Tag Archives: Costa Rica

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A Little Night Music

Published in the Spring 2018 issue of Sky Island Journal, this is an excerpt from the forthcoming memoir, Evelio’s Garden: Memoir of a Naturalist in Costa Rica. 

Now, in the still, moonlit nights, insomnia has company.

Wup, wup, whoo, whoooo.

An owl challenges the jungle of the quebrada by the house.  Everyone marvels at how tranquil our place is, but they’re used to the noises of cities and towns.  Out here the sounds drop into the night silence like thunder.

It begins with the owl.  From our quebrada he calls to another in the quebrada to the south.  A small echo coming back, saying what?

Crickets playing a triad – two tones perfectly spaced at a third – offer a metallic accompaniment.

The cicadas who screamed at sunset have already exploded and left their empty shells in the crannies of the trees.

A distant dog barks.

Later, no matter what the moon, a pack of coyotes hurls its protest at the stars.  Little Flor – separated by millennia from her sisters – still remembers to howl in tune.

In the ceiling, all night long, the bats are chirping fussily over their busy comings and goings.  There is the muffled beating of wings against the small, dusty spaces.

A gecko rustles across the skylight, and I hear the flat-footed thump of the cat’s paws on the kitchen counter, a better vantage point for contemplating the gecko’s tempting silhouette in the moonlight.

Even later, a small but insistent mew from the cat: she wants out.

The pump decides to gurgle, even though no one is drawing any water.

The breeze, blowing from the volcano, sighs back and forth like the ocean, and the great crossed limbs of the guanacaste tree groan against each other like two quarrelsome lovers in their sleep.

A lamp burns in my tiny room as my pen scratches across the page.  It attracts an abejón that buzzes his frustration against the screen. There’s a hole in the screen, but he hasn’t found it yet.

In the small hours a far-off rooster crows.

Later, at five – right on time – the King of the howler monkeys roars in the dawn.  He knows when the sun is about to rise.  The rooster hasn’t figured it out.

Night sounds in the campo.  I never feel alone.  As I look out the window above my bed, lights out at last, I see the pale moon and constellations swinging through the bowl of blue and, distantly, ever so faintly, I can hear – beyond all the chirping and chatter of nearby things – the music of the planet tilting toward the sun.

(An earlier version appeared on this blog in the series on the use of our senses in writing.)

 

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Pensamientos Navideños: Holiday Thoughts on Rewriting a Life

This essay first appeared in The Tico Times 20 years ago as Pensamientos Navideños.

 

The coffee pickers are in the fields full-time now. I can see them on my morning walk, both in our neighbor’s field and in the giant cafetal that climbs the steep hill on the other side of the river: small human forms balancing their baskets in front of them, reaching deep into the dark foliage, stripping one branch after another, moving steadily along the rows, sure-footed on the steep slopes. As hard as this work is, it is a cheerful time. At dawn, I hear their voices calling to each other, and this bantering goes on all day, sometimes punctuated by a line of song.

Coffee season means we are approaching Christmas. For the pickers it means a few sheets of galvanized metal for the roof of the new house, school uniforms for the coming year, a new ceramic or wooden figurine for the crèche (portal), a pair of shoes.

As the coffee baskets are rapidly filled, they are dumped into sacks, and the pickers drag or shoulder their sacks to the collection point where the coffee is weighed and the colones are paid. Men, women and children – whole families – pick coffee, and these few weeks out of the year are enough to ensure relatively good economic times . . . at least for a while.

When I first came to Costa Rica I was amazed at how labor-intensive these crops are, but on such precipitous terrain no machines could do this work. Now I have grown accustomed to seeing people in the fields, and it is their cheerful calling to each other that first puts me in mind of the coming holidays – a better reminder than the sudden appearance of Salvation Army Santa Clauses on slushy city street corners, I’m thinking.

Year’s end always makes me pause and reflect on the changes in my life since moving to Costa Rica. Over the years I have learned some important lessons – far beyond losing my fear of driving on mountain roads with no guard rails, discovering the joys of communicating in a new language or adapting to the courteous ways of the people around me.

I suppose you don’t have to move to a foreign country to rewrite a life, but you do have to get away from everything familiar that binds you to your old self. Another culture is so different that it forces this rebirth much more dramatically. It is often painful, but if you choose to be open to it, let go your defenses, take joy in what’s around you, you’ll find it reflecting back at you something new, something you never knew was there, a self you never had time for before.

Here in Costa Rica I have learned that I believe profoundly in the power of family; that I can be a generous person; that a single orchid or a new-hatched hummingbird can fill me up; that being a good neighbor is better than guarding my privacy; that I have more patience than I ever thought I did; that to welcome a stranger is not a waste of time; that charity is personal; that connection with others is the most important thing in life; that personal growth is a choice and, once it starts, it will not be stopped; and that, even though what remains to me of life is less than it was when I first arrived here, I have all the time in the world.

Photo by Dan Spreen

Photo by Dan Spreen

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Finding the Heart of Writing

(Adapted from a presentation given at Allyson Latta’s 2012 writers’ workshop in Costa Rica)

Point of view

Many years ago, I fell in love with Joseph Conrad. I read every single book and story, one right after another. I got excited. He gave me hope. Not that I could write as compellingly as he, but that I could have a point of view, a perspective worth sharing. At the time I didn’t know what this might be, but I certainly could identify with his. I loved his capacity for close observation and at times thrilling description, but most of all I loved his humanity, his understanding of the inner workings of people, their secret selves and what makes them choose the evil or the good. And I especially enjoyed his delicately ironic sense of humor, since I shared something similar myself. In spite of having spent hundreds of hours in literature classes, this was the first time I “got it” that writers must write from a personal worldview, and it gave me courage.

I was forty-something and, fortified by Conrad, I decided to start writing on purpose, and this was part of my motivation in moving away from a high-stress job to another country – Costa Rica – where I imagined I could get a better handle on just that. There were plenty of false starts, and life got in the way a lot (moving to another country is not an unstressful thing to do), but over time I honed my skills and learned plenty of important lessons. But what to write about? Here’s where the sense of place enters the story.

A sense of place

Living in a foreign culture eventually strips you clean of all the cultural encrustations you’ve accumulated in your previous life and leaves you naked and vulnerable. For some, this is a terrifying experience of helplessness. For others, it’s an adventure of discovery – not just of the other language and culture, but of yourself, of what really matters to you. Living in Costa Rica, I found that my values firmed up about things I really hadn’t given a lot of thought to before.

But how to write in such a way that your readers can “see” it the way you see it? You have to describe things – accurately, lyrically, whatever way you want – but in order to do any of these you have to observe closely – physically and emotionally – whatever it is you want to describe. It was this exercise of close observation that resulted the deep sense of place that informs my forthcoming memoir, Evelio’s Garden. The most important lesson this work taught me, from a writer’s point of view, was to close my eyes and go there, wherever that was, into the quiet place where the words – amazingly – just came.

Telling the truth

I had a big problem with truth for a lot of years. I would go back over something I’d written and find it just didn’t jibe with something real inside me that I couldn’t put my finger on. Maybe we all face this in the beginning, the desire to reinvent ourselves through language or stories, and we find that they don’t quite ring true – I mean true to the human experience, not true to the facts. Some of us need a lot of living before we can find this truth, and it can take great courage to face it, and then, ultimately, to tell it. After all, what do we have to lose? Realizing this, I finally found that truth exists only in the place where acceptance lies.

The truths of the human condition haven’t changed much – like the 100 great plots, they’re familiar to us all. But with an understanding of our own personal truth, each of us can bring a unique perspective to the human story. Anonymous was right when she/he wrote that writers write not because they want to say something, but because they have something to say. And that “something to say” must ring true.

Writing from the heart

All writing is really best if it teaches us something. What does what I have experienced or lived have to offer you? How can the way I put something down on paper help you to experience it more deeply, or in a fresh way; make you reflect, or stop for just a moment to say to yourself, “Ah, that’s the way it is”?

Writing makes me feel more alive because it forces me into each moment I describe in a way that can make connections with others. Feeling the thing observed, the moment, and then describing it so that someone else experiences that same moment through one’s words – these are moments of truth shared. It is in this heightened awareness, in this search for connections that we really exist as writers.

This was brought home to me not long ago in intensive care, when I was on a respirator and couldn’t speak. Fortunately, I had a notebook with me, and I could write brief requests or comments to the staff and doctors. It interested me how intently everyone followed the act of my writing. I would signal in the air that I wanted to scribble, they would rush to find my notebook, pen and glasses (never in the same place twice), and then they would peer over my shoulder to see what I was going to “say.” It occurred to me then that they attached so much importance to what I wrote because I was writing it to them. Being the intended recipients of the written word made them feel important. Connections being made. In this light, we can almost see writing as an act of love.

© Sandra Shaw Homer, 2014

Photo by Marten Jager

Photo by Marten Jager