March 24, 2011
Today was a big work day. First on the list was to rebuild two planting beds 20 feet long by excavation and then replacing it with layers of soil, compost, chicken manure, cow manure, more soil, and then more compost. Second was to build a planter box from scrap wood for the edge of the yard for roses and ornamentals.
I started work on my painting today, mixing up a small batch of material for the texture and delivering it to the surface of the panel. It didn’t go as well as hoped. The reason is that the acrylic resin I got here is a strange variation of admix that doesn’t work at all the way the same product I get at home works. It’s going to be disappointing if I can’t get the mix to be the consistency I need. Also, I just checked it and now, 4 hours later it still hasn’t set up. This is in a way good, as it will make a harder final texture. But if it doesn’t dry in a couple of days, it will mean that the whole process will be slowed down considerably. I can’t deliver it all in one sitting so it means that I’ll have to wait a couple of days to re-engage the process when it’s dry enough not to get bunged up while I work.
I am beginning to find myself anxious to get home. I am describing a wave that isn’t big enough to swamp my canoe. But it is a feeling that this time in Costa Rica will be nothing more than an adventure, a journey, and I feel that there is no time to waste on journeys and adventures. I feel a need to initiate and engage projects and flesh out ideas at a pace enabled by technology, in spite of the bliss of being beyond it’s tentacles here. Contrarily I also want to live life simply, consciously and deliberately, without compromises (here we produce almost no garbage, fully recycling every ounce of input into compost, most of what we eat is locally grown, and zero processed foods and certainly no high fructose corn syrup) inherent in urban life in the USA. At the same time, I want to manifest a host of projects only possible by having no obstacles and continual flow. I could be so much more productive than I am, I am obstructed by isolation here in moving on ideas. It’s a great place to work them out, however… I’m just venting.
I’m frustrated today if it isn’t obvious already. I want the past to resurrect itself in a metamorphosized and perfected version of itself. But it’s gone and I am beyond, out where the sea dragons on maps are drawn. I am floating aimlessly in a sea calm as a rust-welded lugnut.
I long to hear her laughter and the sound of her voice and her quickly delivered refutations of some crafty floating boloney spewed as a means of dredging up something luminescent. She’s a bird with exotic calls and blue -green feathers, like a Quetzal perched in the penthouse of a twenty story tree in the courtyard of a temple built to make sense of me, and attract her divinity.
So what. The bird flew off and the priest thought she’d be back and then he died and the people forgot and nobody cared about the temple anymore and then they all died of festering skin diseases in a matter of days and their bones melted into rock and the sun swallowed the earth just before the black hole at the center of the galaxy had had enough to eat and imploded to a singularity and then exploded in a supernova and wiped the milky way mass away like ants in a tornado and nothing ever mattered again because it only matters if we ARE. And WE really means YOU. And that pronoun is really ME, bobbing aimlessly in a monkey bladder. Today. But I am GRATEFUL FOR LEMONS, LIMES, PLANTAINS, ORANGES, AND PINNACLE OF ALL, CACAO. I am so grateful for cacao. And my family. And Mary. And the Choza and all who have made this a possibility for someone like me to experience and process and evolve and become…thanks.