I’m in this place. I am a “volunteer” in an organization not so much bent on trying to change the world (not even Obama can do that, apparently), but more focused on people changing themselves, so they – we – can go out into the world and “be the change,” as the saying goes.

I’m in this place, and subject to people who have reached a higher state of being than I. I’m in this place, and joining in the activities that young money and yogis live daily. I feel like I could be one day friends with these people, who I think occasionally miss my cynicism but call me cheeky anyway. I am friends with these people, who seem to know that the way to my heart is a thought-provoking film followed by Lebanese food and hookah and Farkle, which is a strange dice game played by people who like each other as human beings. I am in this place, and I want nothing more than to be in this place.

One of these people, whom I realized then was of the generation I always vibed with best – the 20-something crowd from the mid-nineties, who are pushing forty now and showing no signs of ever having hit thirty – said that now and then he has the thought that “wow, I live in Panama!”

Nevermind that 25,000 other US Americans can say that. Mind that I kind of want to be one of them. I’ve been in Boquete a week, under the guise of exploring Central America with Heather, with whom I’ve weaved life since last summer, lifetimes ago, but also living up to a promise I made myself in Zadar a year ago: travel with intent. Learn where you are, and learn why they are they way they are. Speak the language, wherever it is, and Be There. Be Here. I’m doing that. Absolutely intentionally.

Today I thought: I’m living. Here. Now. I am here, and I love what I’m doing. It feels like I’m high and I’ve come to a realization that no one’s ever figured out before. That I’ve never thought of, and that when I come down from this, I’ll realize it was a stupid and worthless thought, and it was just the drugs talking. Right.

But I’m not on drugs. And for a big change in my travels, I feel that maybe I can accomplish something for myself. That “wanting to be a better person” idea doesn’t have to be one of those bullshit thoughts which seems as revelatory as Jesus Christ frozen on a popsicle, sucking the life out of the party. Whatever. This feels right. And whatever the future is or becomes or wants to be, it can be, will be. But I’m not there now. I’m here, and happy for it.

Emergency, indeed – of the people! The flaws of modern civilization, in both the free world and the repressed, are under microscope and spotlight; their creators, propagators, and beneficiaries are being called out and are doing everything they can to keep a rapidly changing world the same as it never really was. To continue the ever-widening division between them and the people who unwittingly support them, to value still their wealth of cash which is subject to inflation but perhaps not to taxes – this cannot endure. Will not endure. 2011 was the first year of a struggle which will divide – has already divided – people from their governments, and governments from the principles on which they were established.

In the Arab world, last spring proved to the so-called leaders of nations that fear tactics and oppression are no longer affective ways to hold power. the United States’ law enforcement agencies’ violent reactions to the peaceful Occupy movement showed the world just how much integrity we hold for the Constitution and our Bill of rights, which people flock to be protected by, and point fingers at the first amendment while addressing a media so influenced and unfree that not only is it severely biased but flaunts bald-faced lies to an ignorant public it wishes to remain so.

It very well may be that every fifty years or so, some massive protest uprises from the people, and that such demonstrations are needed to tilt the wheel of power – to keep those wielding it from writing themselves into history as dignified and flawless leaders of a perfect world while manipulating that passive, ignorant public and crushing those courageous enough to call for truth (who are sometimes called dissenters, other times protestors, and later revolutionaries, patriots, and leaders), show their peers the reason for the semicentennial consistency.

However, when one generation demands change, and later, when they’ve fought their battles and won, integrates the characteristics of that protested, supposedly broken system they waned so badly to change into the society they themselves inherited, they are equal to the freedomfighters-turned-dictators willing, able, and happy to massacre those they vowed to free, protect, and enrich.

Why must their children wait until they grey in golden palaces to realize what they’ve done? Why have we waited through – waded through – ten years of war to stand up and say something, united? What fear had we before? How many illegal laws must the Senate pass on to an unfortunately ineffective president for the people to rise from their recliners to protect the rights they claim so fervently they enjoy? how can we support our armed forces who fight wars which do not protect our expensive freedoms but serve only those who can afford to buy them?

My generation fought the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. My friends and schoolmates signed up for the front lines because we were being sold the idea of patriotism and freedom. With fires in their conditioned minds, they made their marks on dotted lines without so much as a post-it note of truth of what they were really fighting for. some of them called me a coward for not doing the same.

And what have either of us accomplished, they, the fighters and puppets of political, cash wars, and I, the reluctant, invisibly supportive protestor, who has te same fear of being caged for something I believe in as well as for fighting for something I don’t? Nothing.

Therefore, there is only one answer to the unasked questions of those who govern the system we for some reason support – perhaps because we once superficially benefitted from it, or continue to have faith that a crashed economy will fix itself on the fundamental principles on which it was built, or maybe even on feel-good pep talks from Obama. Amongst those silent inquiries are Is This Working For You? and What Do You Want, If Not This?, answers to which we must come up with to initiate any lasting change.

It is not enough to state only what we do not want, for the health of a movement depends as much on the solution to the problem as the courage of the people to not run away when the police shows up to shut them down. People must demand action, and change, and be willing to not only stand in the streets with signs proclaiming the faults on society with cardboard signs, but also to create something new from the ashes of the system they are slowly but surely burning down.

Since the beginning of this year, my mind has been in a quiet recovery from all the writing and supposed ‘rest’ I had in San Jose before I left. I’m a blank slate for ideas, past the Missing and the Want for the familiar, for my friends, for ‘home,’ and for the Pull to Travel. I want to keep going, and will, but for now do so more because I said I wanted to so many months ago rather than because I want to now. I want to find something worth holding onto. Perhaps I already have, and can’t or won’t admit it yet. But the search is the journey, which is far more fun – even in this state of limbo – than enduring the Alaskan winter, a regular job, another semester of introverted silence and wondering what I’d be doing out here. Here, where I am. What am I waiting for?

If the apocalypse came, and we lost electricity and computers and facebook and all this unnecessary garbage, what would it be worth? Not much, obviously, but lifestyles and healthy diets and  daily workout routines exist because some of us have the luxury of having them. Some people drive Hummers to the grocery store. Why? For the same reason those two drunk guys in Las Vegas left one casino for the Excalibur. Why are we going to the Excalibur, he asked his more-drunk friend – because we fucking can.

And that’s not necessarily a good enough reason for me to do anything, granted, though I could argue it anyway. The reason the Occupy Wall Street movement exists because it has the right to, just like the U.S. media, who is only forward and direct and honest when it serves them, has the right to ignore them.

What am I saying? I’m in a half-sick haze and about to get on a bus for the Caribbean, without much of an idea where I’m going to sleep tonight. Bocas del Toro, where I’m headed, is too far to make it in one day – I’m tall, and long bus rides are mildly torturous for me – so I may stop on the way and chill on the beach for the night. What a hard life I have.

If only I was content with it, I could be at peace like normal people, and be able to live in the same little town all my life, get married and own a house and four dogs and a cat who only came back to eat and sleep with one leg hanging off the roof. I could go to work and on the way home have a beer with my friends from high school and bullshit about… well, whatever those people bullshit about. I wouldn’t have the need or desire to find revolutionary literature to occupy my time and mental energy with, and I wouldn’t read International Business textbooks to kill time. I could just be.

Even now, thousand of miles from wherever I chose to call home this week, I’m still looking, still writing, taking up challenges which could inject just the right amount of inner turmoil to make me smile when someone walks away, and practicing pieces for the stage that I imagine reading when I’m done with all of this, and have something to share from it.

They must think the gringo who talks to himself while he walks around Barrio Córdoba is crazy. And maybe he is. But he doesn’t care what you think; he just has occasional pangs of envy that you can stand behind your caged houses and still smile.

I’m looking forward to this. I really am.

I know what I’m still missing, or at least I have an idea. The boat ride up to Witch’s Rock in Santa Rosa told me some things I needed to know:

quit the expectation.
learn to communicate better, because otherwise you’ll never know what you’re agreeing to.
if you want to do something, fucking do it already.

and the seacave around the corner from the infamous Four Seasons where high class celebrities (whom here will go unnamed) pay boatmen two hundred dollar tips like yesterday, and did I really need to know that she’s here? I don’t care,.but I hope she’s having a good time, it told me some things, as I underscord the island with a poem to listen to its echoes and waves, it put me in the middle of the crashing waves, the ones which take the crabs away, wash them to somewhere, else, where the algae lives, where the Life is, where only the day before on another set of outcropped lavarocks I sat above, on the safe and secure and lifeless surface where no tide reached but in the first signs of spring, which is ambivalent and might not exist here.

Recently as yesterday, I was watching life below me happen, watching the struggle and the swell come in, and sometimes it seemed like forever before it went out again. Life under it could have been happening, or drowning. It didn’t matter which. I wasn’t in it. And yesterday, in a place I thought was somewhere else, I walked through that tunnel and found my untakencareof foot hurt yet again under the strong sun, and when I came out of it, at my tico brother’s  polite request, I’d rid myself of the frustration of not being able to understand people who spoke only to me.

on stage a couple of months ago, I read a piece to a crowd which contained people whom I’d hoped to graciously insult with one line:

some things don’t break when you throw rocks at them – like people who talk because they never learned how to listen.

Only under the heat of the spotlight and feeling the blood rushing to my face did I realize that I hadn’t written any of that about any of them. The crowd was quiet until I pointed to myself, humbled by my own comment. Then they made a noise which sounded like either agreement or empathy. It didn’t matter which.

I have some resolutions, I do. But I don’t measure life by years. Dates only help as they relate to others. however. I will learn how to listen. starting now.

–

I wanted to find a place and a culture that I knew nothing about and to learn about it. And I found this place, where people generally care for each other but fear those they don’t know, so they put up bars and security fences to keep those things at bay. In the street.

This place, like Alaska and everywhere else, depends on the climate to do what it always does. In Alaska, that dependency keeps people inside for most of the year, because of the cold. Everyone wants to be warm and comfortable.

In Costa Rica, the people depend on the climate to be more or less the same throughout the year, and want to be comfortable also, so being outside is just like being inside, and many houses’ construction reflect this. In many places in C.R., though, you can be outside, but still behind bars.

So much goes unsaid in this culture. Perhaps even more than what is said, which is saying a lot because the people here talk a lot. But it also speaks to the great amount of context, complexity, and respect in a culture where even the cokeheads and schizophrenics are listened to, instead of being written off as waste, or worse, ignored entirely.

The mountains, the sea, the sky – these things are important to me in every place that I visit, but can all be more or less compared with one another.People, on the other hand, and what they create, cannot be so easily. It is true, in my experience, that people are generally the same everywhere in that we want the same things – happiness, love, respect, a safe place to live, good food, etc., but we all have very different ways of obtaining them. This pursuit is what creates culture, and in that respect we are dependent on what we have – the environment; people, natural resources, etc. – to obtain these things we need, and then want. And of course because geography determines these resources, some have different levels of needing to meet these requirements.

Using the most obvious example, in the city, relatively few people have massive networks of trustworthy individuals, as opposed to in rural areas where everyone knows everyone else, and the area thrives not necessarily from a stranger-induced economy, but from its relationships.

In Alaska, it’s much the same. Many towns are isolated from one another. The road system, relative to the size of the state, is not very extensive. But somehow, people survive. Why? How?

One answer is that they laugh. That’s something your home and my home have in common. And coffee. Everyone drinks coffee.

Both of our homes are also very beautiful. Sometimes to the point where, in order to keep balance and order, we must ignore the beauty, or feel we must, because it takes so much energy to be in awe all the time. But when someone visits our home, and falls in love with what they see and hear and feel there, it sparks a new love in us for the place that we’re from, the place we call ‘home’, and perhaps that’s why the tourism industry makes everything seem better than it is – because the denizens see the wonder around them and want to emphasize what they themselves love about their home.

–

After the translation, mamatica, ever vying for the upper hand and last words in the conversation, told me that I’d told her nothing, essentially, and that she wanted to hear about the physical characteristics of Alaska, and how different they were from Costa Rica. I have a feeling that if we spoke the same language, she and I wouldn’t get along as well as we do. But that’s okay.

I’ve spoken less English in the last few days than in the past few months, when I was “immersed” in a study abroad program, in this family’s home, in San Jose. This is Playa del Coco – Coco Beach, Costa Rica – at peak tourist season, and I’m sort of in love with Guanacaste. Two days chillin’ on the beach, nursing blisters and other wounds, hearing from someone who was kind enough to rock my world that I cannot be scared anymore – not of myself, not of Cristo Rey, and who does she think she is to say what’s worth what when the apocalypse comes? I’ve got to get up to Guatemala and check with the Mayans about that business, quick.)

the sun glares off the palm leaves like reflections from rippled glass. the morning is humid and warm, the sky mercilessly blue. there’s just enough wind to keep the heat from overtaking the town. until noon. if there were an ideal weather for a relaxed family vacation at the beach, this would be it.

the 8 a.m. surf at Playa del Coco reminds me of mornings on Kodiak Island, when all there was in the day ahead was work and fish and good food. utter tranquility, albeit a more remote sort than one can find here – shopping baskets at the beach full of pipas for sale, policia kickin’ back at their sandfront office. half the town seems to be a beer and a half in, and it’s not even breakfast time yet. music blares from american-owned hostels and restaurants, and the 2 a.m. crowd still recovering from last night’s streetside foray, trash lines the streets like a well-decorated party. the internet is free, what as long as you buy a cup of the best coffee in the world for a buck. I don’t even like coffee, but to hell with you, Starbucks.

because my brain is still in dream mode, with the tour of the Kenai apartment in tow, I’m going to give you a few things from the notebook instead:

Traveling has historically been where I face my challenges: the things I don’t like or haven’t tried – showers, for example; when I was a kid I took baths until I was twelve or so, only showering when I had to. After a three week road trip, however, which was little more than a string of hotels and the blistering summer heat of the West, I never took a bath again. Same with mustard and New Mexico highway rest areas, milk at any place but home (I don’t know, it just tasted weird), the humidity in Costa Rica which I so despised those years I lived in Florida, and frequenting bars alone (as a patron instead of an employee) in Budapest. I like being outside of the comfort zone of my ‘home’, because bey9ond those walls I’m a stronger and more understanding person. Or so I’d like to think.

–

We had smoked and talked of buying more. Of course, my tico friend would have to do it because the price was always higher for gringos. Much higher. We walked toward the Caribbean knockoff spot where out favorite waitress Suiring (24 going on 17) worked, and short man with a strpired shirt and goatee offered the third person in my party a roach. He was quick to point out that it was marijuana, though the truth was that there was more paper than mota, and I could tell my friend was at least interested by7 the time the guy let me smell it. It was paper and ash, and I told him so.

Es basura, I said flatly.

He backed off immediately, and looked at me in submission. He had known perfectly well what he was trying to sell (for god knows what price; no one had inquired yet, and most of his efforts so far (in quick Spanish, of course) were in trying to convince us that what he was selling was in fact what he was selling), and he was called out, by me, who only calls people out when I have something to lose from the transaction.

I felt powerful and envied. It didn’t matter that no one else thought twice about it – my comment had settled the matter indefinitely, and even my friend chuckled a small I-knew-it-all-along laugh upon hearing what I’d said. The guy had disappeared in a quartersecond, and when we returned that way not five minutes later (the Caribbean spot was closed) he was gone, though I was thinking that if I was ever going to pay for what I said, that blatant insult to his nighttime dignity, to his very manhood, the sort you seek out your friends to reinstate, it would be then, when I was with at least one person who would fight for me, with me, and M would fight for his brother if not for me. But I carried my pridefear through the living streets of Playa del Coco, over the one paved road there was, through crowds of people whom I thought unfortunate for never having met me.

I wonder how much more arrogant or selfish or ignorant I could be than to think that instead of how unfortunate I was for not having the courage to go and meet them, to see what they had to offer, what their stories were, when mind is but on in a pile of US American travelstories that began, more or less, with dumping most everything I had and setting off into the wide world with everything I cared to own in my backpack and with pockets full of crumpled cash (usually the wrong sort for the country I was in) inside pants which hopefully didn’t smell terrible after three weeks of movement at a time. For all, we know nothing. I know nothing. Perhaps we’re both losing out, but think that before assuming anything. Take Amanda for example, and apply it: I passed her off with my first impression of her when she gave me an argument, a counterpoint, a snide remark to some unnecessary digging into the symbolism of one thing or another (“I don’t think it was that deep,” she’d said, annoyed and dismissive.)And look what happened.

You have reason to assume nothing, Sean. And proof that when you do anyway, you just haven’t seen enough.

I was too far ahead on the trail to Chirripo to head her, to fast to listen – but when I wasn’t, and when I did, I was happier than when I had my solitary way of quick pace and quietude. We spoke less when we walked, trading looks instead, to cherish forever – we knew we were writing our personal and together histories, because the night before, humiliating, prolific, learned from us things that we ourselves hadn’t known we were capable of discovering. True to her word, she swept her judgments aside to keep things the same with me, because we hadn’t finished evolving in that stage yet. But she didn’t get her way either; we just chose a different door to open.

And walk through, we did, twenty kilometers at a time, to the top of the nation at sunrise after the moonlit valley walk under the upside down Big Dipper, Polaris hiding under the mountainous horizon.

I was just following the stars. I didn’t want to be any less enduring without the need to reinvent light as reassurance, like the spotlightmoon is going to go out in the middle of the show.

We spoke of Middle Earth and Narnia and were reminded of the true definition of epic. Our journey was more than 20 kilometers to 3820 meters in the sky ‘ it was months, a semester of school where we learned more about ourselves than we ever did in the small and mercilessly hot classrooms for four hours at a time, sponging up Spanish like spilt beer.

Songs that reminded me of another time came up like virtual realities which sent me reeling or stumbling through the mess I was Before, and the choruses hit home like long night drives on icy highways in Alaska.

This is a new sort of Missing that I have for her. It feels good, like I did the right thing somehow , perhaps in meeting her, or in letting her go. It feels ‘healthy’ to some extent. But we will see each other again. There was truth enough in that tired conversation to glean, and eventually, hopefully soon, this longing will fade into a tolerant patience to pick up wherever we left off, ideas blazing from the east and headed west, at least until later in the day.

If we see the local reality for one moment in the time that we pass through a country, we are as lucky as he who drinks blood in Kenya as if it were the fruit of the earth, or who beds down on the couch of a kind stranger and his family in rural Ireland.

But we must remember these as gestures, and therefore as the result of culture as well as contributing to it. For culture is not merely what a group of people make of themselves, but also what others make of them. The differences which separate these groups, the space in which we communicate and stumble between the seams of our respective worlds, hoping that the correct answer will appear as suddenly as we found ourselves wanting a better grasp on what our counterparts are thinking, and when it doesn’t, learning from the confusion and asking what tradition is when it comes to informal futbol games, for example, on basketball courts on lazy sunday afternoons. They’ll tell you, just like you would tell them if they looked as bewildered as you.

A small part of me wants to detach from what I know here, and become a cityhopper again, the one who learned little but the names of the streets he was crossing, or the birth year of an old poet. There is an ethnocentric safety in that distance, like looking into a telescope and seeing a red dot, and being told that what I see is in fact the planet Mars, the closest it will be to Earth in so many years, or ever has been, and then stepping down from the telescope seat and going out with your friends for pizza.

Sometimes I really miss that pizza. But my curiosity endures it; I want to make sure that what I am seeing is Mars, and then go there, and breathe the air and shop in the markets and learn how to ask not just where is the bathroom, but also may I join you for a drink also, and finally discover the secret behind your accent, or find out what filmed formed you, if that’s how it goes here. Or was is a farm, or a ghetto, or a pompous beach town on the Pacific coast?

Right now, my tico brother Jorge is standing out on the second-story balcony and watching the sunset. He had to check with me about that word. The new Blink 182 album is blasting, from his bedroom where I type, out the always-open door and into the gasolinescented city, which is surrounded by small mountains just daunting enough to cool the air off as it makes its way from the seas. He does this every day, as soon as he gets home. I’ve lived with him for three months and have never known this.

We’re always learning new things.

Rainier pulled me out of my selfpity yesterday – he banged on my door with a bottle of beer, knocked the door open. what the fuck are you doing in here, he asks, in a snarling drawl unmistakably redneck. Of course I say these things with the utmost amount of affection and kindness, for I lived in western North Carolina for a day less than two years of education in life and other things not so glamourous. you see, the problem starts when we glamourize things and make them bigger than they are. then they get all out of proportion and distorted. addiction sets in. then it’s a desperate search for the unattainable, when before it was just a nice thing to have now and again. anyway. I digress.

He pulled me from the concrete cave that has been my pseudocell for nearly three months, and demanded I get a beer and sit down and talk to the people there whom I didn’t know, that no, I could not continue my letter writing or contemplate finishing the second chapter of Madame Bovary. It is estaba, not estuvo, he tells me sometimes, or corrects my pronunciation of some swear word I’d never use in English. And that’s saying quite a bit, because I like to swear almost as much as I like to talk.

wait. that doesn’t follow.
whatever. logic is flawed. this is Costa Rica. todos son pura vida aqui. it’s time to start traveling. like i keep saying. but I’m halfway done and where have I gone, what have I done? I have three notebooks, a novel and a blog to speak my words for me, while I do myself while walking through safer neighborhoods and towns up in the mountains. time to find the next thing. keep going. leave, too.

I thought I had a lot to write. Like I said, I’ve been doing a lot of that lately. But I think that I’m just going to live for a little while, and see what happens next.