When asked why I left Costa Rica, to keep it simple, I say, “It was too hot.”
And it was too hot. And maybe if I had more access to cooling and calming resources (a vehicle and a casita with working AC, a shaded pool, rivers and oceans which could be accessed without risk or stress) I could have endured or recovered from the heat rather than be annihilated, hour by hour day and night dry season after rainy season, by almost relentless calor and a body that does not tolerate heat, a body that in fact panics in heat, for physiological causes which lead to psycho-spiritual effects. Maybe.
But I am writing from the fluffy rapture of a very snowy Saturday in the North. I am under the pleasant weight of thick blankets. Piper is sleeping on my right across my feet and Jupiter is thoughtfully regarding the snowfall to my left, his weight almost tipping my laptop off my lap as he leans into my legs. Bliss. Pam is downstairs chopping things and stirring a giant pot of pasta sauce and baking gluten free sourdough bread for the week. We are messaging back and forth about where to source milk in glass bottles because I had success making yogurt and now want to make ricotta and the farm store is too far in such weather. If I stop typing I might hear Pam clink something in the kitchen or Piper snore. All else is a thick and buffered silence.
I have always loved a thick and buffered silence and later when I pull on shearling boots and wrap a long scarf around my neck to descend the stairs and pull open the wide front door, my dogs will bound out into the wonderland and I will feel as good as a person like me can. You will never, ever hear me complain of the cold. I returned for it and just in time. I was out, far too long, beyond my capacity to hold beauty or terror or heat or a widened aperture or even one more no good very bad day.
My time in Costa Rica was not just hot. It was very, very, hard. I will one day really write about what happened to my son Julian while we were there. How a culmination of things drove him right to the very threshold of death where he hung, in agony and despair and pain and confusion and angelic haunting beauty whittled down to are you even breathing bones for over a year. He went in and in and in and I had to reckon with losing him. The prolonged vigilance is still alive in me. He took years more to return to full and robust physical health, but today he is muscled and active and healed enough from Costa Rica to even miss it.
I am not healed enough to miss it. Which is funny because all that most anyone talks about in Costa Rica (in the ex-pat communities) is healing. What are you doing to heal? From the government lockdowns, your childhood, your ancestry, patriarchy, pharma, Catholicism, feminism, addiction, your shadow. What are you doing to HEAL YOUR SHADOW?
I am working on a book I began writing as Sarah was dying and which I vow to publish before year 8 of a world without her (we are on year 7 soon). I have already written deeply about an ayahuasca journey that left me, too, in agony and despair and pain and confusion and very nearly out of touch with the framework that helps us to stay here in just enough amnesia to stick to the Story. I was trying to heal you see, from everything, and I blew my lens so wide open that I, too, took a year to get to the place where the rendering stopped shimmering and slipping. A year to get to the place where I could lie down at night and not become instantly so afraid that I would call my dear brother friend and say, “ Help me I can’t stop knowing things.”
I wrote about that in my manuscript, so I won’t preempt it here, but there are, I have realized now that I have quiet and blankets and time, so many things that also happened that I did not yet write. And when I list them, I wonder how I did not leave sooner or simply drop down dead.
Here they are, my stacked survival traumas:
I ministered to my son in actual moaning hell and exhausted every effort and resource to save his life. If you do not know what that means, I hope you never do.
A tiny little bite on my leg turned into some (unknown to me but familiar to the Ticos ) infection that ballooned my leg to twice its size, compressed nerves, burrowed into and ate my skin and muscle almost to the bone and which made it impossible to lower my leg because the pain was so shocking and the infection bled and leaked everywhere if I hopped to the bathroom which is the only place I went for weeks. I was largely alone. The scar is a sort of filled in hole and I mostly avoid looking at it. I remember screaming into a pillow during some of the '“remedies.”
A giant woman came whimpering up my long driveway with her tiny disabled daughter in her arms pleading for entry to my home so somebody wouldn’t see her. I let her in and she turned off all the lights. I held her daughter, both our hearts hammering, was I now in danger, too? This is not so uncommon there but if it happened here? Like right now while my dogs are sleeping and Pam is stirring sauce? Inconceivable. I just got sort of used to wild and unexpected things.
The brakes went on my Jeep on the way back down the mountain from San Isidro. My friend Jennifer was driving and the steering went and we just gripped what we could until a side road appeared. The Jeep alone deserves a spin-off series. Cars in general often flip in the deep overflow ditches and people die all the time in car flips and crashes.
Videos circulated of crocodiles eating dogs at the beach where I ran my dogs.
Scorpions snuck into the sheets.
Spiders, the size of my hand, that were not there at night suddenly appearing in the morning.
The dogs rolled, I guess, in a tick nest and for almost a solid week they locked into my two girls and crawled like living black pepper on my white walls, on my bed, on my FACE no matter what I did to get rid of them. (Let’s not forget my 8 years of lyme disease that preceded Costa Rica.) I was in a nightmare for a solid week.
Ayahuasca, peyote, bufo, huachuma, sassafrass, kambo, and sweatlodge ( I lost count of ceremonies in 3 years time).
A surprise litter of six puppies (and two adult dogs) with a 20 foot drop to the jungle floor outside the door.
Frogs that can kill your dogs if your dogs lick them.
Home invasions (of friends who were not home) who lost everything and reports of invasions where people were home and were zip-tied and threatened with knives.
Dengue fever. Which I am going to tell you about.
And, yes, it was hot.
Let me tell you about Dengue fever. There is no time near water that does not involve mosquitos. I went almost two years without even hearing about the Dengue they carry. One night, after years of all the things, I felt suddenly very bad. I get a lot of fevers so I usually ride them out but this one was different. My fever, which hit 102 by nightfall and then hit 104 again and again, dropping a little and spiking again over the next four days was an internal boiling I could not comprehend.
But it was almost nothing next to the pain. The pain in my head threatened to push my eyeballs from their sockets. For four days. No break. Four days of will my eyes push out of my face. But even that was nothing compared to what was happening to my bones.
A cytokine surge (I have since learned) was ringing alarms from every cell. I was in full-scale internal war and the pain was so intense and unrelenting that I got very very scared while endlessly searching for any position or remedy that might bring some relief. Dengue is also called breakbone fever and the pain was so unbearable that I was certain that was coming. Nathan sat vigil for days replacing one ice pack after the next to try to shock me into a hint of relief, holding up straws for me to sip from a pippa he had cut down on the way. I lost sense of time and honestly of anything outside of the bed as I writhed on it. WHY CAN I NOT FIND A POSITION TO GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK? I remember Nathan holding my phone to my ear so my sister could pray into it. I was in a full bodied and total somatic torment and my sister called on Jesus to give me relief or the peace of mind to bear it. The love and conviction in her voice reached me through the phone and sent a tiny beam of light into my pounding pounding pounding brain. If you do not know this kind of all consuming pain, I hope you never do.
On the morning of day 5 my fever broke and I realized I had survived. My body had not failed me. It recognized a lethal threat, mobilized everything, endured enormous suffering, and won. I endured it.
All of it. More than I have even written here.
And here is what I am learning about this Great Capacity of mine to Do Hard Things. My Ability to Survive Wild and Crazy Things. To endure shadow realms and search for the light in dark places.
I am learning that capacity is no longer what I am after.
I am after margin.
You see, I am in a body that never gives a stand-down order. There is a limit to my biology that you cannot see in me. All rest is temporary, all relief is suspicious and any calm may be the prelude to the next hit. And you (and I mean any of you) can not see it. I show up pretty normal in the world. Unless you live with me and I cannot hide how often I must retreat because I do not have any margin left after most any kind of doing.
A friend who knows this realm thinks perhaps I need a better diagnosis and she may be right ( ME, CFS for starters) as she too knows a thing or many about chronic (often stress-triggered) illnesses (or ways of being in a body which at this point when I turn and look back has been since Go). My friend knows that the suffering isn’t only pain.
It’s:
never being fully believed
never being “done”
constantly negotiating energy
living in a body that feels unreliable
feeling like you have to be your own ICU, case manager, and witness.
I have been very mad at my body. WHY ARE YOU FAILING ME is the skipping record. But here is what I can now, after 9 months more resourced than I have ever been, see.
My body hasn’t been withholding grace.
It has been spending it continuously.
Here are the place emergency remains “on” after stacked illness:
Breath: shallow, guarded, sighing, or braced
My body learned oxygen was once not enoughJaw / face / throat: clenching, swallowing, holding
Ever-readiness to endure pain or speak urgencyLegs / pelvis: bracing, heaviness, collapse after exertion
Learned immobility + threat + weight-bearing dangerStartle / vigilance: quick reaction to body sensations
Symptom = potential catastrophe, historically trueFatigue that worsens after relief
Nervous system finally lets go and drops
Emergency mode persists not because I am anxious, but because it was repeatedly correct.
My body didn’t get sick instead of living.
It got sick while surviving love, threat, infection, isolation, and unrelenting responsibility, often simultaneously.
Nothing about my story suggests a body that failed.
It suggests one that was never allowed to stand down.
I am standing down. But I must go slowly because I simply do not know how to do it and I still have a body that echoes with all that came before.
I have been storing stories that were not safe enough to tell because I could not bear to conjure them back into my bones to tell them.
And I do not want to risk the mismatch.
There is a gap between how others perceive my capacity and what it actually costs me to live in my body and history.
Because here is what I also am: intelligent, articulate, spiritually literate, competent under pressure, functional despite adversity, generous, caregiving, creative, and able to stay upright.
Until I must lie down.
I lie down more than you know. Pam and Steve know. Julian knows. My dogs, lying with me know. But it would surprise most of my people to know that I am not just introverted, or an early bird, or a homebody, or God forbid, lazy.
Most of my world sees me showing up and doing the Hard things. What they do not see is the metabolic cost, the immune debt, the nervous system load, the recovery time, the invisible sequencing of collapse and regrouping, the way every demand stacks on an already full system.
Which leads to my Irish goodbyes.
I can do things until I simply cannot.
Because I do not have buffer. My margin is a thin and shadowy line between can-do and simply cannot. It is physical and if I do not find a place to lie down alone and be very quiet with my dogs, I just may drop down dead.
I am not sure if this will change. This needing so much recovery time after doing (post-exertion malaise it is termed). But here is the thing. I don’t want to get better at doing more.
I want to get really really good at doing less.
Capacity is what I can, technically, do.
Margin is what remains after.
I am, in this coming Year of the Horse, chasing nothing.
I am, flanks quivering, nostrils flaring, nosing a bucket of oats in the barn.
And lying down in sweet hay watching the trees.
I do write from bed, happily and well. If you would like to sit for a Holy Witness (a sacred kind of poetic bio) you can find out more in my Substack posts and comment below.
And P.S., I also loved Costa Rica and have given that land and people her proper thanks in much of my writing. But this, too, is true and was time to say.