Blogging and “The Accident of Touching”

Tags

Blog, Blogging, Jacque Lacan, online community, Online Writing, poetry, Shikibu Murasaki, touching and being touched, writing

“The accident of touching / is so rare! Sometimes / I pause my hand on purpose / and hope to find yours there.”

These are the last lines of a poem I wrote long ago.

But I realize now that’s what this blog is all about, a way of “pausing my hand on purpose,” and hoping to find you there.

It’s all about touching, isn’t it? Touching others with our lives, our insights and understanding, our memories and dreams, our poetry and art. Blogging meets this basic human need—to touch others and be touched in return.

We’ve all heard how physical touching is essential to human health and happiness. They say people can shrivel up and die for want of being touched or having someone to touch. A simple pat on the shoulder, a hug, a hand squeeze can make all the difference. Merely having a pet, they say, saves lives.

But there’s a basic human need for another kind of touching—from the inside out. Touching others with what means the most to us, our deepest responses to the world around us. Keeping those unspoken, unexpressed, can be as withering as being untouched physically. Which is why, perhaps, so many writers and artists will give their work away for free if need be, just to allow what’s inside out into the world where it can touch others, and “evoke responses.”

“The function of language is not to inform but to evoke . . . responses.”  – Jacques Lacan

It’s why, perhaps, art for art’s sake is a need for some. Art not to please others, but to evoke a response. To share something essential with others that must not go unspoken, unheard.

“Again and again something in one’s own life, or in the life around one, will seem so important that one cannot bear to let it pass into oblivion.

There must never come a time, the writer feels, when people do not know about this.”

Shikibu Murasaki, Tale of Genji (978 – 1014 AD)

Blogging is like those conversations we have in the wee hours of the morning, when the party is over and all have left except for those few lingering souls who find themselves opening up to each other in ways they could never do when meeting on the street or over dinner. Those 3 AM conversations, you know.

That’s how blogging often is done too, late at night when we can’t sleep, or after we’ve put our novel to bed, or when we wake early and are seeking the company of other early risers, or those living half-way round the world from us.

In person, we rarely have time to bare our souls this way in such depth without interruption. But here we can do it without disturbing anyone’s sleep or taking them away from their work or families.

We can share our thoughts and evoke responses in our own time, and others can respond in the same way, with a quick “like” or a longer comment. And we can respond in return.

For loners or social introverts like myself, it’s a way of reaching out to others that feels more comfortable than the spoken word. I feel I may be getting “the best” of them in those wee hour revelations, as they are getting the best I have to offer, a side of myself I seldom share apart from the written page.

It’s the reciprocity that I find so meaningful. Touching and being touched in return.

Here’s the rest of that poem I wrote so long ago, unshared, until today.

The Accident of Touching

Once, in some wild gesture,
Some random fancy
I found my hand stretched out,
Open and unprotected.
There, your hand paused,
Palm moist and heavy
Yet warm and lively.
Before I thought to clasp it
The moment passed and
You were gone.

Now, I watch hands
As they quickly dart and
Never cease to move.
The accident of touching
Is so rare! Sometimes
I pause my hand on purpose
And hope to find yours there.

by Deborah J. Brasket

More of my posts on blogging:

Blogging as Virtual Love-Making, and the Science Behind It

Is Blogging Orgasmic?  More on the Science of Sharing

More of my poetry:

The Geometry and Geography of Love

A Scattering of Rocks – Zen in the Garden of Eden

Hot Hills in Summer Heat

Walking Among Flowers

Birthing & Rebirthing, A Constant Becoming

Tags

Birth, Childbirth, children, creation, Evolution, Family, grandparents, inspiration, Live, Love, Mothers Day, parents, personal, rebirth, self-transformation

By Pablo Picasso

When my granddaughter was born my heart fell apart and I became a new thing.

We’re astounded again and again by the miracle of life, the birthing of a brand new being, although its occurrence  is older than eons, as common as pollen dust carried on butterfly wings, more numerous than grains of sand washed by countless waves, more prolific than the bursting of billions of stars.

Even so, there’s something so breathtakingly tender and heartbreakingly sweet in the newly born. Each tiny finger, each soft sigh, each rose petal ear, seems a miracle that melts us.

How did she, how do we, come to be? Is there ever an end to our becoming? Was there a beginning?

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting,” writes Wordsworth in “Intimations of Immortality. “Not in utter nakedness, / But trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home.”

This is but an echo of Shakespeare’s thought when he wrote “we are such stuff as dreams are made on: and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

When the morning stars first sang together, did we sing with them, as scripture implies?

Is our “little life” the whole round of creation, beginning with the birth of the cosmos, as so beautifully imagined in the film The Tree of Life?

Do bursting stars and the splitting of a single human egg each set into motion a whole panorama of evolving life?

All I know is that the whole world was changed with the birth of this child.  A whole new universe of possibilities opened up. Her birth forged bonds and relationships that will forever be a part of our becoming.

The birthing of a child is the rebirthing of man as a father, woman as mother, parents as grandparents. Another child becomes brother or sister, siblings become aunties and uncles.  A whole new set of relationships and shared histories evolves.

No one is quite the same as before. Nothing will ever be again as it was. The whole universe is slightly skewed to make room for this one child and infinite number of changing possibilities that occurs with her birth.

They say the stirring of a butterfly wing can set into motion a string of events that lead to the creation of a hurricane of the other side of the planet.  Surely the birth of a child must have an ever more stirring effect on the remaking of the world.

We live in a universe of relationships in which everything is connected to and influenced by its surroundings. We are all tumbling together in the wash of time and space, breaking against and polishing each other.  Shedding what we were in becoming what we will be.

What if all we are is a constant becoming with no end in sight, with endless sights and sounds and relationships and experiences to sculpt and renew us? Birthing and rebirthing each other, over and over, ad infinitum, in potentia.

It’s not hard to imagine. After all, I remember not at all my time in my mother’s womb. Huge potions of my childhood self are largely forgotten, sloughed off as I became something new.  The woman I was as a young lover, a new mother, I am no more.

The strands of my becoming are still unfolding, surprising me day by day, even as this newborn child breaks my heart and takes my breath away.

We hold each other in our gaze and see faraway in each other’s eyes our own evolving selves.

A brand new thing has burst upon the world in the birthing of my granddaughter, and nothing will be the same again.

But I cannot help believe that in some deep and unfathomable way she is not new at all. She has lain in wait in the womb of the universe, tucked away in the folds of time and space with the singing stars, quietly biding her time as the world evolved around her leading to the very moment when she emerged into our midst and recreated us anew, her very presence here a rebirthing of us all.

Parenting Advice from The Prophet

Tags

Advice, children, faith, inspiration, Kahlil Gibran, Parenting, personal, poetry, Prayer, spirituality, The Prophet, writing

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not from you.

I first read these words from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet when still in high school, a child myself, although I did not see myself that way. His words moved me then, even as they do now, so many years later, when I am raising a granddaughter.

Then I truly was “life” in its earliest stages “longing” for the life that was to be, that stretched out before me in what seemed an endless and exciting unknown potentiality.

I didn’t want to be hemmed in by the hopes and expectations of my parents, nor by their fears and warnings. I didn’t want to “learn from their mistakes,” as they cautioned me. I wanted to live my life as an adventure, learning from my own mistakes, not theirs. My life was my own and no one else’s. I wanted to risk all, moving at my own direction, and good or bad, I alone would take responsibility for the life I chose. Such were my longings then.

So I found Gibran’s  parenting advice immensely inspiring,  both for myself as I was moving beyond my parents into adulthood, and also for the kind of parent I wanted to be to my own children.

He goes on to say:

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Now, as the mother of a grown son and the guardian of his child, The Prophet’s words still move me . . . and admonish me.

How I wish now my son had heeded my warnings, and that they had been louder and clearer. How I  wish he had chosen paths more safe and sane, had lived up to all the potential I saw in him then and see still.

But those are my fears, my regrets, not his. I must loose him and let him go, and see the direction in which he flew as his own choice. It was never mine to make or change or regret. I had longed when young to make and learn from my  own mistakes, and so must he. But that learning is his alone to make or forsake in his own good time.

As for his child, my little granddaughter, she too is an arrow who will fly beyond my bending, beyond my ability to see or guide her life’s flight. Will my warnings to her be louder and clearer? No doubt. Will she heed them, or long to learn from her own mistakes, as I had, as her father must? We shall see.

She, as her father, is in the Archer’s hand. And I must trust, trust, trust that each will reach that mark upon the path of the infinite toward which the Archer aims with gladness. They are, after all, Life’s sweet longing for itself.

As am I.

First posted here five years ago.

Photos & Poetry to Celebrate Earth Day

Tags

Earth Day, Gerald Manley Hopkins, inspiration, Nature, photography, poetry, Theodore Roethke, Thomas Merton

From “The Shape of Fire” by Theodore Roethke

To have the whole air!—
The light, the full sun
Coming down on the flowerheads,
The tendrils turning slowly,
A slow snail-lifting, liquescent;
To be by the rose
Rising slowly out of its bed,
Still as a child in its first loneliness;
To see cyclamen veins become clearer in early sunlight,
And mist lifting out of the brown cat-tails;
To stare into the after-light, the glitter left on the lake’s surface,
When the sun has fallen behind a wooded island;
To follow the drops sliding from a lifted oar,
Held up, while the rower breathes, and the small boat drifts quietly shoreward;
To know that light falls and fills, often without our knowing,
As an opaque vase fills to the brim from a quick pouring,
Fills and trembles at the edge yet does not flow over,
Still holding and feeding the stem of the contained flower.

Pied Beauty
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

O Sweet Irrational Worship by Thomas Merton

Wind and a bobwhite
And the afternoon sun.

By ceasing to question the sun
I have become light,

Bird and wind.

My leaves sing.

I am earth, earth

All these lighted things
Grow from my heart.

A tall, spare pine
Stands like the initial of my first
Name when I had one.

When I had a spirit,
When I was on fire
When this valley was
Made out of fresh air
You spoke my name
In naming Your silence:
O sweet, irrational worship!

I am earth, earth

My heart’s love
Bursts with hay and flowers.
I am a lake of blue air
In which my own appointed place
Field and valley
Stand reflected.

I am earth, earth

Out of my grass heart
Rises the bobwhite.

Out of my nameless weeds
His foolish worship.

The Green Fuse that Drives the Flowers

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California, green fuse, inspiration, Nature, nature walk, oak trees, photography, spring flowers

The green fuse that Dylan Thomas wrote about in “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower” is what drove my walk on Easter morning through the green wonderland behind our home.

All the rain we’ve been having here in California after the long drought has stirred those life forces, painted the oak trees with mosses, covered them with the rich pollen-full blossoms, created rivers of tall grasses to wade through, stirred wild flowers into riotous bloom, created soft green beds for deer to dream in. Lush landscapes for my eye and feet to roam and know how blessed I am.

Travelers on a Cosmic Journey

Tags

cosmic, cosmic journey, inspiration, journey, life, life journey, poetry, spirituality, travel, travelers

By Odilon Redon

We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust,
swirling and dancing in the eddies and
whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal.
We have stopped for a moment to encounter
each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is
a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis
in eternity.

—By Paulo Coelho

Fortunately, some are born with spiritual
immune systems that sooner or later give
rejection to the illusory worldview grafted
upon them from birth through social
conditioning. They begin sensing that
something is amiss, and start looking
for answers. Inner knowledge and
anomalous outer experiences show
them a side of reality others are oblivious to,
and so begins the journey of awakening.
Each step of the journey is made by
following the heart instead of the crowd,
and by choosing knowledge over
veils of ignorance.

—By Henri Bergson

Evolution Entwined with Love

Tags

Brian Swimme, Cosmogenisis, death, emergence, Evolution, Immortality, inspiration, Love, Philosophy, Pierre Teilhard, Science, spirtiuality, universe

Paul Bates Photography

I like to think this all has meaning, this grand scope of things from the birth of stars to the greening of earth to the emergence of mankind to me. And even beyond me. To whatever lies beyond my passing or circles around me like a cocoon, just out of reach or past memory. What emerges next? I like to think there’s “more to us than time allows to be,” as I wrote in Epitaph for a Tombstone. That “exploring infinity” is not just a real option, but a certainty.

That’s why this quote about philosopher-scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin resonates with me.

For Teilhard, development through time is the primary revelation. It is the fundamental source of meaning in the universe. By development he means the cosmic and organic evolution as discovered by scientists, but he includes his conviction that the process of evolution is entwined with the process of love, an idea he attempts to capture in his neologism, ‘amorization.’

Teilhard’s thinking is that a complete annihilation at death cannot be the case because in order for humans to embrace the evolutionary challenges, they must have the sense that there is a way forward, that the future is open. If humans came to regard death as their end, they could still find value in caring for their families and others in need, certainly, but it would be nothing like what they would experience were they convinced their actions had eternal significance.

In his later years, Teilhard’s deep concern became the activation of energy. He saw nihilism not as a moral mistake but as a cosmological dead end. His primary objection to the notion that the universe is meaningless is that such a conviction enervates humanity.

There you have it. Teilhard’s faith in the universe’s development leads to his sense of immortality. Teilhard felt humanity as a whole will one day achieve a deep conviction of immortality and this will be on the order of a major evolutionary achievement, along the lines of aerobic respiration or photosynthesis. It will lead to a massive influx of energy into the human adventure.

from Cosmogenisis, An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe by Brian Swimme

I love the idea that the process of evolution is entwined with love. How could it not be? All this budding forth, all these repeating patterns, all this superabundance of being bursting out so gloriously, endlessly.

I like to think that I and everyone I know is part of it, and essential to it, and that what brought us into being here and now will carry us forth to there and then, as it has already done every nanosecond of our lives.

Immortality. Eternity. Such lush words fraught with so many religious and spiritual connotations, we rear away from them—they seem too rare and precious to utter beyond a whisper. Yet, lush they remain. They fit right in to what we see all around us—the lushness of the Earth, of the universe, of each one of us, our bodies teeming with countless atoms and so much energy we could set the world afire is only we knew how to tap into it.

What is more rare and precious and mysterious than a single human being?

I like to think that this “deep conviction of immortality” that Teilhard likens to “a major evolutionary achievement” is well on its way. And that I’m part of it.

Joy Not Shared, Dies Young

Tags

Anne Sexton, flowering plum tree, inspiration, Joy, Nature, photography, poetry, Welcome Morning

A lovely reminder from Anne Sexton to share our joys–the simple pleasures of life. So I’m sharing with you her poem and these photos I took yesterday of our flowering plum tree. Enjoy!

Welcome Morning

There is joy
in all:
in the hair I brush each morning,
in the Cannon towel, newly washed,
that I rub my body with each morning,
in the chapel of eggs I cook
each morning,
in the outcry from the kettle
that heats my coffee
each morning,
in the spoon and the chair
that cry “hello there, Anne”
each morning,
in the godhead of the table
that I set my silver, plate, cup upon
each morning.

All this is God,
right here in my pea-green house
each morning
and I mean,
though often forget,
to give thanks,
to faint down by the kitchen table
in a prayer of rejoicing
as the holy birds at the kitchen window
peck into their marriage of seeds.

So while I think of it,
let me paint a thank-you on my palm
for this God, this laughter of the morning,
lest it go unspoken.

The Joy that isn’t shared, I’ve heard,
dies young.

By Anne Sexton

Touching and Being Touched: The Rainforests of Costa Rica

Tags

Corcovado National Park, Costa Rica, Ficus trees, Nature, photography, rainforest, Sirena Ranger Station, spider monkeys, travel, wildlife

The presence of the world is precisely the presence of its flesh to my flesh.

–Maurice Merleau-Ponty, from The Visible and Invisible

This is precisely how I felt hiking through the rainforests of the Corcovado National Park in Costa Rica a few weeks ago. “The Lungs of the World” is what they call these forests, so vital to human life.

In one way I was just an intruder, a foreigner, a tourist, led by the gentle hand of our guide into an exotic world outside myself or anything I’d experienced before. In another way, it was like entering a vast green breathing world that embraced and pervaded me even as I embraced and pervaded it with my presence.

I was like a single thread weaving its way through this vast tapestry of trees, taking it in as it took me in. I walked beneath a broad canopy of leaves, trampling through layers of dank, damp leaves, and stepping carefully between gnarled roots that snaked up the trunks of trees. Weaving my way through this woven world and being enveloped by it at the same time: My lungs breathing in what its lungs released. My skin absorbing its moist breath. My scent mingling with its heady aroma: a wild herbal tea with hints of mint and moldy leaves, punctuated by sharp whiffs of piss from animals marking territory.

And all that awash in the sounds of the sea lapping its shores, and the ripples of rivers and streams that ran like veins through it, reflecting back images of itself.

I was entranced by the Ficus trees, these huge abstract sculptures, so elegantly shaped with their deeply fissured trunks and roots spreading like giant octopus arms. I loved to run my fingers over its rough texture splashed with paint. One giant Ficus root, like an elephant’s back, rose twice as high as me, so tall I could not see its top.

Often along the trail we would still, listening intently while gazing upward and around us for animal sightings. And sometimes we found them: Two ibis with their long thin beaks wading in a stream.

A toucan half-hidden among the palm fronds.

The slick backs of tapirs napping in shallow streams.

A thin green snake swallowing a fat toad.

And then there were the spider monkeys, so many swinging by their tails through the trees or quietly watching us with their big yellow-ringed eyes. As one such mama did so, her baby gleefully romped across her body as if it was a jungle-gym, recalling similar moments with my own youngsters so long ago, feeling that shared weight of motherhood. (I have the video but was unable to embed it here.)

I remember all this now as if a distant dream, the flesh of the rainforest impressing itself upon my flesh, touching me as I touched it. I remember too our indigenous guide Bolo, holding my hand as he helped me over some of the steeper trails and across rocky streams, pointing out different sights and setting up his telescope so I could see them better, cupping his mouth to imitate the sounds of birds and howler monkeys.

I remember how the heat and humidity weighed me down by the end of our hikes, how eager I was to reach the Sirena Ranger Station’s wide veranda, where we could sit and rest between hikes, and how the cooks piled our lunch plates so high with beans and rice and pork and plantains, I thought I’d never be able to eat it all. But I did.

I remember the rows of bunkbeds and their white mosquito nettings, so neat and tidy, and how I lay there in the dark, breathless nights listening to the sounds of the jungle.

Even as I left the rainforest for the sea and boat ride back to Drakes Bay, I still felt embedded in the world around me, still had the sense that I was its perceiving self, the part of the world that reflected back on itself.

This is true, even now as I recollect in tranquility those raw experiences, processing them and shaping them into images, into a language others will understand and draw upon to recreate their own images of similar experiences. Even now it all seems so rich and alive and vital, this shared experience of what it means to be human in a more-than-human world.

Costa Rica: A Gem Among a Trail of Tears

Tags

beauty, Central America, Costa Rica, democracy, Drakes Bay, ecotourism, Nature, Oso Peninsula, photography, travel

How did Costa Rica escape the fate of its neighbors?

How does this haven of democracy (devoid a standing army) survive, sounded as it is by the corrupt dictatorships, cruel cartels, and trails of emigrants fleeing the violence and exploitation of their native countries?

Why did the Spanish Conquistadors, European colonists, and US industrialists leave this piece of paradise in comparative peace?

Why are the massive ruins of ancient Mayan cities and temples not found here?

Why is Costa Rica the one country along this slender waist connecting two great continents that boasts a thriving tourist economy? Why is it considered one of the most biodiverse regions in the entire world?

None of the research I did before travelling here three weeks ago adequately answers these questions. But once I arrived I realized some mysteries could be savored without solving when basking in the beauty of the landscape and the generous hospitality of the gentle people who live here.

I travelled with my brother and sister-in-law, landing in the capital of San Jose and taking a small plane to Drakes Bay on the Osa Peninsula. The views from the plane of cloud-dappled mountaintops and turquoise-rimmed coastline were breathtaking.

Drakes Bay is a tiny remote village named for the famous captain who anchored here while provisioning for his voyages. The unpaved roads are rough and deeply rutted, the landscape a tangle of trees with occasional glimpses of the bay between, the air hot and heavy with humidity, wrapping everything in a warm, wet blanket.

The little house we rented had a stunning view of the bay, where we watched entranced as flocks of red-tailed Macaws flew over head and yellow parakeets bobbled among the branches of flowing bushes. As the hot night fell, music would flow from far below where people gathered for song and dance before the politicos took over, their ardent voices seeking votes. Elections were held the next day: democracy in action.

We spent three days exploring Drakes Bay and the surrounding countryside before wading through the waves to board a boat that would take us into the heart of this magnificent country, the Corcovado National Park. There we would spend the night at the Sirena Ranger Station and two days hiking through the rainforests. Our next adventure: to be continued.

Traveling Below the Border: Costa Rica, Ecotourism, and Politics

Tags

Central America, Costa Rica, democracy, immigration, Politics, tourism, travel, US foreign policy

Volcano Arenal, Costa Rica, by Arturo Sotillo

I’ll be traveling to Costa Rica tomorrow to spend two weeks exploring one of the most beautiful and biodiverse countries in the world. As well as the most stable democratic nation in Central America. I’ll also be doing research for a novel I’ve been writing about Central America in the turbulent 70s, when so many people were rising up to overthrow corrupt dictators propped up by the US.

What we see at the US southern border these days is so sad and disheartening. I fear it is the result of failed US foreign policy over the past two centuries in that part of the world, starting with the Monroe Doctrine in 1823. Originally the policy was meant to stop further European colonization in the region. But eventually it led to treating our southern neighbors as “our backyard” to wield our power and influence and enrich our corporate interests at the expense of the people living there. Again and again we intervened in internal politics, propping us corrupt dictators who would allow us to syphon off the natural wealth and resources of those countries. We used our military to protect those dictators, who treated their own people as vassals to feed their greed and ambition.

It’s no wonder the people who rose up to fight against these dictators saw Capitalism as a great evil, since it served only the interests of the wealthy; and saw Communism, that promised to serve all the people, as a beacon of hope. Unfortunately, it turned out that the Communism they thought would help them was just another way to serve a different elite, the Party Leaders, who syphoned off the wealth for themselves, just as the Capitalists and Dictators had done.

It’s no wonder that over the decades a culture of authoritarianism and strong-arm tactics would lead to the rise of Cartels, and lead to people fleeing for their lives to what is seen as the promised land of freedom and opportunity in the North.

I write about some of this in my novel This Sea Within. Set in the 70s, it’s about a young idealistic woman from California who travels to a fictional country in Central America and falls in love with the rebel leader with his dream of democracy as he fights to overthrow the corrupt regime.

I can’t help wondering what Latin America would be like today if our foreign policy back then was more like it is today–to nurture and defend democracies around the world. If instead of treating our neighboring countries as “our backyard”–a rich, undeveloped resource to exploit, we had treated them as true neighbors in the pioneering spirit, helping them to prosper and grow, I doubt we’d be seeing the flood of immigrants at our southern border seeking refuge and a better life.

Perhaps we deserve this. Perhaps we’re reaping what was sown. Hopefully our new foreign policy with its emphasis on protecting democracy and human rights will eventually help people in those regions find the kind of stability and safety they need to remain where they are and prosper.

Costa Rica is one of the few countries below our border that managed to create and sustain a democracy during all those troubling times. Today it’s one the most peaceful and politically stable nation in the region. Eco-tourism is the fastest growing segment of its economy. I like to think the dollars I spend there will contribute to keeping this democracy stable and prosperous, as well as provide funds for continued ecological conservation. I’ll be back in two weeks with tons of photos (I hope) to share with you of this beautiful, richly biodiverse, country.