From Southwest Virginia to Canada to Poland, then France, England, Morocco and beyond--the last two years have been a whirlwind for me. This is especially poignant when one considers that as recently as 2018, I was terrified of both airplanes and getting murdered in Toronto. Laughable now, after nearly twenty flights here and there, most of them international, and the realization that Toronto is one of the safest cities on earth. When the Universe decides to turn my preconceived notions on their collective heads, it doesn't mess around.
There's no denying that my life story reads like something out of a novel. What most people don't think about as I'm posting photos of beaches and parrots and palm trees is that every good novel is fraught with tension and the characters are embroiled in conflict from the first page until the last. There's an axiom about good storytelling: "put your protagonist up a tree and start shooting at them." In other words, every payoff comes at a tremendous price. And being up a tree ducking proverbial bullets--in case no one has noticed yet-- has been a recurring theme for me.
Somewhere along the way I decided that I will write mostly about the positive things that shape my world and keep the more difficult moments to myself. There are many, many things I have never written about nor will I write about. These things include fractured relationships with family and heartbreaks delivered by other people who never need to know how badly they damaged me. A memoir, while I'm sure it would be interesting to some, has ceased to be of interest to me. Dark days can be found in a journey through my past, times I simply do not wish to revisit, ever, under any circumstances. I certainly don't want to immortalize them on the page.
Even so, I won't pull back from telling the unvarnished truth if I think it is something that others need to know. It's a fact that I will gush over new discoveries and share my enthusiasm with gusto, and later I'll have "the rest of the story"to publish with all the down sides. A prime example of this is Morocco. I did see the charm in that country and understand the cultural insights it has to offer. I did do my very best to give it the benefit of the doubt, posting reams of photos and videos of all the wonderful things I could find to display for the world. (See this post.)
But the dark side of Morocco relentlessly stalked us, and by the time Michel and I left, I felt I owed it to myself and everyone else to paint as balanced a picture as possible. We could have lived in Morocco... until we realized why we very much could not, and why we could never advise anyone else to do so, either. So yes. I begin every chapter hoping there is no down side. But I report experiences as they come, as faithfully as I can. And maybe some day, I'll have nothing but happy to share.
If anyone is tempted to resent the upturn in my fortune since I left the U.S., I hope they will remember this: Cindarella suffered. That old narrative skims past the bleak existence she lived in the months and years before her fairy godmother came along. She learned some excruciating lessons in humility. She also learned to accept the bounty of a better life with grace. I hope that I've learned the same lessons. I've certainly paid my dues. Crippling autoimmune disease aside, rejecting toxic relationships has, for me, meant a relatively solitary existence hundreds of miles from everyone and everything I ever knew. It took more than a decade of starting over before I learned to be emotionally independent and how to avoid repeating mistakes of the past. It also meant scouring my mind clean of many things I'd learned as a child about life and people, ideals engineered to build a life surrounded by mental barbed wire and self-imposed material prisons.
One of the hardest realizations for me was that "God's Country" doesn't have a North American zip code. Two years of being a global nomad has shown me some ugly, but mostly it's taught me that beautiful people and beautiful places exist worldwide, and the belief system that taught me to fear them did me a great disservice. I regret not learning multiple languages during the years when learning was easier for me. I feel silly for thinking that success had anything at all to do with credit scores or bank accounts. I'm sorry it took me fifty years to stand in the derelict gas chambers of Aucshwitz and comprehend for the first time just how far "white privilege" can go if left unchallenged.
But I'm deeply grateful for the perspective I've gained. I spent 2020, the "covid year," an ocean away from my own country, immersed in a culture with different politics and a completely different religion. I was locked in Morocco with a traveling buddy I'd met in 2018, and believe me--if you want to know if you can really get along with someone, get yourself locked in a foreign country during a pandemic with them where you don't speak the language, don't have the resources you're accustomed to, and don't have anything familiar around you except what you brought in a suitcase small enough to take in the airplane cabin. Michel and I emerged from that calamity closer than ever, and on this side of the lockdown, we still want to be in each other's orbit. Being together was such a priority for us that we chose to live in a part of the world where it's possible, since he's French and I'm American, and neither of our native countries have anything even resembling reasonable immigration requirements.
Costa Rica, however, offers a solution. So now here we are, with the tame wild parrots and Jesus Christ lizards, and I am having a blast. I intend to write endlessly about this experience, covering topics from gardening and local plant life to animals both domesticated and in their native habitats, our transition to an off-grid lifestyle, our bus conversion to a tiny house on wheels, tourist attractions, food and local culture--basically anything that piques my interest--and yes, some short fiction here and there along the way.
I'll also be uploading videos to YouTube and posting photos on various social media platforms, so I hope readers will consider following, friending, subscribing, and anything else we can do to stay in touch. I'm not a professional at any of this, but if past circumstances are the best indicator of future circumstances, then life's going to be one jungle adventure after another for me and I don't want to keep it all to myself. Even better--if things go as Michel and I plan, we will soon be able to offer some very pleasant little cabinas on our farm in the mountains for people who want to visit us in Costa Rica. There you can meet the native sloths and birds and coatimundis and our cast of imported characters, the multitude of dogs and cats we brought from Morocco.
The world is changing, becoming a pressure cooker of politics and culture wars, and even the most anxious personality types may feel the need to disconnect from everything at some point and just get away. Because of my own backstory, I feel a special kinship with people who've never set foot outside the U.S., never ventured outside their comfort zone, and would really like to visit different places, but are afraid they'll be so disoriented and overwhelmed that any number of bad things might happen. It could be that this is one of the reasons I'm in Costa Rica--maybe I can pay forward some of the kindnesses shown to me that I've never been able to pay back. Who knows what the future will bring. For now I will hold fast to the new opportunities I've been given and see what develops. Stay tuned, because the updates are going to get interesting!
