Journals from the Jungle XV: Shooting straight through sense-making
Incomprehensible beauty is enough to live for.
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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.
My morning routine: Naked outside with coffee and the hummingbird, my journal, in this perfect air and bright blue sky above beyond the green. Why would I leave?
Post-surf: A nice whitewater session. I’m getting better, stronger, riding a little cooler, feeling a sort of style emerge, when possible. It’s more subdued today, having stayed inside the break, and therefore easier. The walk home more calm too. I’ll focus on the book now.
~
A request to reserve my house arrives for July, signaling a certain end date for me now. It’s more than a month away and yet I feel very uneasy. I have to look at the calendar in order to situate myself in time.
I lay down and contemplate the way it feels to leave these sensations behind—letting, or being forced to endure the experience of the intensity fading. And that fact—that details wash away, filtering into some other realm where they become the past, where they become memory, which is imaginary—is almost so overwhelming that I wonder if I can go on living in pursuit of such things. To gain only to lose again. It’s so …
painful.
I’ve worked so hard to get here. Now I am in some limbo … with some release, relief, and yet some strife still too. I’m still pushing into this place, into some maybe when/where it’s all here and there is no more counting down of days.
Sunset tonight: I touch the sand with the back of my hand, brushing it gently—a caress—tracing slowly back and forth across it like I would on a lover’s chest, laying beside me. I realize the preciousness of simply being able to touch the earth and how rare that is in New York. I lay on it now full of love, and also of grief for all the years we’ve been separated. The other way, that other life, it doesn’t feel humane.
The land is warm and alive, like a body. I love it as if it is.
And I cry, because this place has taken me. I feel like I could sleep here, on this beach, with the incessant sound of the sea, watching the crashing break on the misty cliffs in the distance. I feel home. I feel saved. I feel desperate to stay. I feel that I would give up “my life” for this place. “My life” suddenly pales in comparison to this.
I also realize that I’ve done what I’d hoped to: I’m living both lives—sampling the two, trying before I buy. I’d thought that doing so would be impossible.
~
Does it mean anything that I’m more preoccupied with this place than my book? Is it that one is newer? (Competing dreams coming true! Life can be incredible.) Or does it signify something deeper?
~
I realize that figuring out how to live this way is like the next level of figuring out how to leave the corporate world to work for myself. The progressive exiting of the matrix of convention that never suited me anyway.
I think about this new way of being where I question less why, and maybe even what I want and just do it, take it, have it, go into it. Is that different from how I’ve lived in the past? It feels different.
~
6/2/24
I go for a little walk. It’s a perfect day. Mariposas and beach dogs. A sapphire sky, smiles.
I feel like I’m in the promised land and that this is what I get for what I did—for what I’ve put myself through, for my choices. It feels so, so, so worth it. As if my whole life has lead up to today. And, how many times have I said that here?
9:45am: Pacing, dancing, energy energy excited excited … !
Post surf: It’s hard to paddle out and at first I can’t make it. We relocate and try again, this time I succeed and quickly catch a wave. I hurry back out, watching the time. As we’re bobbing in the quiet deep, far from shore, all alone in the blue, the clock strikes 11am. I tell coach to give me a high-five, and that I’ll tell him why later. He does, and it is done.
That moment, forever memorialized, when the manuscript for my first book was delivered—while I was out at sea.
~
I surf, and then walk home—or float, in a blissful daze.
Afternoon: My whole body is weak from the effort, in the best way. All I can do is eat, and fall asleep. I love it.
6/3/24
In the loosened semi-conscious coming-to before I awake fully I feel the truth of my powerlessness against the force of this place. It is simple and clear: I have to be here.
Night: I’m drained from surf and the day, so much so that I’m a little worried I’ll fall asleep or get lost at sunset, but then am so glad I went. I get sucked into it—drawn toward it as if by gravity, as it becomes more unbelievable by the minute. When I’m able to back away, I turn around to see it blushing the entire sky and I have to sit down in awe. I simply gape as it turns the world pink, and then an eerie, surreal orange. It’s enormous and silent, some phenomenon that is simply occurring—nature just … doing what it does—displaying this magnificence. And we can either witness it, or not. It’s frightening almost, and in that way sublime. It’s a beauty difficult to comprehend. I keep blinking and squinting, trying to see … reality. But this is it. So thoroughly distorted that it’s disorienting.
(Addition: Beauty that is difficult or perhaps even impossible to comprehend is exactly how this land claimed me: It overpowered comprehension, it disregarded rationality, it pierced straight through sense-making and flooded my body, overtook my spirit. Incomprehensible beauty is love. Incomprehensible beauty is transcendence. Incomprehensible beauty is enough to live for.)
Dark thunderclouds sweep in from behind, backlit by some godly light I don’t understand the source of. None of it looks real. As I’m walking home through the darkening glow of orange air, the jungle begins scurrying with life—in front of my every step, and then behind, and then all around me. Is it lizards? Rainbow crabs? I can’t see a single creature. The sound fills the air—crackling, frantic, invisible. Thunder and lightning break overhead and I’m surrounded in total strangeness. Every sight, every sound, twisted and unusual.
I think: This is why I never miss a sunset here.
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