On Wednesday morning, 10-year-old Ashley shuffles into the Quaker meeting house for 45 minutes of silent worship. She pauses at the entrance, scans the room for friendly faces, then hesitantly walks up to an already crowded bench. The children squeeze even tighter together, shuffling bums over to make space for another friend. Monteverde is that…

How to know you’re in bed with the right woman in the right place? When you wake up at 6:30 to a hard rain and you both want to rush out for a walk before you miss it. You can easily spot tourists in Monteverde. They’re the ones wearing clear plastic garbage bag ponchos. Even…

I seem to have three gears when it comes to venturing into the cloudforest out my Monteverde back door. On fitness days I jog, straight up those steep paths that have me winded within 2 steps and gasping and burning within 2 minutes. This is the run I did two or three times a week…

“Have you ever had fun with your facial hair?” asks the guru of our men’s retreat. This seemingly casual flippancy belies deeper questions of ownership and masculine identity. College Rick tried the pathetic scraggly look, knowing it looked ridiculous. Grad School Rick had long-enough chin hairs to string a globe bead into it, thinking it…

I learned two things on the first day of grad school. The first was that “worker satisfaction is not correlated with increased productivity” and therefore just keep workers happy enough that they don’t quit. My first inkling that Industrial-Organizational Psychology would not be for me. Professor Dobson then told us that we were basically wasting…

Nature adores a vacuum. The carefully groomed paths of Curi-Cancha reserve are an irresistible playground for nature. They are the cloudforest equivalent of Leonard Cohen’s crack – a flattened swath that could be seen as a scar, instead is a bold opening letting the light in and giving nature a chance to stretch and play…

For my 58th birthday, I’m lying motionless in a cold MRI coffin in Albania. Bright lights and loud whirring mechanisms shout at me that I’m old, maybe sick, definitely dying (someday). Hopefully not soon, but for 45 minutes there’s nothing to do but contemplate mortality and assess life. If this is the beginning of the…

The only thing I knew about Philadelphia growing up in the 70’s was that the Broad Street Bullies were the toughest hockey team ever. A Canuck fan once held up a sign saying “Dave Schultz is a baby” and I was so scared that Schultz would jump into the stands and pulverize him. An unplanned…

Last weekend’s No Kings march was mostly business as usual. Clever signs and costumes. The flood of relief of being in a big group of people who still believe in humanity and democracy. Even an occasional glimmer of hope. But three things still surprised me. 1. Size Matters We know there’d be a crowd, but…

Nothing ever gets ticked off a Travel Bucket List. For every place we visit, we learn about four more adventures we want to explore (the Excel spreadsheet has swollen to 104 rows). And behind us, the number of places we’ve fallen in love with and would like to return to grows. We are forever deciding…