Almost every day we order pumpkin soup. The soup is such a revelation, we go back for it again and again. Setting down the bowl, aromatic with cinnamon and nutmeg ground fresh from local plants, the young waitress asks the same question another waitress had asked the day before. "Por favor me pregunto, do you think it's expensive here in Costa Rica?" We give a shrugging answer. "Sometimes, but never as expensive as it is at home." She tells us she grew up in Manuel Antonio, but is now one of the many dark-skinned Costa Ricans who can't afford the rent in her own village. Business is good...people speaking English, French, and German are arriving in droves at the hipster restaurant, Café Milagro, hungry for arepas and thirsty for Imperiale. The Servers in black shorts and red t-shirts, the Served in various states of undress. Great Barrington in the jungle.
The tropics are a different state of mind, a different context. Animals and plants in myriad arrangements proliferate as you approach the equator. You can see the density and diversity, the abundance of life forms, when you walk in the rainforest. Packs of monkeys, iguanas and striped frogs, blue morphos and many other butterflies, vines entwining trees interlocking to create the canopy. You can see it in the variety of shells that wash up on the beach. Mother-of-pearl and tangerine and iridescent green. A guide at the reptile preserve where we visit caymans and crocodiles at a safe distance explains. At this latitude, the seasonal variations are not extreme. The temperature only changes a few degrees from month to month. The diurnal rhythms also barely vary, resulting in twelve hours of daylight and twelve hours of darkness in every twenty-four under a sun that breathtakingly disappears into the sea every evening at 5:45 like clockwork, as they say. People on vacation briefly detach from their mojitos to watch this spectacle and actually applaud the divine magic trick as if Someone were taking a curtain call. Life seems to flourish when there is enough light and heat to go around, when scarcity isn't the prevailing mindset, unless you're serving tacos or harvesting mangoes. Then, it can be a great effort, a contest, as it is the world over.
Here in Amerika, the struggle for survival - between classes of people, between people and the earth that nourishes them - has now been orchestrated to a crescendo. Everything has been brought to a boil, to mortal combat that comes from the mistaken notion that there isn't enough for everyone. This is a lie, of course. Just look at the fruit hanging from the trees, the fish teeming. It's the lie to end all lies. It keeps us locked inside our own virtual fall-out shelters, unwilling to open the doors of perception to other people, other cultures, other species. Our whole country sometimes feels like a giant kindergarten classroom where for some reason there aren't enough cookies to go around. Someone will be left in tears, empty-handed. No dialysis, no decent schooling, nowhere to go when you're old. The fear of scarcity and the anxiety about diversity travel together. The pressure they exert is stunning.
Why else would Spanish-speaking people be rounded up and herded into vans by ICE agents as if they were less than human? As if they were so profoundly other that their parenthood, their sisterhood had no value? Why else would small children sometimes come home from school to find that their mothers and fathers had been taken away? What's wrong with this picture? Everything. All ways of being that deny abundance promote the distorted notion that there isn't enough, that we are playing a zero-sum game where if you get something it means that I lose something. The rainforest tells a different story. Layers upon layers, generations upon generations of life interweave, giving birth and dying off, providing nourishment for each other, sustaining the whole. Embracing abundance is foundational. It's the first prayer of the day and the first lesson we need to learn if we are to live in gratitude and generosity.
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