Fifth Time In Costa Rica, 23

It feels like Sunday today, even if it´s only Wednesday. I thought it was just me, but then I mentioned the same to the owners of the bed and breakfast and they told me that, yes, it does feel like Sunday today. This is Holy Week, or Semana Santa, and the whole week is a statutory holiday in Costa Rica. This of course has to do with the strong Roman Catholic heritage in this country, even if Costa Ricans are among the least overtly religious Latin Americans. I can´t remember the exact stats but a significant minority, over twenty percent of the people here do not profess any religious faith, other than making money, that is. Unlike in hyper-secular Canada, they still haven´t changed the name of the holiday to Spring Break, and they´d might as well, given how few really seem to observe the religious significance of this time. For me there have been no overt signs that it´s a holiday today, except maybe for the presence of more families in the Cloud Forest today. I don´t really know how I picked up the vibe, and I think it´s one of those things that can best be read intuitively. I should be careful about whom I say this around. I don´t want to get diagnosed with anything that I don´t have just for saying these sorts of things. I didn´t do much today. I was up super early, had coffee in my room, sometimes seated on the bench outside where I admired the garden in the developing dawn, otherwise I was on my bed working on a drawing. I thought of doing art outside but for some reason it usually doesn´t feel very comfortable. It could have something to do with not wanting to make myself vulnerable, or perhaps it´s more that I was just too absorbed staring blissfully out at the new day and the garden. Maybe a bit of both. It´s nice to have First World Problems, especially if, like me, you earn more of a Developing Country income. That would make kind of a cool comedy skit, in a twisted, black humour sort of way. Holding a contest for people on low incomes and the winner gets to enjoy one full week of First World Problems: like being served a martini that was made with the wrong brand of Vermouth, or winning a holiday in a tropical paradise where the all-inclusive doesn´t provide any vegan or Paleo options on the menu. Hey, Gentle Reader, how about writing in the comments section about your favourite First World Problems. The winner, provided you live in Vancouver, gets treated to coffee and a cheap dessert. For me, First World Problems were but an untouchable dream for all the years when I was wrapping myself around a telephone pole just trying to keep myself fed and a roof over my head, and I even ended up homeless for the better part of the year. Now that, thanks to subsidized housing and relatively stable (if obscenely undercompensated) employment, I seem to have just enough discretionary income so that sometimes even I get to enjoy having First World Problems. Oh, what was I missing! Now I can complain about my white extra old cheddar not being sharp enough, or winge about the discomfort of flying economy. On the other hand, I can afford cheese and air travel and maybe that´s where I should draw the line. Following breakfast, I did some work on a drawing, went down for a nap for about an hour and a half, then walked up to the reserve where I spent three hours today. The fellow who usually lets me in free is off today, but I asked the other worker to phone the bed and breakfast. Fortunately, one of their sons works at the reserve, and everything was confirmed, and I was let in without having to pay one single colon. I hiked some of the easier trails, and spent a lot of time sitting on benches, simply absorbing the incredible beautiful tangle of the web of life surrounding me. It was then, that I saw all this jumble of plants and other species together, not as a Darwinist cacophony of everything competing and lurching and struggling to survive, but as a grand and vast community of nature, where all life forms are integrated and interconnected and interdependent for their survial and wellbeing, and together help support and sustain one another in this beautiful miracle called life. All of us recieving the same oxygen, the same light and water, the same nutrients from the ground, and only that unfathomable biochemical miracle of DNA distinguishing each one of us from the others, but still, all together, not struggling, not competing, but thriving together as a supercomplex unity of diversity, and diversity of unity. It seems that we humans with our obsession with competition and capitalism are really uniquely out of synch with this beautiful truth about nature. Other humans on the trails seemed a little more absorbed in the wonder that surrounded them, which was nice to see. Still very few lone hikers, just me, and two other separate individuals I walked past. I really don´t know how I would be able to appreciate and absorb a place like the Cloud Forest with the distraction of friends and companions. Perhaps people feel more protected by one another from the terror of the beauty that surrounds us. There is a lot to take in, and there is also something about opening our inner selves to the nature around us that also forces us to become vunerable about our other issues, and very few people have time or the courage to walk this kind of psychological and spiritual labyrinth, and this I find to be really sad, because this is something that we all desperately need to do, if we are really going to become fully human. I am now back at the bed and breakfast, watching as the setting sun dazzles my eyes in the golden green foliage. The sky here, and the colours of nature, are the most sublimely violent and intense hues of blue and green. This beauty is almost exhausting.