Letters from sea: wild, violent, alive
Welcome to the jungle
My Letters From Sea series is for paid subscribers, where I share personal stories and thoughts from the ups and downs of my life living on a sailboat and traveling the world. I have opted to make this one a free and public post. If you enjoyed it, please consider subscribing.
I sit on the bow in the darkness, watching the glittering reflection of two distant worlds bounce off the water of ours, and meet my eye. The breeze rushes past my ears, taking all my thoughts with it, leaving me open to the orchestra of chirping and buzzing from the mountain right next to me, the mountains all around me, the protected wilderness that protects me, this bay that enfolds us. It’s dark: no moon, some clouds, no lights anywhere, save for the lightening bugs bouncing along the surface of the water, hovering over the vanishing bioluminescent tails from busy critters below — one world, again, meeting another.
My heart cracks open thinking of my work, my coaching work, and the utter privilege of being invited to sit on the sacred ground of someone else’s experience of their life, with them, being witness, a guide, a mirror. What an intimate, precious connection I have been gifted, with so many beautiful souls. Whatever the future holds, I vow to not forget this. In bed, a mysterious speck of something lands on my cheek, and I realize it must be raining — the drops find their way to my skin through the overhead hatch cracked skywards. I get up and close every window, lie back down, and get up and open all the windows ten minutes later when it has stopped.
In the morning, the sun paints the steep hillsides in damp, saturated greens, peppered with blooming branches of purple and white and orange. Parrots call to each other, frigate birds glide high along the thick air, hunting with an eye on the sea below.
I wonder how I got here. Where even is here? I take a moment to reorient myself with a brief autobiography that somehow feels distant and disconnected. We sailed our boat here from Seattle. I remember the word, the sound, meant to give this place a start and an end, a conceptual boundary, an idea with a name. Costa Rica. The wild jungle.
In the day, we keep an eye for jaguars and crocodiles on the beaches while we let the dogs run and cool ourselves in the ninety degree turquoise water. And every afternoon, the sky summons its most impressive power, a performance that begins with the sparse, cheery tufts of clouds transforming themselves into something wicked, building dark and high into the atmosphere to a menacing tower of elemental energy. Sometimes it makes this shift in an instant, a singular moment changing the mood of the entire earth. But often, the change happens slowly and dramatically, like it’s casting a spell, like it wants you to watch, like it wants you to pay attention, like it wants you to feel terror or awe or anything at all so long as you just feel something. It’s here.
All the clouds in the world arrive and assemble overhead to form the monstrous, moving maelstrom that was just there, now there, now here. Opaque walls of rain stampede across the bay and up high across the mountains, bringing a fresh rush of air that feels brand new, just made, and almost cool — a welcome reprieve from the constant, heavy heat.
As the storm makes its way to us, the thunder grows louder. Sailors worry a lot about being struck by lightening: we sit helplessly as our homes reach high into the charged sky with a metal mast, the sole feature in an otherwise featureless sea. The electromagnetic wave that pulses through a vessel, even if a strike should land somewhere nearby, can create a litany of problems and dangers, from frying all electrical on board (critical navigation and safety equipment), to fires, to blowing a hole through the hull that will sink it in an instant, to death. The next roar of thunder crashes over us, and I feel it shake the boat under my feet.
Left and right, electric flashes cleave the dusk, their sonic booms getting sharper and louder. The dogs shiver and pant nervously down below. A single, deafening crack is unleashed, piercing the air, the earth, the sea, viscerally moving through my body, rattling me, rattling us all, into a primal alertness. Every life in this rich ecosystem gasps, jumps, and cowers, becomes still, and watches as intently as the trees. We all pay attention.
I am captivated, entranced. I imagine that this is what the birth of the universe must have been like. A combusting, violent, primordial, unconfined exchange of electric energy. And I am in the middle of it. I don’t really know who or where I am but I know what a privilege it is to get to sit on the sacred ground of this earth and be a mirror, a witness to the cosmos, angry and beautiful. I watch it rage and evolve, and I feel wholly participant in every piece: the chaos, the power, the perfection, the drama, the chemistry, the dance.
And then, it’s over. How such a profound, furious display of energy can storm through my veins in one moment and dissolve into the atmosphere in the next, teaches me what I often like to forget. It has come and it has gone. Like everything does. How certain we are that the darkness moving in will last forever, that the rain will drown us, that the rattling will break us.
I thank the sky for its lessons in annicca, the Pali word for the fleeting, the ephemeral, the process, the ever-changing nature of it all — the sole reliable feature of this world, and yet the one we still somehow always overlook and resist — the word I have tattooed on my arm, a permanent reminder of my, of everything’s, ultimate impermanence. I remember that I am just a drop from the sky, life passing through me, through us all, in nothing but a short fall from a cloud to the ground on the cosmic scale. Here one moment, gone the next. I remember that this is it. Life is here, raining on me, chirping and barking to me from the jungle canopy, buzzing through the skies, swimming beneath me, thundering through me, breathing me.
The rain lightens and the clouds leak rays of rose gold across the mountains. A faint rainbow smiles at me from beyond the bay as a dense stillness settles in over the water. I share my fellow sailors’ healthy fear of these storms, but the truth is, I also cherish them. I can’t help but be struck by the sense that there is something deeply important here — this vulnerability, this ephemera, this invocation into the wild, this commanding of our attention, the fierce violence brandished to command it, and this colorful, soulful stillness offered in return. It feels like more than a lesson, more than a reminder, more than a storm. It feels like something is being revealed — a glimpse into something immaculate, something true. What an intimate, precious connection I have been gifted. Whatever the future holds, I vow to not forget it.
As darkness crawls across the mountains, the jungle again begins its nocturnal chorus. The lives of all of the insects and flora and reptiles and primates renewed, like mine, through the cleansing rains, through the powerful forces that just cracked us all open, through the mystery that was just made clear, through the ineffable truth we were all just shown, we all just felt, we all just were, together. As the hills sing to each other, to the sky, to the sea, to me, and their voices rise to a steady hum, I read the words from Raymond Carver,
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
My Letters From Sea series is for paid subscribers, where I share personal stories and thoughts from the ups and downs of my life living on a sailboat and traveling the world. I have opted to make this one a free and public post. If you enjoyed it, please consider subscribing: