Torch

“Covid19, coronavirus, health  threat,  public health emergency, pandemic, plague…”
These are the words that were used to describe this time in which we are living.

We , billions of us, live in quarantine just now. Here, in Costa Rica we will be “locked down” until April 30. My own suspicion is that date will be revised and extended.

My experience of this is somewhat different than that of almost every one I know. I say this because all my friends and loved ones live in cities.
I live in the mountains of Costa Rica. The green forested hills are my environment. The creeks and woods, the wildlife, the blue sky and the good soil are my quarantine. I have a house, I have spent the better part of my days indoors, though not exclusively. Because I am a farmer, my work is essential during this time and so I can be outside, doing what I love and growing food for myself and my neighbors. Currently there is no market, so what I grow is given to neighbors who can’t get to town because the buslines have been discontinued until government directive.
My experience of the quarantine then is no different than my usual day. My nights are essentially unchanged. But, then again, that is not entirely true.
Social distancing has made of social media a lifeline for many. My friends in New York City, in Miami, Amsterdam, London, Dhaka, Paris, Madrid, Zurich, Kansas City, Albuquerque, Lausanne, Posznan…my friends are caged. Mostly caution and fear keep them indoors, but the fear is not as bad as the uncertainty. How will this change everything that came before? How will we be once we become accustomed to not going to work? Not living with money as primary focus? How will we survive?

I feel deeply for all my fellow humans. Plagues are an unpleasant fact of civilization, but they do come to an end.
It is this ending, the after part, the unknown to come that scares my friends, my loved ones. I feel this.

My wife and I had long ago asked ourselves how we wanted to live. Having sufficient means  through savings, we were presented with an opportunity to fulfill a lifelong quest; to farm. To be, as Carla always said, “as close as we can be to the plough”.   Costa Rica became our chosen place to live.

Farming became our way of life. In the first years I kept a blog about it. I had grown up in cities and all this was new and needed to be recorded.Gardening was a dream, coffee growing a marvelous adventure. But as time went on, the special became the mundane and quotidian. We became farmers and we grew food and sold it and ate it and gave it away too. We got to see how this honest life of hard work and community was so fitting for humans. What you see most at a farmer’s market? Smiles.

Smiles, glad hearts, amity, hope and understanding. These are some of the qualities that define my community. For the farmers specifically, it is these qualities, that get us through hard times. Times of skinny cows, no money, not knowing what will happen next…and having all this to have to take care of.

It is unsettling to not know fromwhere your next meal will come, especially if you have family. I no longer have Carla by my side. She passed away from leukemia and the grief was nearly fatal. I had no idea where my next day would come from. How would I survive without the reliability of her companionship? Income? How to pay the remaining mortgage? How to find the desire to live, how to keep giving when I was empty, how to survive emotionally when all others had melted away into their own grief…quarantined by death.

I came to this pandemic  unprepared for how well prepared I was. The loss of life we face now as a species, the  deaths of so many of “our kind”, our loved ones, I have faced in recent times. The uncertainty we all face now, the questions I feared to ask and had to resolve. I am seasoned in these.
      So what do I have to say to us all? I say that it’ll be alright. No matter if we lose a loved one in this plague, even if we don’t have a job or guarantees of income, even if the nights are fearful and the days anxious and suffocating…this too shall pass. And since it will, we would be wise to use this moment dark and foreboding to ask ourselves what matters. In all this mess that life can become, we have time to see ourselves, to dress ourselves in garments we have not worn before but only imagined. We can live as we want, even if we have to do without all the stuff to which we have grown so sadly accustomed  and addicted. In this quarantine of bodies, there is the germination of something special. Never before in history has such an event as this taken place. An industrial economy , world financial system and authority of governments worldwide have been stopped. Dead stop. Death has come to make us think about life.
 If we are brave, if we are willing to eat less and have less and expect less of a materialist culture, if we are actually willing to be the agents of the change we wish to see, if we love this planet, if each of us dares to be intrepid, we can have the world we imagine.

Now is the time, take the challenge, change your world and help to change our world in the process. It is time to awaken to all that we can be. There will never be another opportunity like this . Ever.