Costa Rica`
Rooted in Community
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…
Read MoreMonteverde Water Colours
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…
Read MoreCloudforest Bathing
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…
Read MoreManly Movember Mischief
“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…
Read MoreStress (please!)
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…
Read MoreOvergrown
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…
Read MoreEveryone is Special; No-one is Extraordinary
No-one can make you feel special like the Monteverde Friends Meeting. After 6 long years away, just walking into the beautiful timberframe meeting house elicits joyful smiles and “So glad you’re back!” waves from long-lost Friends. More surprised delight as more people trickle in. The enthusiastic but appropriately-muted murmurs of “Welcome” after we stand up…
Read MoreSweet Home, Monteverde
I think the first hug was from Rita. On that dry-season-dusty-green, oh-so-familiar corner at the base of the hill the boys and I climbed every day to school, outside La Colina Lodge where Greg and Amber used to host Hamburger Night, right by the favorite fencepost where the green-and-blue mot-mot would greet us every morning,…
Read MoreLa Fortuna, Costa Rica
Our overly-affectionate friends from Minnesota treated us to an overnight at La Fortuna at the base of Arenal volcano. The drive there through the rural, mountainous interior of Costa Rica was already worth the price of admission – an easy (3.5 hour, 70-mile, you do the math) drive from Monteverde – rent a 4×4! Our…
Read MoreNarrowing Down “Anywhere in the World”
If you could go anywhere in the world, where would it be? For most people, that’s either a dreamy party game or a one-shot, two-week opportunity to hit that beach or volcano or mardi gras. For us, it’s an ongoing question – making one selection does little to narrow down the options for the next…
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