If she knew you, you were loved

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I don’t think many of us are thinking about legacies right now. We’re thinking about what to do immediately for our families, towns, cities, countries and the world.

But truly, those thoughts and the actions they beget during a crisis like this are the best legacy we could hope for.

I saw a post this weekend that was both horribly sad and deeply inspiring. It was about a beloved preschool teacher who died from complications from COVID-19 in Missouri. Near the end, it said: “If you knew her, you loved her, and if she knew you, you were loved.”

We can’t fully control whether we are loved, but the second half of that homage – If she knew you, you were loved – stuck right in my heart. If she knew you, you were loved. What else can we be aiming for during this life, but that?

What else can we be aiming for during these strange and scary weeks when, if we are very lucky, we have been given a chance to better appreciate the people we take for granted, from our parents to our kids’ teachers to our supermarket clerks?

What else can we do, all those of us who have been smacked right across the face with a heightened understanding of what it means to be in a house, maybe to have a job,  to have phones and computers and internet, to see people we love on those screens. To show love.

Ms. Juanita, may you rest in peace, and in all the love you clearly gave and won.

I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook! If you want to learn more about how to support Costa Rica during the crisis, visit my COVID-19 section, updated regularly – or for ways to enjoy Costa Rica from afar, visit Virtual Costa Rica.

‘Be brave, because you are worth it’

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One of the unhelpful things people tell parents of young kids is, “Just wait until she’s a teenager!” I always say some version of, “You truly don’t need to remind me. I have been terrified of that since before she was born.”

As a middle-school teacher, I loved my students. I also saw the gap that, necessarily, grows between them and their parents. Now that I have a six-year-old telling me every thought that enters her brain, I’m even more aware of the chasm ahead – especially when I think about teenagers’ mental health and the isolation that can come with that time of life.

All of this is to say that I am already so grateful to Joven Salud, the platform that the international nonprofit TeenSmart International is using to serve more than 50,000 young people throughout Latin America and build dozens upon dozens of public-private partnerships that surround many of those teenagers with in-person attention. They can start with something as simple as reaching out to a trained online coach for support (up to 500 teens do so every week), or build to something as intensive as becoming a volunteer and leading programs for other young people. The online platform can reach young people few other programs can, including migrants and refugees.

Joven Salud recently shared the story of 18-year-old Yareth:

Be brave, because you are worth it.

These are the exact words my TeenSmart coach said to me when I went on JovenSalud.net to seek help. These are the words that began my story of transformation.

Two years ago, when I was sixteen and suffering depression, a classmate told me that cutting myself would make me feel better.

It didn’t.

I felt alone and frightened. Afraid of what I might do. Until the night I decided to reach out to TeenSmart. That was the night my coach encouraged me to share my feelings with my parents and to open my heart to receive their support.

Now, two years later, I have graduated from high school and am applying to medical school. My goal is to help others through my service as a doctor. I want to help my parents and be an inspiration for my younger brother.

I am not sure what would have happened to me if I had not found out about TeenSmart. Perhaps I would have kept taking the advice that my friend gave me and began a life of dangerous behavior. Maybe I would not be here today to deliver my testimony. In my neighborhood, many children leave for school after a long night of listening to their fathers beating their mothers. Teenagers wake up on the streets after drinking all night. Many do not finish school.

Not long ago, a friend committed suicide due to drug abuse. We had grown up together and used to play soccer. I wonder if I could have helped to prevent that by saying, Hola!, and starting a conversation.

Now, as a TeenSmart volunteer, I know I can help other teenagers. These days I share how TeenSmart helped save my life and I use my testimony to encourage others to use their services.

Thank you, Joven Salud, for putting this kind of support available to young people like Yareth. We need to make sure all of our teenagers have this tool in their pockets, especially those who need it most. At a time when some of Central America’s most vulnerable youth are on the move, losing access to the already tenuous services they might have had at their school or in their communities, a tool like Joven Salud and an organization like TeenSmart isn’t just a nice option. It’s vital.

I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook! You can also find me churning out small, square poems on any topic under the sun (here on the site, on Instagram or Twitter). 

 

 

Day 29: Is there a park calling your name?

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Can you name the Costa Rican park where I took this photo? Do you have a favorite – national, city, private? Dog park (man, I know a nice one in Eastport, Maine)? Random-corner-that-isn’t-technically-a-park-but-makes-you-happy? I’ve been collecting parks in Costa Rica for 15 years, and there are few habits that have done more for my mental health than those escapes, no matter how short.

If you can, wherever you are today, drop by a park and take a break. Because sometimes, #travelthursday is just that simple.

I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook! You can also find me churning out small, square poems on any topic under the sun (here on the site, on Instagram or Twitter). 

 

 

Day 15: Overly Literal Translations, Oktoberfest Edition

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No matter how good you get in your second language, there will always be moments when the direct translation to your native tongue flashes through your brain. In the inaugural episode of Overly Literal Translations, where I put things through Google Translate and see what happens, I’m taking on a topic fit for Oktoberfest: Costa Rica’s dizzying array of craft beers. Here’s some of what a non-native speaker of Spanish might see when looking down the menu or the beer aisle. (What’s your favorite? Can you guess the original names? Can you pick out the one that is made up and not, in fact, a poorly translated beer name?)

Tomb Panties
Weeping Woman
Bald Lady
Daddy
Monkey Indigestion
Misplaced
Pumpkin Tamale
Stick Hen
Heartthrob
Butt Horse

To learn more about Costa Rican beers, you can visit Birripedia, lk j or Craftbeer.cr. And here is this week’s round up of Daily Boost posts for those who like to catch up on reading on the weekend. See you Monday for Week 4!

Day 11, Monday Inspiration: The empowerment of women starts right here.

Day 12, Tuesday Beau-tay: The coffee-inspired art of Raudyn Alfaro.

Day 13, Wellness Wednesday: Why I love olla de carne.

Day 14, Thursday Exploring: One of my favorite travel hacks ever.

I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook!

Day 14: A travel hack that saves space AND gives back

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rubber boots Costa Rica

When I asked an array of Costa Rican travel experts for their best advice last year, my favorite tip was a way to save precious suitcase space while also supporting local businesses and giving useful to someone who needs it. A triple boost, if you will.

The travel hack, which I’m paraphrasing from Pip Kelly of Casitas Tenorio in Bijagua (and one of last week’s Changemakers), was as follows: unless your Costa Rican trip will include some rigorous hiking, rubber boots, or botas de hule, will probably fit the bill much better than expensive, heavy hiking boots. What’s more, they’re pretty cheap and readily available around the country. So save that room in your suitcase, buy a pair upon arrival, splash around in some puddles and muddy trails – and at the end of your trip, simply donate them to your hotel, tour operator, or a local family. They will be put to good use, because every man, woman and child in Costa Rica needs to own botas de hule. It’s an essential.

Have you done something like this when traveling, in Costa Rica or elsewhere? Are there certain items you “forget on purpose” so you can buy them locally? Are there items you plan ahead to leave behind when you head home? I love this idea and would love to hear more.

I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook!

Day 12: Art inspired by coffee? Sign me up

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During Week 1, I threw down my first of what will probably be many challenges to myself during this year: to get to know the stories of Costa Rican artists and support their work at a time when art is a particularly important antidote or vehicle for change. Well, meet Raudyn. I’ve never met him in person, but his work makes me smile. Raised in the province of Heredia, he picked coffee as a child alongside his grandparents, as did so many Costa Ricans during that time, and has dedicated much of his artistic life to showcasing the unique role of the “golden grain” in the country’s life. 

I love his paintings’ trademark shapes and spirals that cut the classic scenes into new patterns. I love the way he applied this same approach to Michael Jordan preparing for a dunk. I love the way he sees his art not as a throwback to a lost time, but as a reminder that the values that used to unite us – in this case, Costa Ricans – are still out there. As he said in an interview I edited while at The Tico Times, his work “applauds our ancestors, but I must also applaud today’s Costa Ricans. To the tico who still feels humble. The tico who… keeps working. There are still ticos like that and I applaud that.” 

Insert your own nationality to the statement above: lather, rinse, repeat. Thank you, Raudyn.  And if you share my desire to hang a piece of his work in your home one day, enter his raffle! Just visit his Instagram account.

Courtesy of Raudyn Alfaro
Courtesy of Raudyn Alfaro

I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook!

Day 7: From Jorge, for Greta

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Poetry is the damndest thing.

Last night at dinner I said to my husband, “What do we do? How are we supposed to go on when we have world leaders who can listen to a speech like Greta’s and then not take action? Do we just revolt in every single country that’s not falling in line? Do we create some kind of a parallel leadership structure? Do we just take over? Do we just create a new, single nation of people who give a rat’s ass, and elect our own leaders and go from there?”

He shrugged, which I guess is a logical response to such questions, especially when you have a mouthful of soup.

And then I walked upstairs and took a book of Costa Rican poetry off the shelf on a WWJDS-ish whim (that’s What Would Jorge Debravo Say, of course), and the book fell open to “La Patria,” and there he was, telling me just about the same thing. “A homeland is just like fruit,” he says, “sometimes sweet and delicious, sometimes acidic and bitter.” He imagines a borderless planet where “we could work, serenely abandoned.”

Isn’t that what we need to do? To get to work, abandoned though we may be by many of the people who have the most power to create change? Don’t those of us who are committed to this have more in common than compatriots might? Should we be pledging allegiance and paying taxes, with our donation dollars and purchase power, to a new nation led by the scientists and CEOs and mayors and teenagers and whoever else has been stepping up to the plate? It sounds like a fantasy, but it may also be the only possible way to continue.

For the first time in a long time, a poem made me feel more energetic at night than I had in the the morning. I’m not sure how serene I’ll feel about our abandonment in the harsh light of day, but I won’t be alone. I’m a citizen of the unstoppable. Now, there is no other way to be.

Here’s the full poem, “La Patria” (my apologies for any late-night less-than-elegant or overly creative translation):

The homeland is like fruit:
sometimes sweet and delicious;
sometimes acidic and bitter.

As soon as we start school,
or even as soon as we’re born,
they place the homeland in our hands
and they make us love it.
They tell us that “homeland” is delicious.
They never tell us that sometimes it’s bitter.

Homeland is the bitterest invention
since the bad invention of our soul.

If we all inhabited the world
as one single homeland,
there would be no orphans, no widows,
not in the lands of drought, not in the pouring rain.

We would be able to work, serenely abandoned,
without killing each other for the homeland on the battlefield…

(From Vórtices, Editorial Costa Rica, Second Edition, 1999)

I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook!

Day 6: An extraordinary legacy

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During this year of the Daily Boost, Mondays are for celebrating people who are making a difference — small business owners, community leaders, nonprofit founders and more — and I’m starting with two people who give me a boost every time I think of them.  We have our bicultural families in common (Pip met Donald when she came to Costa Rica from Australia to volunteer on an ecotourism project, and they now have two fantastic girls), but in all other respects, my family’s city life is worlds apart from theirs. As a person who does most of her work in meeting rooms or on the computer, I find it breathtaking to watch two people who are literally building their dreams plank by plank and nail by nail. They live, sleep and breathe their beloved community, Donald’s native Bijagua, and the fragile ecosystems that have made it a sought-after tourism destination.

How? Well, they’ve built Costa Rica’s best B&B in Casitas Tenorio — don’t take it from me, ask TripAdvisor — all the while taking their role as local employers with the utmost seriousness. And now they’ve created Tapir Valley, a 220-acre private reserve where visitors, photographers and naturalists can roam the Costa Rican rain forest they way it’s meant to be explored: without schedules, crowds or restrictions. The fact that they have pulled this off is completely insane. I really can’t put into words how astonishing it is to see a private reserve worthy of a Rockefeller that instead has been reforested, protected, and prepared for visitors by working parents, hand-in-hand with community members who have chipped in to mix the cement or raise the forest viewing platform. Let’s just say that taking a walk through Tapir Valley, home of the endangered Baird’s Tapir, expanded my view of what one person or one family can do. It made me think about legacy.

At a time when our children are taking to the streets to protest their elders’ inaction on climate change, our generations’ chance is not yet lost. Far from it. There are still actions that ordinary people with extraordinary devotion can take to better their childrens’ lot. We all have changemakers like Donald Varela and Pip Kelly in our lives, whether we know them personally or not. The visionaries. The jaw-droppers. The people with the guts to “build it and they will come.” Sometimes they don’t realize what a gift they give us by letting us be a part of their projects. We are the lucky ones, we who get to buy what they make, spread the word, relish their ascent. We get to pick our jaws off the ground and think about what their hard work can inspire in our own lives.

When days like Friday and the climate protests make you feel simultaneously inspired and a horrendous failure for being part of older generations that will hand today’s children an utter mess; when you feel that there’s nothing left to be done; when your children’s questions about looming ecological disasters make you cry; when you just have a case of the Mondays, I invite you to take a look at Casitas Tenorio’s and Tapir Valley’s feeds, which are bursting with beauty and just plain goodness. If you can visit Pip and Donald in person, better still. There are such lovely people in the world, tucked down a side street in your neighborhood, tucked up a winding dirt road in northern Costa Rica, waiting to dazzle us. Making things better in the place they love.

Who are your Donalds and Pips? Who is dazzling you? I want to hear.

The forest viewing platform at Tapir Valley. Photo courtesy of Tapir Valley.
This is a glimpse of how much fun it is to spend time with this family. Seriously.
An aerial view of Tapir Valley, courtesy of @sapoaadventures.

I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook!

 

Day 4: Girl, volcano

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When first I saw you
I was 21 and blissful.
You were spewing lava:
slow drools of red through the black night
under a cold rain.

I thought that was just how volcanoes behaved.

Today, when I visit you, you are quieter
I am louder
You are just as tall as ever
And so am I
I see how you command the clouds
I see the forests on your flanks and the scars through the trees;
I never noticed those before.
You’ve still got an angry-powerful core,
But now it’s just for you.
I didn’t have one yet, the night I met you.
Now I look at you and smile.

Inspired by the no-longer-lava-spewing Volcán Arenal, and by The Daily from The New York Times, “Keeping Harvey Weinstein’s Secrets, Part 1.” 

I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook!

Day 3: I just had an epiphany in the middle of a sentence

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Fantasy me drinks tea. She gazes out of a rain-spattered window as she savors every herbal sip and smiles indulgently at her daughter who is curled up on the hearthrug, building a tiny recycling center out of locally sourced twigs (note to self: acquire hearthrug. And hearth). She breathes a sigh of contentment as the comforting sound of her husband chopping kale in the kitchen. OK, that’s a bit much. He’s roasting a chicken, but it’s definitely free-range.

Real me drinks coffee, obviously, and does pretty much the opposite of all of the above. She does smile indulgently at her daughter over some good old-fashioned plastic Legos with her mind only about 45% distracted by that email she should have sent about that thing. “Queer Eye” is the hearth she curls up in front of. She’s made a life in the best coffee country on earth and takes her responsibility to support national coffee producers – singlehandedly, if need be – very seriously. She’s consistently a little bit frazzled, like a sitcom klutz, or at least that’s how it feels inside her brain. She thinks that Tea Me is kind of obnoxious.

I’ve been trying to get these two together forever. I keep telling Coffee Me that she needs Tea Me around, and that she should lay off the kale comments – but you know what I just realized right now as I am typing this? I fucking love Coffee Me. I don’t want to change a hair on her head. She can sip kombucha and make organic vegetable stew and meditate whenever she wants – and while kale is a nice punching bag, she secretly kinda likes it – but she is no longer expected to become a different person as a result. I’m done with self-improvement as a concept, especially when it’s is of no interest to certain horrible people at the very top of society. There’s so much wrong with the world, and so little time to fix it, that I don’t have an ounce of mental energy to spare for any me other than the one who’s prostrate on the couch, typing furiously while her daughter watches a cartoon about a group of anti-feminist ponies who can’t find their hairdresser (wait, what the… ? No. Let it go. Writing casualty).

Hi there, Coffee Me, ye of the whirring mind, disheveled hair and achy soul. I started this little essay intending to broker a peace between you and your imaginary mindful sister with her beatific smile, but you know what? No matter what you’ve got in your mug, you’re the one I want. And you’re all I’ll ever need.

I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook!