human being, being fully fulfilled, by simply being—that is profound.

I mentioned how natural it felt, feels, and yet so much of the time we live against that grain.

I wish that memories didn’t fade. I am amassing so many of them on this trip, and I know that in this heightened state, they are saved more clearly than most, but still. I guess the thing is, the memories remain, but the sensations fade. The feelings, they melt through shades like sunsets and seasons, and they interrupt each other too, like this, now, obstructing my view of what was, then. Because I live for them, I continue on in this. The pain of arriving here was certainly worth these new wrinkles in my brain.