Pura Vida, Costa Rica
by Rose
This summer, Ari, Oliver and I visited Costa Rica for the first time. We have been drawn to this country for a while. Many friends had told us about their wonderful experiences there, and we were also intrigued by a country that chooses not to have an army and to offer its people universal healthcare. We had also heard about Costa Rica’s deep commitment to the land and the incredible flora and fauna that inhabit it.
In my experience, it feels viscerally different to be in a country with universal healthcare. Such nations have a sense that we are healthiest when we look after each other and allow no one to be left to struggle by themselves when they are sick or injured. This allows the population to feel more supported and life to feel more workable for everyone.
Costa Rica was calling us!
We visited during the rainy season, so we packed our waterproofs and mosquito repellent, and set off for an adventure. From our first day, we felt so embraced by the spirit of Costa Rica. We had some extraordinary good luck on arriving at our first stop, a jungle lodge on the Caribbean coast (so far south we were almost in Panama). While recovering from our journey in the pool, I got chatting to a young boy from Europe who lived in an alternative community on the Rhine in the Netherlands. He told me that he and his parents had spent that day with members of the Bribri, a local indigenous tribe, being shown their traditions. This resonated with us as over the last few years we have been reading a lot about indigenous peoples and culture and making connections with elders in these communities.
Prior to coming to Costa Rica, we had heard that there are very few indigenous people left, so we were not expecting anything like this. After some phone calls, Ari managed to arrange for us to visit a group of the Bribri people with a local guide the next day.
Upon arrival at the Bribri village, we were introduced to Catato, the village chief. Catato is generous and knowledgeable, and also playful and brimming with joy and zest for life. He showed us around the village and introduced us to the medicinal plants that grow there while explaining how the Bribri used them. Around the structures of the village grow cocoa trees, turmeric, cinnamon, vanilla, rubber trees, and many other useful plants. They also have a frog pond where they help support the local populations of five different frogs that live in this area (many of which are poisonous).
Catato had previously worked in sea rescue and in a factory, but an injury at work made it impossible for him to continue in those jobs, so he decided to open up his village to visitors. While being warm and welcoming of outsiders, and sharing their customs and way of living on the earth, the community imports as few products from the outside world as possible. It makes for an extraordinary place—we felt we had entered a wholesome, healing, and earthy environment that was balancing some of our burn out from the speed of modern living.
The village has three main communal structures, all hand-built of wood and roofed with leaves: a social gathering hall; a shaman temple housing a firepit whose flame is never allowed to go out, representing the warm nourishing sun (while also protecting the roof from termites and molds); and the largest structure, which is for making cacao. We were invited to participate in roasting the beans, then grinding them on a rock and then through a metal grinder. Apparently, it takes many years, even decades, to become a proficient preparer of cacao for ceremony, but ours tasted and felt pretty good to us!
Chief Catato dressed Oliver in hunting gear, camouflage leaves and a stick, and showed us how to blow darts while demonstrating the different calls Bribri hunters make to attract different animals. The Bribri have strict rules about what you hunt, when, and how the bounty is divided within the community to maintain balance in the animal and human worlds. Then they cooked us lunch and made leaf bowls from which we ate together with our hosts while sitting in their kitchen.
It was an amazing experience. Of course, we didn’t get to know all the relational dynamics within the group. We know from all our time spent in India, Nepal, and Bhutan, that wherever there are human beings, there are also human problems. Yet, there was something so calming and powerful in reconnecting with how human beings have lived for so much of our time on this beloved planet. It is only very recently that we have all separated off into our individual boxed houses and nuclear families. Many of us feel some deep loneliness in the modern lifestyle, even if we live with others or in large cities. There is something in communal life that feels so nurturing and natural. Human beings simply hanging out with other human beings fulfilling our most basic needs; eating, sitting by a fire, making cacao, and connecting with one another.
We feel deeply grateful and honored to have this magical experience.
During the rest of our trip, we went on many wonderful guided walks in the jungle, including a night walk where we observed a scorpion on a tree trunk, a green poisonous viper camouflaged against green leaves, a beautiful Motmot bird of gold, green, and turquoise, and even a very itchy porcupine scratching away up in a tree.
In the first jungle lodge we stayed in, there was a perezosa (sloth) right by our hut with a baby, close enough for us to touch (though, of course, we did not). We rafted down a river through the jungle and saw an iguana, monkeys, turtles, river otters; we had a little swim then got back in the boat…and further down the river we saw a crocodile! We snorkeled in the ocean and Oliver saw a Nurse shark. We saw rather too many poisonous snakes for my liking, including two highly poisonous Fer-de-lance snakes, one of which kept being very close to pathways in the last place we stayed in. The day we arrived it was about 10 feet from the reception desk.
This last place we stayed in, on the Osa Peninsula, seemed to switch from us staying in the jungle to the jungle coming in and staying with us! Our hut was broken into daily by a local coati gang (in the racoon family) that left a very musky scent on all our belongings after being evicted. We began to feel ready to return to our own home. I was feeling that I would be glad to have all three of us safely in our house and none of us having been swept away by the quite dramatic and rip-tide prone seas we encountered or bitten by a poisonous snake.
It has been good to return home and we have wonderful memories of Costa Rica and look forward to seeing how our relationship with this beautiful land unfolds in the future. For me, it has really supported my intention and movement towards being simpler in the way I live and finding a space of being beyond conventional success and failure, striving and comparing. I feel I have become more grounded in my human roots, in my animal roots.
One thing we try to remember when we visit any area for a day or a month is to approach the land and her inhabitants with respect—to let the land know we are coming as friends. We try to walk lightly on the land and leave no mark upon her. We try to respect the animals as fully autonomous beings with their own lives, not as some form of entertainment for us. And, upon leaving the land, we thank the land, spirits, and animals and we often make offerings of prayers, milk, and honey. As with all of our work and life, we think of things in terms of relationship and being honorable within those relationships. As they say in Costa Rica, “Pura Vida”, meaning “pure life”—the phrase holds a sense of living simply, in harmony with the land and animals, with a sense of gratitude and joy. This beautifully encapsulates the spirit we aspire to take with us when we visit other lands, and when settled at home.
