face=”Tahoma” size=”2″>     Hopefully, “absence makes the heart grow fonder”…as the saying goes. You see, I’ve just returned from two weeks in the Costa Rican rain forest and have been AWOL from my blog. But I’ m back with lots to share so let’s get to it.
    First of all, while I was deep in the rain forest, I was also staying at the beautiful and secluded home of friends so I don’t want to mislead you into thinking that I was cutting my way through the jungle with a machete and sleeping in a tent. Definitely not my style. However, it was two weeks of being in a meditative (not vegetative) state communing with some of the most remarkable and beautiful plant, animal and insect life I have ever encountered.
    It gives one pause for thought.
    At home, if we have a spider in our bathroom or an uninvited fly at our outdoor barbecue we tend to make much of it. But I spent two weeks in a beautiful, open-air home, with frogs in my shower and pesotes (wild pigs) walking past the outdoor dining area while I ate breakfast and never even flinched. Not to mention the troop of monkeys swinging past me on my walk or the hawk flying less than six feet over my head as I swam laps in the pool. (It was so close I saw it’s face!).  And then there were all those little flying insects that were forever going in and out of the house or the “sugar ants” that seemed to be on every counter top and which the local residents simply consider “another form of protein” should they wind up in your salad or on your toast. So why all the calm and acceptance around the abundance of strange and  plentiful wildlife?
    I think I was acutely aware that I was a guest in their natural environment, not the other way around. They seemed definitely unconcerned with me and much more involved in whatever constitutes survival for them. For them, I was a “live and let live” blip on their radar screen. So long as I was respectful of peaceful co-existence, so too were they.
    And I guess that was one of the lessons I brought home to share.
    For two weeks I saw no TV, heard no radio, had no access to world news. All of the fear and terror and corruption and killing that seem so much of our daily lives, thanks to various forms of media, were absent.  From that distance, and with that perspective, I looked around me at all the peace then looked back at the way we live and I knew for certain  that we are literally killing ourselves by failing to understand the connectedness of all things and the necessity, in fact the imperative, that to live in peace is the natural (not to mention sane) way to live.
    Of course having been home for a few days now, I can feel some of the peacefulness receding and the stress of my life slipping back. But truly, I am incapable of ever forgetting the feeling of living so close to nature with so few unnatural, artificial and human-made intrusions upon my life and I am the better for it, now and always.
    I hope just hearing about it gives you pause for thought.
    And while you’re pausing, take a deep breath and know that you have the power, in this moment, to change how you’re living your life by simply changing how you see yourself in relation to everyone and everything else.

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