the awakening (part 4 of 5): talkin' bout a revolution

don't you know 
they're talkin' bout a revolution 
it sounds like a whisper… 
don't you know 
they're talkin' about a revolution 
it sounds like a whisper… 

when Tracy Chapman first sang those words it was 1988, and very few people were in the mood for global revolution - especially in the West - despite the sprouting seeds of growing inequalities, environmental concerns and corporate interests coopting democracy. flash-forward 25 years and what then might have sounded like a whisper is now a world-wide chorus of screams we can’t possibly ignore. and they really are talkin’ bout a revolution now, even when it’s couched in friendlier language like ‘transition’ or ‘shift’ or ‘occupy’. we use those lighter words because when we hear ‘revolution’ we think guillotines and Jacobins in 1789 France or the decades-long Islamic Revolution in Afghanistan whose violent aftermath persists today. we hear revolution and we’re scared of what it might entail: will we have to die so that others might live in justice and freedom? what will the new system look like and how do we know it won’t be worse than the one we’ve got? god forbid, will we have to change the ways we live and exist in the world to accommodate more sustainable ways of living?

we forget that revolution need not be violent or even abrupt as it has been in the past; instead, we might conceive of our present revolution as a steady change now decades in the making, finally coming to the fore as global citizens unite against oppressive power imbalances, taking a stand versus corporations running politics to the detriment of people everywhere, and demanding a reversal of the destructive pillaging of the Earth on which all life depends. but the revolution we’re experiencing today isn’t just ‘against’ the powers that be with no direction on where we go from here, akin to a short-sighted protest lacking vision or purpose. no, our current revolution is both deconstructive of injustice and creative in innovation at the same time, offering tangible examples of what kind of world comes next while concomitantly destroying the old order through resistance movements and withdrawal of consent to oppression and exploitation. when we recognize our revolution for what it is – the dismantling of the old and the simultaneous creation of the new – it need not be terrifying, but rather inspiring that a fundamental change in power relations, socioeconomic structures and governing institutions is indeed on the horizon. and that our many interventions, be they minor or grandiose, are contributing to this change in ways we might not even recognize or understand.

we all have a unique role in supporting the change: fighters, writers, farmers, artists, activists, eco-socialists, community leaders, spiritual gurus, filmmakers, academics; young, old, rich, poor, North, South, East, West. we all have something to contribute; and more and more, these interventions are coming to be seen not just as choices we make in support of a sustainable and just future, but as moral obligations of the global countermovement to build new realities and to rise up against the system and its increasingly illegitimate institutions controlled by corporate interests:

the legitimacy of both states and international institutions is now contaminated by corruption, usurpation, and bias. it is therefore the obligation of the people – in this case the people of the world – to “alter or abolish them.” given such an obligation, there must also be a right to take the action necessary to fulfill it. further, institutional structures, practices, and purported laws that block or punish such action are inherently illegitimate and unconstitutional. they represent little more than lawless force and violence. these concepts legitimate a withdrawal of consent of the kind that… provides the underlying power of social movements.[i]

with governments unresponsive to citizen demands for socio-structural change, it’s less about rallying for piecemeal legislation within unworkable political frameworks and more about entire system transformations aligned with new-paradigm thinking and a complete overhaul of the global economic model at the heart of hegemonic oppression and exploitation; for in the words of Audre Lorde, “the Master’s tools will never dismantle the Master’s house”. in that sense, our revolution is disassembling the global capitalist system and its instruments of control by way of building new-paradigm approaches to social and economic relations and institutions based on collectivity, cooperation and shared solutions to common challenges. as we are seeing in the growing presence of social movements and protests in major cities around the world, global society is ready for change and our systems are ripe for revolution; now it’s just a matter of when and how.

in the circle I had a vision of a buffalo skull and it said: ‘now is the time to rise up; we can’t wait any longer.’  

these words linger in my ears and brain crevices now, months after they were spoken by a sister at the moon dance, finding deep resonance in the sense of urgency we’re experiencing in the seemingly imminent need for change NOW, not tomorrow or the next day but right this very instant. and it seems that more and more people are being called to the causes that irk their heartstrings and make their souls sing: climate change, poverty and famine, labor rights, sustainable development, social equality, economic and environmental justice. and while our motivations differ, our objectives are one and the same: a radical transformation in the current global order toward equality, justice and peace for all of humanity in harmony with nature. it might not be about a grand scale plan, since grassroots change and local solutions are proving powerful in driving global change from the bottom-up. but no matter how local the effort, the interconnected nature of our transition networks is strong through solidarity and shared ideals of the new paradigm. we know what we don’t want, and we’re now in the seemingly chaotic reorganization phase of defining what we do want, yet we’re still not all the way sure how we’re going to get there or what it’s going to look like when we do:

“never in history have there been prepared alternatives. when feudalism disappeared and capitalism arrived, no one announced that at 12 o’clock one would end and at 12:01 the other would begin” (El Diario Interview with Arcadi Oliveres, Professor of Applied Economics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and President of NGO Justicia y Pau (Justice and Peace), May 11, 2013; translation mine).

our new type of living social system has to evolve; it can’t be invented and assembled, but rather it will always be a surprise based on trial and error given the previously unknown capabilities of new systems.[ii] but we are clear on one thing, and that is that we can’t wait any longer. and while we might be scared of the unknown, we are even more scared of maintaining a status quo that condemns the lives of billions to subservience, oppression and marginal existence. doing nothing is no longer an option. for in doing nothing, in being content to live our day-to-day lives blind to the suffering of our brothers and sisters and our life-giving Mother Earth, we give consent by way of complacency to the injustice of elite power dominance over humanity and nature. and once we open our eyes to that reality, it is no longer a choice or an uncomfortable burden to our conscience, but a clear and irrefutable obligation to act. and to act now.

so what are we gonna do and how is this whole thing gonna go down? is violence our only option as dominant power interests hold tight to their reins in the face of resistance movements whose window for peaceful means of change grows increasingly narrow? many in the countermovement would say yes, that lacking traditional or democratic mechanisms for dismantling global capitalism without resorting to violence, we must meet force with force. i’m realistic enough to concede that at this stage in the game, they may unfortunately be right, and we may very well see the situation get worse before it gets better. however, i for one am hopefully (and practically) optimistic in aligning with a peaceful trajectory for nonviolent eco-socialist revolution. and it’s messy and uncomfortable and it forces us to be surreptitiously creative and outspoken when we’d otherwise cow to social pressure to conform because it’s easier. but we can, and we must, so we will.

withdrawing consent through civil resistance

“my life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?” ― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

since the durability of power relies on the consent of the governed, particularly in democratic regimes where government is supposedly a representation of the desires of the people, the most important component of revolution is the withdrawal of that consent as a process of delegitimizing power. while seemingly obvious, this crucial step is perhaps the most difficult to catalyze given modern capitalism’s far-reaching tentacles and subtle tools of social control, including media, pop culture and consumerism, whereby the internalization of capitalist values by the majority is the most powerful form of consent, and the hardest to overcome. as David Harvey explains, the constructed consent of the majority of people is what allows the injustice and exploitation of the capitalist system to persist, requiring “the construction of political consent across a sufficiently large spectrum of the population”, centered around what Gramsci calls ‘common sense’, or ‘the sense held in common’, which is itself “constructed out of long-standing practices of cultural socialization often rooted in regional or national traditions”.[iii] so while people everywhere are being fed images of glamorous modern lifestyles espousing the accumulation of wealth and materialism as social aspirations, the revolution seeks to undermine such practices by drawing awareness to the fallacy that these lifestyles are even attainable let alone desirable given finite natural resources and income’s diminishing returns to happiness as discussed in the previous posts of this series. the Occupy Movement has been perhaps the most successful in this process, using the simple imagery of the 1% versus the 99% to single-handedly turn capitalism on its head and into a four-letter word by drawing attention to structural inequalities inherent in the system. social movements can continue this important work of deconstructing consent by propagating similar images in mainstream culture through social media, magazine articles, blogs and documentaries to raise consciousness as to why a complete overhaul of the system is necessary.

as part of this strategy, transforming patterns of production and consumption are coming to define the countermovement, whereby economic localization and individuals’ voluntary withdrawal from consumer culture have become important means of resistance to corporate control of what and how we live, relate, produce and consume. by opting out of the global economy and saying ‘no’ to the modern consumer lifestyle by buying (minimally) and producing locally, creating non-capitalist mechanisms of exchange and barter, and swapping previously-owned goods for other previously-owned goods instead of buying new things, we are leading by example and weakening the influence of mass production and its mantra of ‘buy-buy-buy’ to support corporations and the economic growth mechanism fundamental to global capitalism. at the same time, opting out of the debt-cycle money system is another way of withdrawing consent by limiting the power of banks to enrich themselves and their executives at the expense of the working class, while simultaneously reversing the power relationship between people and moneylenders. this entails students saying no to repaying outstanding student debt, families opting against taking out a loan or mortgage to buy a house, and small-business entrepreneurs finding alternative means of financing outside the banking system. while these processes may be slow to catch on given the socially ingrained lifestyle practices of modernity and the internalization of the values behind the American Dream, they are specific and tangible steps with potentially powerful and wide-reaching implications when more and more people join in the fun.

similarly, nonviolent protest in the form of civil resistance has been increasingly powerful in the withdrawal of consent despite mainstream media’s minimal coverage of mass protests in cities around the world. disobeying illegitimate laws, showing up for protests at all levels, sitting or standing in silence as a form of resistance, and impeding construction efforts for environmentally destructive energy projects all fall under the category of nonviolent civil resistance, and their impact is broad yet subtle. undermining state power in stealthy ways is one method of saying ‘no’ to social control and injustice, and the more of us who are willing to risk the consequences, the greater our chances of making unjust laws a thing of the past.

i have been accused of political posturing and criticized as too radical by proposing things like abstention in US elections, but i write these things as a challenge to all of us to consider our role in perpetuating global injustice, violence and war by legitimizing otherwise illegitimate policies; we do this by exercising our supposed democratic right to vote and elect our leaders and policymakers, and taking it a step further, by funding the wars and economic practices we claim to oppose by continuing to pay taxes, fueling the machines of war and contributing to the loss of innocent lives to protect what we are told are our ‘national interests’. we are beginning to recognize that those national interests are in fact not ours but rather those of a teeny-tiny majority at odds with the needs and lives of billions around the world, yet we continue to offer our consent by doing things like voting and paying taxes. at what point do our leaders and representatives’ actions become illegitimate if we are the ones tacitly offering our consent in the democratic system of which we are a part? when it stops being about ‘we the people’ versus ‘them the leaders we elected but whose policies we don’t agree with’, we cannot ignore our role in this great big mess we call democracy – WE ARE THEM AND WE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR POLICIES because we legitimize them through continuing to play the game of democracy, thereby supporting murder, exploitation and environmental destruction in the process. the overt withdrawal of these forms of consent is what is ultimately required by us as individuals propelling the revolution as the means of delegitimizing our corporation-controlled governments. we may worry that our singular acts of resistance are futile against the overwhelming power of dominant interests and the state apparatuses of control, but with all of our individual actions taken together as a multitude of drops in the countermovement ocean, we are not alone, and we are powerful indeed. and there aren’t enough jail cells to house us all anyway. :)  

strengthening the global countermovement for peaceful revolution

…fear not, fellow revolutionaries: our time is now.

another, more positive reality, however, is that much of the global countermovement is not centered in the Global North, whose hesitance to disobey is slowing the revolutionary process. instead, many of the revolutionary epicenters are in the cities and communities of the Global South, where people are no longer waiting for change to come to them; on the contrary, resistance and socioeconomic alternatives are emerging organically and powerfully by the people of the South in the form of new social movements, political parties and local strategies to design communities and government institutions in the best interest of people and the planet, rendering mainstream systems of dominance and control increasingly irrelevant. Raj Patel writes of this phenomenon as the countermovement and contends that “the people leading such movements are the poor, the dispossessed, the marginalized, the people on whose shoulders the externalities of the rich often fall, the world’s least free people who are discovering that they are The Change They’ve Been Waiting For”^[iv].

Philip Smith and Manfred Max-Neef refer to this flow of people-power energy as “an unstoppable underground movement of civil society”:

what we have is two parallel worlds. one concerned with politics, competition, greed and power, which seems to have everything under its control; and another concerned with equity, well-being, respect for life and solidarity, which doesn’t control anything, but grows and expands as an unstoppable underground movement of civil society…. the latter, because of its dispersion, its diversity, its fierce independence and its chaotic structure, cannot be beheaded nor can it collapse…. the need for radical change of the dominant economic model underlies all the components of the movement”^[v] [italics mine].

this movement of civil society is making its presence felt in societies of both the Global North and South as a reaction to the harms of modern lifestyles of overconsumption and profit-seeking plundering and exploitation. citizens in the North have begun expressing their desires to escape the ills of modernity, to ‘un-develop’ for greater sustainability, sufficiency and a return to the ‘human home’: “accepting and living by sufficiency rather than excess offers a return to what is, culturally speaking, the human home: to the ancient order of family, community, good work, and good life; to a reverence for skill, creativity and creation…; to communities worth spending a lifetime in; and to local places pregnant with the memories of generations”^[vi].

as Fritjof Capra notes poignantly, it is this connection between civil society in the South and sympathetic Northerners with power that is finally tipping the scales in the direction of revolution, creating a global social movement promoting people-centered approaches and democratic, participatory political processes[vii]. we see these trends emerging in the annual World Social Forum, the International Forum on Globalization’s seminal report on “Alternatives to Economic Globalization”, ongoing meetings of the Group of 77 (G-77), now comprised of 132 developing countries united within the UN system to support collective economic interests and strengthen negotiating power, and most recently with 350.org’s Global Power Shift – all coming to define the revolutionary processes of ‘globalization from below’[viii] to counter increasingly discredited institutions like the United Nations, World Trade Organization, World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

the unity in solidarity we are seeing in these new movements is not merely a coincidental convergence of similar yet unrelated calls for individual and social change, but rather an early reflection of what Morris Berman calls ‘the waning of the modern ages’: “the dual process of the disintegration of capitalism and the concomitant emergence of an alternative socioeconomic formation”; what is to be “the central story of the rest of the century”^[ix]. as alternative socioeconomic formations continue taking shape, we move closer to satisfying Lindner’s requirements for the transition to a ‘dignity economy’, which:

requires a multi-thronged approach with two core moves…. it must be a hybrid bottom-up and top-down approach. a simple combination of bottom-up and top-down would not suffice, because we cannot wait for the majority of the world’s citizens to become Mandelas from the bottom up. we can also not wait for the politicians of our time to implement necessary changes from the top down.”^[x]

as the interests of social movements, civil society, grassroots community organizations, and select policymakers conjoin within the global countermovement, we find hope in envisioning a peaceful transition toward new alternatives to support the full realization of human potentialities, meaningful community livelihoods and relevant ways of living in harmony with nature – outside the confines of the global economic order and its international instruments of domination, exploitation and oppression. in building the new, the countermovement undermines the power of the old by making it both unnecessary and irrelevant.

while this post helps us get a clearer understanding of what the revolution looks and feels like on the individual, national and global levels, the following and final installment of this 5-part series will get into the meat of what comes after the revolution as a guide for where we’re headed next: post-capitalist alternatives and people ‘doing utopia’ in communities around the world.   

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[i] Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello, & Brendan Smith, Globalization from Below: The Power of Solidarity (Cambridge: South End Press, 2000): 45.

[ii] Graeme Taylor, Evolution’s Edge: The Coming Collapse and Transforming of Our World. (Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers, 2008).

[iii] David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005): 39.

[iv] Raj Patel, The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy (New York: Picador, 2009): 108.

[v] Philip B. Smith and Manfred Max-Neef, Economics Unmasked: From Power and Greed to Compassion and the Common Good (UK: Green Books, 2011): 173-174.

[vi] Alan Thein Durning, “Are We Happy Yet?” Ecopsychology (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1995): 76.

[vii] Fritjof Capra, The Hidden Connections: A Science for Sustainable Living. (New York: Anchor Books, 2002).

[viii] Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello, & Brendan Smith, Globalization from Below: The Power of Solidarity (Cambridge: South End Press, 2000).

[ix] Morris Berman, “The Waning of the Modern Ages,” Counterpunch (September 20, 2012).  www.counterpunch.org/2012/09/20/the-waning-of-the-modern-ages/

[x] Evelin Lindner, A Dignity Economy: Creating an Economy that Serves Human Dignity and Preserves Our Planet (Oregon: World Dignity University Press, 2011).

we, the purveyors of awesomeness

as he contemplated his footing high up on the rocks, curiosity alight in his focused eyes, i saw him at once as a little boy and as a grown man. and i couldn’t tell if i was looking at him as a young girl or as a woman, stretching my body backwards across a sun-warmed boulder, staring up at the sky between the leaves. i closed my eyes for a moment in sheer gratitude and felt the cool drops on my bare skin before the sound of his splash reached my ears. he came up grinning and i smiled back in acknowledgement before he climbed back up there to do it again.

we were three at the secluded swimming hole, venturing into the natural caves created by the river flowing between two solid cliffs, rock-walking and testing our strength against the current of the rushing waterfall. we were brothers and sister playing in the woods, or we were native hunter-gatherers from a forgotten past, celebrating the gifts of Mother Earth and cleansing ourselves in her waters, or maybe we three were forbidden lovers living out an exotic jungle fantasy - the stuff erotic dreams are made of. in those moments, when the seconds lost themselves in the flow of the falls, we were all of those things and all of those souls all rolled into one, all wrapped up in the same speck of space, the same tick in time. it’s a feeling you can’t express in words, a glimpse of the divine you might experience a few times a year if you’re lucky, maybe a few more if you surf, maybe all the time if you’re a wandering nomad. it’s you and it’s nature and that’s it. and it fills you up like nothing else possibly could. and in a few breaths it’s over: a tingling sensation, a fading memory.

“it was awesome…” we’d say, returning back to the group, showing them a few photos from our mini-adventure. they hadn’t experienced it with us this time, but they knew the feeling. i had seen it in their faces in the sea a few days before, instantly renewed after an exhausting hike, bobbing in the waves, ducking under the whitewater, feeling and being completely present to each other, to the water surrounding their bodies, to the breeze at their cheeks, to the sand at their feet.  i think this, more than any other part of the trip, is what brings me the most joy to observe. in those instants i stop being their teacher or their tour guide or their surf buddy. i embody something so wholly unique and wonderfully meaningful: i am the Purveyor of Awesomeness, offering a forum for evoking a sense of oneness and connection to both humankind and nature, getting to share the gifts of this magical land and her beautiful people with strangers i can now call friends. it’s this unwritten unspoken in the job description that i cherish and love the most. 

experiences  like these connect us so deeply to those we share them with that it becomes almost comical to think that we have only known each other for a few days, since the connection we now share has punctured deep beneath the surface into the spaces where our inner child resides, where our true self reigns and rejoices. we feel closer to one another than we might feel even to some of our oldest friends, roommates we’ve shared all our secrets with, perhaps even partners and certain family members whose roles have become so common in our lives that they seem almost superficial in many ways. the stale commonplace of our daily presence in each other’s lives has grown ordinary as we go through the motions of living near and with one another but rarely take the time to ask the messy questions with the long answers and seek out the transformative experiences that connect our souls. and it’s this loss of connection with those who once knew us best and those with whom we’ve shared the most time that makes it so intriguingly strange to feel ourselves so intimately bound to these new friends whose existence was all but irrelevant to us just days before. these new friendships, while perhaps quite temporary in time and space, indeed make us wonder:  maybe it’s not about how long we’ve shared, but about what we’ve shared that determines the depth of our relationships and their potential to help us learn and grow and become. by awakening us to our deepest and truest selves, these new friendships and the shared experiences they embody allow us to remember and renew who we are from the inside out in ways that old relationships and the patterns we’ve fallen into might not.

i contrast this reflection with the way i’ve lived my life in Costa Rica for the past few years, now that the newness has worn off and i’ve made the transition from tourist to resident. nowadays i can’t be bothered to go on the crocodile tour again with friends of friends visiting for the week or have dinner with a cute surfer from Venezuela i meet in the line-up on his last night in town. what would be the point of connecting with someone new only for them to disappear forever the very next day? i’ve become so resolved to placing meaning only in relationships with people whose permanence in my life seems somehow guaranteed that i’ve closed myself off to the potential of fleeting friendships with strangers - the same strangers, i’ve now realized, whose presence may be a divine gift of shared transformation and soul-level connection. now i’m in a panic of regret – have i missed out on half a decade of personal growth and endless depth of oneness with all beings by not engaging with tourists in all of their adventurous and transient glory?

and the most irrational part of all is that when i start feeling stuck or i notice life and relationships getting stale, my go-to solution is to take a trip somewhere, go off the map for a few days, become a tourist again myself, surf some new waves, strike up some unique conversation with some unfamiliar faces. i have to leave town to find fresh experiences to feed my soul. could it really be that everything i’m looking for when i take off to somewheresville is actually right there in front of me – in the smile of any and every tourist on the street?

and that’s just one side of it; it actually gets even more embarrassingly simple (or bafflingly common, depending on how we look at it). in all of my seeking outside, jumping from place to place to such an extreme that i have been able to see and visit so many different places and friends (experiences i still wouldn’t trade for all the tea in china), i have consequently and quite effectively prevented the need for deepening any friendships with the people i already know in the places i call home. i’ll give fifty cheek kisses at the local surf contest every Saturday afternoon, many to people i see all the time but whose names i don’t even know and whose life story i’ve definitely never dared to learn, yet i can count the number of close relationships i have in this town on one hand. so not only am i seeking depth and connection by travelling to faraway lands to engage with strangers when i have a plethora of said strangers in the form of tourists in my very own reality, i also shy away from the potential to connect on a deeper level with the people i have shared a common community and lifestyle with since i was 19 years old. what the hell is going on here?

is it that i assume i know everything there is to know about these people because we’ve lived on and surfed the same stretch of shoreline for the past 7 or 8 years? am i too lazy to make a new friend or too content in my teeny tiny bubble of everyday life that it doesn’t even cross my mind to invite someone new over for dinner or find out what makes someone tick? or are we too far past the point-of-no-return acquaintance-ship that we can’t entertain an updated version of our mostly comfortable distant relationship? or do we take what we’ve heard through the grapevine about each other at face value, making a quick judgment on who we choose to engage with and who we cast by the wayside without even getting to know one another? am i alone in asking myself these questions, or are we all thinking and doing the very same thing every time our neighbor comes home and we barely acknowledge each other’s presence? or when we can’t find anything good to say after the how-are-yous are exchanged, effectively signaling the end-all-be-all of our every conversation? why do we even go through the pleasantries?

is it perhaps that our lack of shared past prevents our deeper connection in the present, thereby limiting any possibility for true depth of friendship? or are we just too hesitant to even go there? or have our lives in tropical paradise grown so routinely mundane that we forget to create the experiences that will help deepen our relationships and renew our oneness with nature, self and others? is it not enough that we share this irreplaceably unique moment in time in such a small geographic space that we might wish to seek some semblance of closeness to those around us? why is it sometimes easier to develop a deep connection with someone you’ve never met than to deepen the connections with those you’ve known for years?  

why is it, that in seeking experiences of oneness, we often feel the need to leave our present reality in search of something new and different? when perhaps, if we look a little closer, try a little harder and open ourselves a little further, we might just find what we’re looking for in the people and places we constantly escape on our endless journey to finding our truest selves. and while complete strangers can quickly become friends through shared joys and tribulations, long-lasting depth in relationships takes a little more oomph and commitment, requiring us to renew and strengthen our existing friendships, maybe through inquisitive, thought-provoking conversations or shared experiences that challenge us to grow and evolve as people. if this type of deep connection is what many of us are seeking, how do we get there from here? can we find ways to connect with each other so that we might connect with ourselves a little more in the process? and at the same time, can we connect with ourselves enough that we are able to take those important first steps to finally reach out to those around us, fostering a shared sense of community as a result? and in that sense, can we all be the Purveyors of Awesomeness for ourselves and one another?

...i like to believe we can.

freedom in anonymity: ode to Palmares

"i've been around the world... TWICE..." i raised an eyebrow at my sort-of friend in the line-up on a small day at the tree, thinking to myself, "really, dude? you're gonna try to make that claim right now?" my silence didn't stop his bold statements, as he continued: "...and Palmares is the coolest thing i've ever seen..."  

while i highly doubted he'd actually been around the world ever, let alone twice, i was definitely intrigued, and i knew i had to verify his words by seeing it for myself. plus, i had lived in Costa Rica for seven years now and i figured attending the infamous fiestas at Palmares was nothing short of a rite of passage. i also had an adventurous new friend who lived up there and said his cousins had a tent party all set up and i could stay at his grandma's house if i made it there. and let's be real, i was still unemployed and desperate for new and exciting experiences, so technically there was absolutely no reason not to. it was all set, i'd make the 2 hour drive up to Palmares for the opening day of the fiestas, getting there in time to check out the tope, the most exciting part of any local celebration when tons of cowboy-clad drunk dudes on horses parade through town before the scene erupts into full-blown party mode: free-flowing beer, blaring cumbia and merengue, dirty street food, live music and rickety carnival rides.

it's Thursday morning and i'm raring to go. got my feather earring and badass new belly shirt complete with knee-length fringe, a screen-printed bandana-wearing smiley face, and the words "pura vida costa rica" written on it. if i was taking on Palmares, i was going HAM and doing this shit for real. i packed an overnight bag and stashed an adorable local surfer in the passenger seat to keep me company on the ride up. we were supposed to park at grandma's house but after driving in circles of traffic for an hour and asking random neighbors on the street for directions, it turns out grandma's house may or may not exist. we ditch the car in an overpriced lot and head toward the blaring music and screaming drunkards. it's 3pm and apparently we are more than fashionably late and completely sober. on a mission to find our friend's cousins' party tent, we wander ourselves through the maze of horse shit and inebriated half-naked teenagers drooling and grinding on eachother between rounds of vomiting in the street, what we might refer to in Costa Rica as the epitome of haciendo feo. we only have our senses and intuition to guide us, since cell phones are of course unreliable; there are dozens of thousands of people in a half-mile radius all making calls to try and find their own friends' party tents.

we wait for the policemen to part the endless river of horses dancing and prancing down the barricaded street, allowing us to shove our way to the other side. after what feels like forever, we miraculously run into a mutual friend who leads us to the party tent we've been looking for, an oasis of chill in a sea of sloppy chaos. thank god we finally made it; it's a freaking intense jungle of party people out there. our tent is a covered stage on stilts with a makeshift dj and a cooler full of pick-your-poison. i'm grateful that our more mellow surfy tunes somehow drown out the blaring reggaeton beats blasting the crowd from dozens of similar second-story tents on either side of the street overlooking the horse and human parade. it's sensory overload to say the least and i'm all but regretting my decision to be here.finding solace in our uncrowded party haven, i take a breath and look around. i barely know 3 people in this giant mess and have very few words to say to any of them at this point. there are no waves around, so we can't talk about that, and the music's too loud to talk anyway, so we just start awkwardly dancing in place, looking out to observe the scene we have for some reason chosen to make ourselves a part of. what on earth am i doing here? i'm a low-key yoga surfer chick who doesn't even really drink anymore and i'm definitely feeling way too old for any and all of this. what have i gotten myself into this time? contemplating making a smooth exit and running back to the car, driving the 2 hours back home and into the arms of someone who loves me, i somehow muster up the courage to commit to being there; maybe it wouldn't be so bad after all. it's just one day, i'm already here, i will survive.   

i grab a Pilsen from the cooler, my newfound 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em' mentality running through my veins at 5% alcohol. so i was in, doing the things that people do at Palmares, bouncing from tent party to tent party, dancing in circles with new friends and total strangers, screaming a few lyrics of bad songs here and there, wearing Captain Morgan pirate hats and mardi gras beads and drinking whatever they put in my hand and being like, so excited, to run into anyone i even sort of know as if they are my best friend ever, ditching out every hour or so to use the filthy port-o-potty out back, climbing up tall things cuz it seems like a good idea at the time, rocking broken ice-cream cone sunglasses i find on the floor, and just generally being content to play the fool and call it a good time. because that's what everyone's doing. because that's what you do at Palmares.

we take a break for churros and pizza, sitting on the shoddy grass near the trash can, watching people trip over themselves and projectile vomit behind the bumper cars. we make moves over to the imperial beer party tent now; a two-level monstrosity i'm dying to climb up or sneak into without paying the $25 cover charge. not because i can't afford it; just because it feels like an exciting challenge. i sneak in with no bracelet and disappear, knowing that the security guy won't go through the trouble of scouring the crowd just to find little old me, the girl who thinks she's too good to pay at the door. i look around now and realize that in my narrow escape and subsequent disappearance into the intoxicated masses, i had lost the friends i was with. i was completely alone in a two-story tent full of thousands of people i didn't know.

and i liked it.  

instead of turning around to search for my crew, i buried myself deeper into the crowd, hoping they wouldn't find me and i could just be there all by myself all night long, having a great time being lost and doing mostly nothing and feeling absolutely free. it's the same feeling you get in airports and big cities, the overwhelming freedom of anonymity, where no one around you knows you or even cares that you exist. where you can be nobody or anybody all at once. there's no past to who you are or where you come from or any expectation of who you should be. in those fleeting moments in space you are you through the eyes of you and you alone. and the possibilities are endless. and you have never felt more free. 

between rounds of live latin rock and drunken dance contest hilarity on the giant stage in front of me, i meet my partner in crime. he's ecstatic that i'm wearing the crazy shirt he almost bought in Jaco as a gift for his mom back home. he dances over to me and buys me a beer; he's the gentle giant type and either quite effeminate or just foreign, i never really figured it out. either way, he's completely benign and i feel comfortable enough to steal him from his friends and enroll him completely in my impromptu shenanigans. we do a lap around the place and make our way up to the second floor. i find some banister to dance on for a minute until the security guard taps my leg and tells me to get down, initiating the new game of how long can i dance on the banister until the security guard either a) kicks me out; or b) stops caring and looks the other way. eventually, i win and banister dancing lasts another fifteen minutes or so until i get bored. then my new friend teaches me our signature dance move for the night. it's a mixture of hold-on-to-the-railing booty pop and circular hip swivel, complete with nonchalant glance to the right, then check the time on the fake watch, topped off with sexy face and eyebrow raise to the left. the perfect combination of moves to start attracting a crowd keen on joining in the fun.

"i lost my friends!!" he screams at me about 30 minutes into our solo mission. "i know!" i say, reassuring him: "that's the best part!!". then we probably high five or fist-bump or something and get back to teaching strangers our signature move. my 'friends' find me a few times, expressing worry that we lost the rest of our makeshift crew, one of the girls stressing that she can't find her phone. i obviously can't be bothered with that kind of buzzkill, so i basically blow her off and get back to having the time of my life.

"we're having the best time of anyone here!!" Robin to my Batman is loving it and stopped caring that he lost his friends, too. "i know!! isn't it the best!!?" i respond with my arms up and some semblance of a "wooooooo" noise. at this point the security guards have realized we're too ridiculous to actually pose any real issue or fall off the banister or anything, so they've lightened up and are just laughing at the spectacle before them that is us - the tall chubby guy and the little gringa letting their hair down, soaking up Palmares in all of its glory, without a care in the world. we had found our own version of the sacred in the otherwise very profane. 

at some point, the music dies down and the ugly lights come on - the universal party signal for get the fuck out. our cheeks hurting from smiling and laughing too hard all night, we know this is goodbye. "uh, i need to go find my friends..." he says almost frantically. "shit, yeah, me too..." and with one sweaty hug and absolutely no pleasantries or talk of 'let's be friends on facebook', our fleetingly perfect relationship is over. 

...then, without warning, the loneliness creeps in as i desperately search the crowd for a familiar face. it's the subtle type of homesick and longing-for-connection loneliness when you feel suddenly and completely alone despite the thousands of people surrounding you, many of whom are just as lonely as you are. i feel invisible and yet totally vulnerable all at once.

i follow the stumbling herd down the stairs and out the doors, magically reuniting with my people as if the party gods have brought us back together through some cosmic serendipity. we celebrate our reunion. except of course for the guy whose grandma's house we're supposed to be crashing at, who remains m.i.a. for the next hour and counting. now that it's 2am and i'm past sober again (luckily i had stopped drinking hours ago and had been dance-sweating beer all night), we make the executive decision to go home. my curly haired, honey-skinned, surfer babe co-pilot snores next to me as i eventually get us home after making every possible wrong turn imaginable. the drive is strangely peaceful as i replay the events of the Palmares experience in my mind.    

i'm still buzzing with that unique sense of freedom i felt being lost in the crowd. yet, i'm also very aware that feeling that free is both temporary and context-specific, and that i may only experience it a number of times in my life. the sense of adventure of being totally on your own, no one expecting anything of you, and no pressure to be the person you've always been, you are free to be whoever you happen to be in that very moment, and you can do anything your imagination can create for you. and it feels really good. it's the lure of travelling solo to exotic places, surfing a new spot among total strangers, doing things you would never do if surrounded by the people you've always known in the places you've always been. it becomes almost an obsession, the need to feel that free. it's a unique high with an eerily predictable low: your fleeting freedom fades to a deep loneliness that tears at your heart, a loneliness you will exhaust all avenues to remedy. and you recognize that your freedom in pure solitude comes at a hefty price. and you are totally and overwhelmingly alone. 

"happiness is only real when shared". Into the Wild's prophetic message warns wanderlust travelers and roaming vagabonds of this same sentiment: losing yourself to find yourself ends with you alone and gasping for breath in the wilderness; a lonely soul dies in a dark sea of  regret that it has sacrificed a lifetime of shared happiness for those fleeting moments of absolute freedom. it's a thin line, that between free and lonely, and you only know it when you've felt both extremes - one has you soaring, and the other, clawing at the sand, crying.

but i think Palmares has me at a different conclusion: that it's only once you've experienced such an intense sense of freedom and its inevitably ensuing loneliness that you can truly appreciate the relationships and places that comprise the familiar happenstance of your everyday reality, the people and settings that have made you you. and it's not a choice of one or the other - escape to an eventually lonely freedom or resignation to a suffocating familiarity forever - but rather a constant dance between the two, finding our own personal balance by living each extreme every once in a while to wake us up to what really matters in our lives. while extreme freedom helps create space for personal evolution and renewal through liberation from societal or self-inflicted expectations as the means to be and express our ever-changing authentic selves, the loneliness reminds us of our need for connection to others as beings in this shared human experience. in the end, we might not have to choose all or nothing when it comes to freedom or familiarity; perhaps we just need to feel both to different degrees at different times in our lives to keep us sane. 

and for many of us, maybe all it takes is getting lost in the crowd once a year at the fiestas in Palmares.    

tia tarantula: words of wisdom from auntie taaaaa

and no, that's not a typo or a means to preserve my identity. taaaaa is what my two-going-on-three-year-old nephew calls me, the intonation dipping on the second and third aa's and then rising again at the end in a perfectly harmonious high-pitched melody. it's either that, or just plain 'T' when we're having more serious conversation. and now that we've been in eachother's lives for nearly three years, i've learned a thing or two that sisters everywhere need to know before embarking on this path of auntie bliss.

1. if you let a two year-old play in the car to his heart's content (the actual car with a working engine in the driveway, not the Fisher Price mobile that runs on tiny flinstone feet in the kitchen) as the method to prove your expert logic that once he overdoes it and the novelty wears off, he'll abandon it for a new activity in a few hours' time, you and your hypothesis will be wrong. and he will magically lodge a teeny piece of metal in the ignition. and you will miss story time at the library because you're waiting four hours for the locksmith to show up. and it will cost $300 to fix. and said two year-old will still want to play in the car. forever.

2. your electronics are the most sought-after 'toys' around, and you are putty in his hands when he steals your phone and you try to make him give it back and he says, "c'mon taaaa, justwannacallbuddies". you are powerless against such statements and you let him call buddies until he runs out of things to say to them.

3. raffi DVDs and goodnight moon are your secret weapons

4. bath-time goes much more smoothly when you get in the bath, too. and yes, that includes fingerpaints and rubber duckies, and usually some singing.

5a. resorting to reason in the midst of a tantrum will get you nowhere and you will end up tearing your hair out in frustration while he kicks and screams in timeout until he can barely breathe. that's what timeout is for - space for the emotional release of not getting to do exactly what you want to do at any given time. It rarely serves for 'sitting and thinking about what you've done' as we strange adult humans like to think. 

5b. emotion, not logic, drives two year-olds' decisions, and when they discover their own free will you are completely fucked. and the sooner you get that and learn to accept it, the happier we all shall be. 

6.  no means yes and don't means do. kind of like dating.

7. when he is silent for longer than 45 seconds, it means he's playing with kitchen knives, drinking clorox, putting his finger in the electrical outlet and painting the microwave with your nail polish, all at the same time. seriously, go find him right now.

8. if there is music, you are dancing. 

9. your baby (well, technically he's your sister's baby, which confuses people when you refer to him as your baby, but really, he's yours too and they obviously just don't get it) is your most favorite person on earth and you will squeeze him until he kicks you to let him down and you will always cry when you kiss him goodbye. it's even worse when you have to do it when he's in his car seat and he gives you a wave and says 'bye taaaaa' with the same nonchalance as when he leaves the room only to return with 'hi taaaa' 6 seconds later. while you're fighting tears walking to the bus, he's all calm and collected because he doesn't realize that the lag time between this 'bye taaaaa' and the next 'hi taaaaa' might very well be 6 months and counting. :( 

10. changing a poopy diaper is disgusting and there is no reason that you should ever have to do it. that's what mommy and daddy and grandma are for. 

11. waking up is the most exciting moment of the day so you better be on your shit.

12. polygamous marriages start making a whole lot more sense right about now.

13. if being an auntie makes you think you are ready for kids of your own, you are an idiot. kids are terrifyingly insane and the fact that you can babysit successfully for 2 hours (and by success i mean no one dies) does not mean you have the first clue about being a mom. that shit is impossible. if anything, embrace your blissful auntie-dom as the best form of birth control ever and drag it out as long as biologically possible. 

14. playgrounds and jumpy castles are your living nightmare - the number of things that can go wrong there are just so beyond your wildest imagination that even thinking of going there for an hour gives you chest pains. safer option: running around New England cemeteries. 

and there you have it friends, 14 lessons from wise old tia tarantula. may we continue learning from our babies and celebrating that our sisters get to be moms while we get to play all day and give the kiddos everything they want and then hand them back to their parents just before they throw a tantrum or shit their pants. 

...good night mush. 

coastal development & anthropology of surfing: university field course in Costa Rica

teamed up with Dr. Bro, expert environmental anthropologist-slash-formidably mustached lifelong surfer, we took on a crew of fifteen of UGA’s brightest minds, the kids they pay to stay in-state instead of going Ivy League, offering them the chance to explore Costa Rica’s Guanacaste coastline, learning to surf and studying the relationships between surfing, tourism and development in one of the world’s leading surf tourism destinations. the following are highlights from the course.

1. Marco, Jose and Choco keep it real

after pulling a few teeth, the guys at Choco’s Surf School finally agreed to sit with us on the beach and share about their experiences as surfers growing up in the now bustling tourist town of Samara. they told stories of having to hide their boards on the beach so dad wouldn’t take them away as punishment for not going to class; the days when it was nearly impossible to get a board so they’d take turns on the ones that gringos and family members had gifted them; and how they would never trade surfing for anything on earth. Marco and Jose agreed that Choco‘s classic surf style was the best, with all the kids in town trying to copy his moves – after all, now in his 40’s, he’s one of the original cats from the pioneering generation of Costa Rican surfing. and he kills it on longboard in the national surf circuit.

they reminisced about the old days before tourists starting showing up in Samara, expressing nostalgia for the past, yet acknowledging how tourism had provided them with a legitimate livelihood as the foremost surf school in town. their way of giving back to the community is through using profits to support local kids in surfing and helping keep the beach clean. and they agreed that the only way to protect Samara from ‘becoming another Tamarindo’ is for the community to be organized against foreign interests and the easily-bought municipal government. through his high-fashion mirrored sunglasses – so hot right now -- Marco shared a funny story about how the municipality had sold the soccer field in town to a foreign resort developer, but since his grandfather had gifted that piece of land to the community, they had to battle with the government to revoke the property title already given to the gringo. in the end, they were successful and the soccer field is still a soccer field, an important cultural landmark in Samara and local mainstay in any Costa Rican town.

gracias chicos, por vivir la pura vida y por compartirla con nosotros. nos vemos en mayo!  

2. turtle world wars

it’s no doubt off-putting when you first hear about a coastal community whose livelihood relies on its national monopoly over the legal distribution of Olive Ridley turtle eggs sold at farmers’ markets throughout Costa Rica. but after we visited the Asociacion de Desarrollo Integral de Ostional (ADIO), watched their informative documentary on a flat screen set up in the Community Director’s backyard (talk about field study!) and had a chance to ask a ton of clarifying questions (all the while drooling over the nonstop perfect barrels on the beach behind us), that creepy feeling about shady dealings in turtle eggs subsided as we gained a clear understanding of ADIO’s work in turtle conservation. for the past thirty years, they’ve teamed up with biologists to protect a 7km stretch of coastline from animal predators and illegal turtle egg poaching, utilizing 900 meters of those 7km for the collection of turtle eggs once every month over the course of three days. the entire community gets involved in the collection process, recognizing that conservation ensures their livelihood, creating a “symbiotic relationship between the turtles and the community,” as Gilbert Rojas explained to us on his back patio. “we help the turtles and the turtles help us.” lead biologist Rodrigo Morera assured us that the eggs extracted from the shoreline represent less than 1 per cent of the total eggs laid each year, and that this past year, nearly half-a-million adult female Olive Ridleys shored themselves to lay their eggs, the highest number recorded in the history of the arribada, the three-day period when the turtles take over the beach every month to lay eggs: an indisputable success story in turtle conservation.

while no one is getting rich from the sale of the turtle eggs, there are tangible benefits incentivizing community involvement and support for the project. each month, community members are entitled to their share of turtle eggs for household consumption, plus a small salary paid equally to everyone involved in the project – the Director receives the same number of eggs and the same pay as the egg collectors, and leftover funds support community projects and social services. With the profits from the sale of the eggs, Ostional now has a community center and functional medical clinic, and members receive health benefits, paid maternity leave and cash incentives for kids to stay in school. where the municipal government may still be unable to provide for the townspeople, ADIO has filled important gaps for social wellbeing: community-driven development in action.  

Despite criticism from other foreign and government-subsidized turtle conservation projects who hate on ADIO for profiting off turtle eggs, it’s clear that their initiatives are serving mutual benefit for both turtle and human, undoubtedly inspiring sustainable development practices across the globe, and it is indeed at least partially because of the profit motive that their conservation efforts have been so successful. And when haters like the foreign scientists at the Leatherback turtle reserve of the Parque Nacional Marino Las Baulas, whose nearly 25 year government-funded project to save the Leatherback turtles has been nothing short of a failure (read: current adult female leatherback population diminishing rapidly, down to below 20 total, despite – or potentially as a result of – conservation efforts), the proof is in the (egg?) pudding.

more haters in their midst: ADIO faces real threats outside the turtle nerd world, and we were shocked to learn that Gilbert and his wife narrowly escaped death last year when their house was burnt down in the middle of the night while they were sleeping inside. “they destroyed our transport vehicle, too,” he confided in me as we said goodbye. i asked him if he knew who it was; he raised his brow and looked up at me – of course he knew who it was. “the government?” i questioned, aware of local corruption by means of vigilante injustice. “yeah, in cahoots with the poachers. they’d rather we didn’t exist here.” speechless, i gave him a hug in solidarity, promising we’d be back in May to keep supporting the project.  

i waited to tell the students until we got back on the bus; we learned firsthand it’s not all pura vida when you’re dealing in turtles.

3. changing perspectives

one of the students, admittedly outside his comfort zone, shares with the group that the course and activities have expanded his horizons, provoking him to think about things he otherwise wouldn’t, particularly tourism and development’s impact on local communities and cultures. “i’m not one of those guys you can easily make feel guilty about something i didn’t do,” he said in slow southern. “i’m not gonna feel bad for the Holocaust just because i’m German, but i will admit that coming here and talking to people has changed the way i think about a few things, especially about our role as tourists in developing countries.” knowing that he is one of our most conservative students on the course, this was a sweetly satisfying victory indeed. because that’s all we want, really, and the foundation for why we do what we do: sharing realities to open horizons and potentially shift thought patterns and ways of being toward greater sustainability and social harmony. i’m sure i was grinning like an idiot.

another validating verbatim testimonial: “although i was vaguely aware of some of the issues we talked about, the trip brought them to the forefront of my mind. even though it was such a short trip, i feel like i have a much broader perspective on things--ecotourism, market economics, community activism, foreign vs. local ownership and investment, etc. i loved learning how to surf, and i definitely plan continuing to learn sometime in the future. what resonated most personally with me was when we talked to Javier in the dessert shop near Playa Negra. he talked about living a simpler life and being more fulfilled not in spite of but rather because of it. he was always smiling and seemed to just radiate positive energy. he looked so youthful and happy that i was genuinely shocked when he said he was about to turn 43. i'm glad i was sitting on that side of the table and was able to have a more in depth conversation with him, because it definitely made me rethink the way I live my life.”  he’s right, too, Javier is rad, and embodies so much of what the surfer lifestyle is all about – finding your happiness in nature and the simple things in life, being open to every adventure, and living your dreams one wave at a time.

4. challenging climate change solutions

“but what if i don’t want to compost or make biodiesel in my backyard or do all the things i’m supposed to do to save the planet? what if I’m just not willing to do that?” this honest question -- posed to professor, biodiesel guru and environmental news blogger, Ryan King, whose talk on Safari Surf School’s new biofuel project in Playa Guiones sparked controversy when it digressed into theories of global change science and the destruction of energy infrastructure as green anarchy’s valiant means of protest -- brought existing tensions to light as students reflected on their own roles in climate change and what they could possibly do about it. in a world preaching ‘be the change you wish you to see’, it takes courage to admit you’re not willing to act locally while thinking globally, reminding the environmental movement that it’s still quite an uphill battle, perhaps requiring adjustments in rhetoric and strategy to appeal to those who, quite frankly, might not be rolling up their sleeves and starting the next community garden. we hope they get on board, and they very well might, most likely out of necessity rather than inspired motivation to the save the world; but when these kinds of challenges emerge, we need compassion and real answers, not defensive quips that further alienate those questioning our solutions. how else will we move from preaching to the choir to actually achieving our critical mass?

(un)coincidentally, on the last day of the course, another student’s shirt had written on it in bold block letters: ‘if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem’. i smiled at the perfect irony and felt en eerie sense of closure as i watched those words bounce through the security checkpoint before disappearing into airport anonymity.

5. the full-circle fallout: embodying that which i despise

two days after the course, feeling pretty damn good about myself that i might have contributed to greater awareness among a group of in-the-know students, i awoke to find this message waiting for me in my facebook inbox:

“what a bad person you are! left my brother hanging! what it's really wrong with you Americans that can insult humble hard working people and simply walk away like nothing! don't you ever get near me! i am tired of dishonest people! be responsible!"

my (apparently now former) friend was referring to an incident where i had reserved 7 longboards from his brother in Avellanas only to have to cancel an hour beforehand when all of the students decided they were tired and didn’t want to surf. understandably, dude was pissed, and i had no clue how to play it. should i have paid him for the boards we didn’t use with money that wasn’t mine for a service that wasn’t rendered? maybe. instead, i apologized profusely and told him it was out of my hands, and that we still wanted to rent boards the next day and that it would be cool if he wanted to charge us extra for what he might have lost in income from the day before. he wasn’t having it, and wasn’t about to reserve boards again without a deposit for a flaky gringa who very well might cancel again at the last minute. i totally understood and told him i’d call the next day if we were going to rent boards. we ended up renting elsewhere to avoid the drama, especially since it was super windy and not that many of the students wanted to surf anyway. i invited him and the other surf instructors to join us for lunch, but got no response. it was probably received as a slap in the face, a pathetic consolation prize for being out the $160 bucks he’d been counting on.

i still don’t know if i did the right thing, but i can’t go back in time and change it, and it still bothers me thinking about it. especially the part about being grouped with ‘you Americans who insult humble hardworking people and simply walk away like nothing”. that part cuts like a knife, since i’ve really worked hard to never embody that image i so despise. in fact, i spent a lot of time in the course itself talking about ownership and how we as gringos have fucked a lot of things up here as tourists and ex-pat surfers trying to live the dream. so being perceived as one of ‘those Americans’ still makes me cringe in my bones, since i’ve always seen myself as one of the good guys trying hard to support local biz and find my niche within the existing community with as little negative impact as possible. but maybe that’s my own naively impossible dream and looking myself in the mirror through the hard words of someone i respect makes it all the more difficult to believe. is there no such thing as ‘a good gringo’? or is it just that so many gringos have given us a bad name that when we make a human mistake or a difficult judgment call in a sticky situation, we’re all grouped together and written off as ‘you Americans doing X thing wrong’? how do we live in the narrow confines of a box like that?

either way, tensions are no doubt rising in the tico-gringo dynamics of puravidalandia, and the surfer community is no exception.  i have a feeling it’s going to get hotter before it gets cool again, but in that scenario, i hope i can still be one of the good guys, even if i never succeed in wiping the gringa stamp off my forehead.