Journals from the Jungle V (double feature): I Forget Myself

She said, “this is what self-actualization looks like.”

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.

February 2024

DAY TEN
Post-surf: Feeling less emo, more happy. A good, hard, fun day in the waves—I am so beat up. Every surface of my body that isn’t soft is bruised and I love it. The nicks and bangs and bruises remind me of the strength of this tool—my body. Its aliveness, resilience, capacity to injure and heal. It reminds me of growing up in nature, which always seems to leave reminders of its presence on us. It makes me feel strong, or reminds me that I am. My whole body is humming and tingling with the energy and release of all of this. Carbonation in my veins, pooling sparkles in my pelvis, the base of my spine. I shake internally with the waning time. I will revel. I will savor. I will stay locked in—in sync.

Only two surfs remain now. So fleeting so much is, I can hardly bear it.

I have today, tomorrow, and Friday … I just want to soak it all in. I want to fully disappear into this. Absorb as much as possible and then … well, nothing.

When I realize the brevity of the time remaining, I don’t feel well.

I leave the beach as wind whips spray into rainbows over the surf and the hot, arid air lifts my hair which will be dry by the time I’m back to my room.

My mind wanders over this little town, this oasis that seems so impossibly perfect. Is life like this really possible? Is it as simple as it appears, and as they say? Does it remain simple? Would there be any energy left for it to be anything other than simple after surfing every day? Would the balmy ease thin over time? Or does it persist? What I’m asking is: Is a simple life truly possible?

Here the tears are. They come as I’m laying in the sun-dappled shade, eyes open and then closed, seeing this morning’s session again. The sun rising through the mangroves, the arcs and sprays of the sea flaring into the sky. The warm, wet mists in our faces as we paddle against the air, against the current. Turtle-rolling into the froth, following each other in and out, exhilarated and protected, thrilled and safe, edges everywhere.

Tu puedes Rashel, you can do it. Paddle hard, keep paddling! Big one coming! Catch your breath! You’ll be okay. Push hard. Go upside-down! Great job! Good job, Rashel, you paddle good. Don’t worry Rashel, nothing bad happen. I’m right here. Don’t worry Rashel, I’ll be right beside you. Don’t worry Rashel, I’m right behind you.

Crying, crying, crying. The metaphors … I think it’s simply too much for me to contain—it flows through me and out of me—the waves of this place. Of the beauty, of the power of it, of it, of it all. When I recall what I’ve seen, what I’ve done, what I’ve felt … I weep.

Out there, out here, I forget that I’m alone. I forget myself. I forget and am lost … I never once think that I wish I had someone to share what I’m witnessing with … not immediately, in the moment at least. The opposite, actually. Like when a friend joins me for sunset, I don’t mind but it was lessened, not improved. The reminders of my belief in no such thing as shared experiences abound here. It’s too deep, too personal, too beyond verbal to share, I feel certain.

~

How do I remember this? How do I change? How do I stay in this, stay open, continue this, parlay it, fold it into me, stoke it? What do I start and what do I stop? This feels important. That is: How do we integrate experiences and embrace their evolving us? Especially when we leave the environments in which we were affected, how do we not return to our old ways of being but rather progress anew? I know some ways. And, I know the bittersweet truth that time erodes, well, everything.

To a friend: I don’t know how I’m going to care about anything else after this.

Friend: Welcome to the other side.

~

Post surf: It is increasingly more difficult for me to discern between dream and reality. Probably it’s all real, in its way. I say, It’s like a dream here. They say, I know.

I feel: Lovesick in paradise.

Is it … nature versus culture? Would I miss … it?

~

I have gone to the place that ayahuasca took me. Deeper, even. Reached that well and kept digging. Chipping until the halves split. We can reach these places without las plantas, I realize so fully now. It requires a different way of being, and persistence, but here we are. And, really, of course we can; they, in all of their revelations, are only showing us ourselves.

~

Dearest, dearest self,

The intensity of this, it will fade. Probably the memories will, as they already are—running together, mixing and frothing like that barreling white-water. While I’d beg and pray and give to preserve them all, what I think (know) is it’s most important to recall: what broke.

The gravity of life back there is going to be strong. The patterns, the attachments, the routes and snares will all be set and dug and slippery. You cannot let it envelope you. Maintain the break. Remember, and believe, have faith—trust—when you forget the feeling itself, that this is real life. This is living. Pura vida erases the rust.

You only live this once. And you have the time and opportunity right now.

Stay attached to this place. Visit, meditate on it, keep it in mind and in focus. Exit the matrix while you can see the way. You have your whole life to make art, you can make it from anywhere, and you tap into deep, profound insights here. Don’t lose this thread.

Remember weeping. Remember being warm all of the damn time. Remember the sunsets in their mind-bending surreality. Remember the rainbows at dawn far beyond the break, and the expansive silence out there. Remember the strength of your body. Remember the wide, wide openness of your mind—more elastic now than it’s ever been. Remember this lifestyle, the way of gratitude and optimism, of ease and intention.

~

What a trip. I change rooms for the third time, back into the one I started in, which tangles my brain a bit—what’s when and where am I?

Had therapy, which was so intense. I tried to describe the peak—the sustained peak—of this opening, the ineffability as much as I don’t appreciate that notion. We agreed that it has been the perfect container for me to release, to fully feel, to totally open. That I have been allowed here to be my most porous, which I am naturally but have to limit, contain, prevent in order to survive elsewhere. That in this, I am feeling everything: grief, joy, gain, loss, free … She said, “This is what self-actualization looks like.” I said, “Self-actualized is all I’ve ever wanted to be.” Her: “It’s a process, not an arrival; it is everything all at once. She mentions Bion’s work, and his concept of “O”:

"0" is perhaps Bion's most far-reaching conception. It designates an ineffable, inscrutable, and constantly evolving domain that intimates an aesthetic completeness and coherence. He refers to it by different terms, ‘Absolute Truth,’ ‘Ultimate Reality,’ or ‘reverence and awe’.”

"0" lies beyond the grasp of the external senses and is only experienced by an inwardly receptive sense organ, intuition, Bion's ‘seventh servant.’ Intuition is observation's reversible perspective, the latter requiring the senses. A transformation in ‘0’ is attainable only by the disciplined abandonment of memory, desire, understanding, sense impressions -- and perhaps also the abandonment of ego itself. Ultimate Reality is also associated with Bion's ‘beta elements,’ Kant's ‘things-in-themselves,’ Lacan's ‘Register of the Real,’ primal chaos (today we would say ‘complexity’), and yet, paradoxically, primal harmony and serenity, depending on the maturity of our capacity to be ‘at-one’ with it. The Greeks called it ‘Ananake" (Necessity). Milton alluded to it as ‘the deep and formless infinite’ and ‘the Void,’ and Blake referred to it as ‘fearful symmetry’ and ‘frightful fiend.’” — source¹

I mean … goddamn, it does exist. This ‘ness that I have sought my entire life … the absolute truth I believed in before anything else … here it is. “O” a storm and I now, in the void of its eye.

I feel like I’m bending reality out here. I feel my mind quivering with the force of it—I feel unstable, highly, and also onto something so thin that it’s nearly invisible, but true, true true. I feel like I’m on a rocket out of normalcy. My mind has never been stretched so widely, the expanse is gossamer. So many things are breaking—shards and splinters falling away, incinerated by this momentum.

I have found something. I have found everything.

At the same time, it feels dangerous. I can’t exist in a state like this for long nor in other settings. I feel like I have to slow it down, or contain it, or close myself off to something before I leave. I go to sunset and rather than taking in, I push myself out into it—back at it—with just enough pressure to resist its saturation. It’s not a rejection, but a non-absorption, as if I’m fully full and can’t contain any more.

The sunset I will not try to describe; I’ve given up. I watch it. I love it. I do not weep. I walk into it and put my hands into it. Thank you, I love you. I will be back.

Then, I wipe my damp palm across my heart, turn my back to the sea, and walk inland. I can do this. I don’t want to, but I can.

~

Listen to the “Costa Eves” playlist.

1. This gives me chills because not only does my therapist not know that self-actualization is actually something that, as a little girl, I thought was possible to achieve (as a destination) in life, and sought since—consciously or subconsciously (more often) in the way that I live and why I take the risks and make the leaps that I do. *And, also from childhood, I have a sort of obsession with the idea of absolute truth, which I also sought then to know someday and have written extensively about. When I left New York for this trip, I'd completely emptied my bulletin board—usually full of scraps of inspiration, artistic and professional aspirations, aesthetic information to absorb on a daily basis in my otherwise intentionally bare-white office. The only thing remaining on the board was a shard of paper that says "de bzhin nyid (དེ་བཞིན་ཉིད): https://rywiki.tsadra.org/index.php/de_bzhin_nyid