It’s been a couple of weeks now since I announced my poetry collection Wildfire, which will be released on July 22. And it’s been a very eventful time at that: much like the way the jungle grows during wet season here. The land changes daily. Mushrooms sprout up endlessly on twigs, branches, logs. Even on my house…
I thought I’d say a few words about the morning that I made that announcement of Wildfire’s upcoming release: because, reflecting on, it, I was reminded of one of the big themes in the book. Wildfire is all about Nature’s wild, untamed, destructive potential, and learning to love that side of Nature. Because it’s all very well and good to claim we’re nature-lovers if we’re looking at the “best” bits – those that easily fit in with a manicured, proper, orderly and comfortable modern lifestyle.
Perhaps when I share more, it’ll make sense what I mean by that.
I’ll be honest with you: when I started drafting up this post a few days ago, I was feeling exhausted to the bone. I then (and now) still don’t have hot water, and it’s going on 3 months now (but should hopefully be fixed today…) I wrote all about that and other things in a post, you can find here. But the hot water issue is not really the root cause of my discomfort. The truth is that I’ve been in “expedition mode” as my mum put it, for about a year now. I went straight from a 6-week-tour in a van across Canada, into rainy season Costa Rica “tent-sitting” (in a friend’s canvas dome-house) for a few weeks. I’ll admit I had a 6 week break in lovely accommodation dog-sitting by the beach in September & October… but then it was back to living on our land on a construction site with minimal comforts. I try to appreciate all the steps of progress – big and small – but I’m no buddha and it’s hard sometimes not to get bogged down in the overwhelm, the aches and pains of a lot of manual labour, and just want a hot shower! I’m fed up of the rain. I’m fed up constantly cleaning jungle growth off the wood that we didn’t quite get treated in time before the rains set in. There’s more on my Substack about the insane rate of jungle mould takeover here…
Anyhow, back to the morning I made my announcement about Wildfire: just the night before, my computer screen developed coloured lines all over it to the point of being unusable. No amount of prayers that night got it working again for the morning. So I started fiddling around on my phone – eager to get my announcement out (and the timing was important for me, given my husband was starting his music tour of Canada, and I wanted to align our creative endeavours). Dealing with it all on a little phone screen whilst also being stressed about the drainage issue on my roadside (another topic I’ll come to), I later realised I didn’t select the best quality high resolution photos of my cover, and even made a typo in my post title (since amended, of course).
It’s the jungle that wreaks havoc with electronics. Premature deterioration of laptops and other devices is the price we pay for the beautiful wilderness of the Nature here.
The Nature that wreaks havoc on many things…
The other night, my pup and I were woken up at 1am by a giant crash on the roof (we have a loft bedroom). The mere noise itself sent shockwaves through my body: jolted awake, for a moment I wondered if a whole tree had descended on top of me. My pup was shaking – I’d never seen him so terrified. Thankfully, the roof had held up. A tree had not cleaved home in two: though it sure felt like that in those seconds when the resounding bang had permeated every part of my body. I remember breathing in relief, breathing deeply to calm myself, and taking a moment to give thanks for the fact I was alive.
The morning after, we took our usual 5am walk down the driveway. I checked our culverts – just a few days earlier I’d hired workers to clear out the stones that had come flooding down from the road, after the municipality had patched up the dirt road with more gravel. They were totally full again. My workers had warned me that my culverts were simply too small and not coping with the volume of water flooding down the road gutters… particularly now with all the loose gravel residue causing blockages after each downpour.
I needed to replace them with wider culverts: dig up the whole driveway to create a better drainage system, or risk erosion to my property’s internal road, and perhaps another slide. The neighbour’s road collapsed the other month. We had a landslide here a couple years ago. The rains are coming down, stronger and stronger: there’s not really time to lose…
Moral of the story is that here in the Costa Rican jungle, I learn how to love it all – even when I hate it – and embrace it all. Because it’s the price I pay to live how I live. I can’t be selective about it. Then again, I suppose I could: I could spend less time here. I could leave and totally ignore the challenging months, albeit the grass probably wouldn’t be greener (literally – nothing beats the verdant green of a tropical wet season). But anyhow, if I just left in those rough moments, what kind of a land steward would that make me?
Because the real learning for me happens in the discomfort. It’s when I’m walking barefoot after the storms, mud oozing between my toes. Feeling: how is the soil draining? Where is it muddiest, where is it drier and loose? Where do I need to plant for more reinforcement? What types of plants will do well?
It’s when I’m trembling at 1am in the morning with my arms around my pup: reminded of my mortality and the wild power of nature, humbled by her ferocity, that is loving all the same. Her voice whispers to me gently on the wind and intensely in the flowing torrent of our waterfall, where I go during the day to cleanse the racing thoughts from my mind.
I think this union of polarities is where the beauty of life lies. It’s where I learn to find a greater, all-encompassing love, beyond simply love for the pretty flower that blooms for the sun.
As I wrote the other day: right now “I feel like a burnt down forest, after the fire. The blazing drive behind all this creation [of my poetry collection, and building my home] is faded, beyond the last ember. I’m spent: physically, emotionally, mentally. Yet work never stops on a jungle homestead, there’s always more things that need pressing attention particularly in the season of torrential rains. Not to mention managing things solo as a woman now, finding greater strength in my femininity, wondering what that even means? And so though the fire has stopped raging, I feel myself like a Fireweed, bursting out of the ash, kicking and fighting for the light and pushed into further blooming by the at-times-violent cycle of life.”
As I said in the introduction here: a big part of Wildfire is exploring the non-pretty, the dirty, the intense, the fierce; exploring those facets of Nature, as well as our own, and the feminine. It’s easy to love Nature when we’re looking at a beautiful flower, passing through a breathtaking landscape and soaking up the peace and bliss she has to offer. It’s another thing to find that same love for nature when we’re caught in the fury of a natural disaster; when we witness the speed she eats away at our material possessions; and we’re deprived of modern comforts.
And so Wildfire, amongst many things, is an ode to Nature’s shadow sides — as well as our own. Examining what the dirt and the struggle teaches us about ourselves and our own relationships.
Exploring the mud, from which the lotus grows, or the ash from which the fireweed sprouts as I put it in the title of this piece.
It’s just a couple more weeks till I release this collection into the world, which I very much hope you will enjoy…
In the meantime, I hope you have a wonderful weekend,
Cara