A brief respite in the jungle

Being human in this beautiful, mad world.

My second night in the jungle in Quintana Roo, I woke up with the sensation of my hair coming alive at the roots. Uncertain whether or not I was dreaming, I tentatively placed my fingers at my hairline, pressing my nails into my scalp. Disturbed by my movements, the ants that had found their way into my room and onto my body began to scatter, moving quickly up my hands and onto my face. That’s when I felt the first bites.

I jumped out of bed and switched on the overhead light. I was in fact, covered in ants—it was not a dream—and the majority of them were in my hair. I made a split-second decision to get in the shower. Breathing slowly and attempting not to move too quickly, I positioned myself under the flow of water, using a comb to carefully extract them from my hair.

As I worked, their little bodies littered the bathroom floor alongside the leaves and small pieces of bark they’d been carrying through my room. They continued to bite as I washed them free —their final attempts to survive the flood

Satisfied that I’d removed as many as I could, I toweled off and returned to my bed to get a better look at the situation. An ant superhighway was snaking from one side of my room, over my pillow and out the other side of the room. I’d disturbed a migration of these hardworking insects, the contours of my sleeping body minor bumps in the road before I awoke and changed their course.

It was clear that I wouldn’t be sleeping in my bed that night, so I gathered up my pillow and a small blanket and decamped for a place to rest until the sun rose. I found a spot in the main gathering area of the retreat center and waited for the return of the light and the sounds of singing and breakfast being prepared.

This is the first thing I made since I got back. Mixed media (flashe & goldleaf) on paper.

During the winter of the year 2000, I spent three months backpacking through the broadleaf rainforests of Belize and Guatemala on an ornithology field study.

I had no particular interest in birding but the opportunity knocked out a handful of general ed requirements I’d put off and needed to fulfill before I graduated from college the next quarter. My primary interest was exploring Central America and getting as far away as possible from the daily surveillance of my increasingly hostile ex.

I arrived solo in Belize City with a much-too heavy backpack and a pair of binoculars that were promptly stolen on a crowded city bus. By the time I’d made it to our group’s first rendezvous point, I was delirious with fever and missing the one item I needed the most. I crawled into my tent for the next three days, gratefully accepting the soup and lemongrass tea left for me at my door flap, and emerging only after I’d decided I’d both died and been resurrected in paradise.

The next three months turned out to be a time of intense physical exertion, profound emotional reckoning, and a burgeoning love affair with the people and land of the Maya Forest Corridor.

We spelunked into limestone caves, lived on a tiny uninhabited Caribbean island, hiked through the Maya mountains, explored pristine rivers surrounded by clouds of blue morpho butterflies, hitchhiked rides in the backs of trucks, swam with manatees in mangrove forests, learned how to process cacao and bird-watched. Or, at least everyone else did. I mostly just waited to be handed a pair of binoculars after everyone had seen what they needed to see and the birds had flown away.

For more than a week we lived in tents on the outer ring of the ancient Mayan city of Tikal. Each morning we woke before the sunrise, and climbed to the top of the temples and sat in stunned reverence as the sun made its ascent. From the top of these astonishing stone structures it was possible to see trails of leaf-cutter ants spreading across the landscape. My journal from this time is a testament to my fascination with them. I drew pictures and mused about their group consciousness. I was into them.

By the end of the journey my body was covered in mosquito bites, sand fly bites, and chigger bites. I stank. My hair resisted all attempts at taming, and my clothes hung awkwardly on my body—misshapen from the humidity and repeated wear. During our stay at the cacao farm I’d emptied my pack of the majority of my belongings and filled it to the brim with the cacao balls I’d processed. I had barely enough clothes to get by and I didn’t care at all. My priorities were intact.

I was 21 years old and beginning to understand myself. I’d finally pulled myself free from an abusive entanglement. I was wild and raw and completely settled into my own skin. I could look at myself in the mirror and see someone beautiful, despite my ragged appearance. I was happy under the spell of connection and the magic of that place.

In the final weeks before I returned home I traveled to Lake Atitlán in Guatemala with some of the people from my group. I spent my days swimming in the lake and communing with the spirits that live in its waters. A few days before I returned home, half-drunk at a bar at the mouth of the Rio Dulce on Lago Izabal, I met a man, about 10 years too old for me, who told me about the trip he was making around the world on his sailboat. We talked late into the night. The next day he offered me a spot on the boat. We didn’t have the same taste in music and it would have been insane to say yes, so I turned him down. But the idea of that choice never quite subsided. I marveled: Life could just be like that sometimes.

Tikal, 2000

Twenty five years later—to the month—I was back in that state of amazement.

After a few hours of rest and no sleep, I gathered up my pillow and blanket and walked back to the “cono,” the single room shaped like a cone, that I’d ceded to the ants. The only trace of their nighttime presence was the organic matter they’d abandoned, scattered across the floor and bed.

All day during my classes, I thought about the experience of waking with the ants all over my face and hair. I realized that my willingness to stay calm, to move slowly with intention and minimal fear, got me out of the situation with as few bites as possible. Over the next few hours I wrote down a series of notes to myself in my journal:

Lay low.

Stay calm.

Keep your wits about you.

Make informed decisions and act with intention and focused attention.

An ecologist would probably explain this occurrence as part of the natural process of a forest: the ants were migrating and I was in their path. But because I was in a group of people familiar with Mayan cosmology and with ancestral roots to this place, I asked around. Why the hell not?

My friend Andres didn’t hesitate to tell me they thought the ants’ visit was the work of a bruja. They shared that when North Americans come to this sacred land we must first shed the darkness that we bring. My teacher Ramiro told me that in Mayan cosmology the ants communicate with God. And my teacher Lila told me to ask the plants.

So I did. And the plants reminded me that I was a return visitor to this place, and that it was time to slow down and start looking closer. That afternoon I found a scorpion under a cushion, and the next day I observed a pair of coatis playing in some low- hanging branches. During my classes I watched mot mot birds swooping and calling in the trees, and the second time the ants showed up in my room (yup, it happened again) I encountered a capybara on the walking path before dawn. When I focused my attention where it mattered, I could so obviously see that the place was teeming with life.

It always is.

Here I am. Home. A vision in a winter coat and pink formica.

I flew back from Mexico the night of the inauguration. My NY Times app wouldn’t load on my phone so I took that as a sign. I slid into bed well past 1 a.m. on the 21st and woke up the next morning exhausted. My phone, which I’d put away for the two weeks I was in school in the jungle, buzzed over and over again with text alerts.

The spell was broken and I was home. Cleo crawled into bed with me; Andy made coffee. I looked outside at the gray January morning and I understood the gravity of the 25 years of life in between me and that feeling of infinite possibility. There’s never been another offer of a trip around the world on a sailboat, but I’ve spent the last three years tacking into the wind, slowly changing course.

I don’t feel beautiful in the same way that I did when I was 21. But I know that what I’ve got going is something deeper and darker and vibrating with creative force. This croning-out comes at the only moment it could.

The possibility of listening to the spirits of the lake is offering itself once again. And, thankfully, the ants have done good work with me.

Being a human in this world will not be getting any easier. We will all have to do what we need to do to build personal and communal resilience, and our capacity for compassion and open heartedness. And, we’ll have to do it in direct confrontation with the chaos, darkness, fear, and pain. There will be no looking away or running from what we all face. But we can do it together. We can imagine into being what comes next, not simply react.

In the meantime, the prophetic Leonard Cohen sang it best. It seems like every time I listen to this song on a walk, a murder of hundreds of crows flies overhead. That’s not nothing.

Until next time, dear readers.

xoxo,

Belle

A few links and random asides:

Here is a playlist I’ve been making for the workshops I’ve been leading. The first song on the playlist is the last song during the credits of Wim Wender’s film Perfect Days which may in fact be a perfect movie. The playlist is all instrumentals (with a few small exceptions), so the bangers are more of a “make you have big existential feels” variety. Safe for children and adults of all ages.

My beloved friends Evan and Caitlin (and their children Edie and John) lost their beautiful home and gardens in the Eaton Fire. Evan grew up in Altadena, and they all have deep ties to the community and their neighbors. If you are able, please consider donating to their Go Fund Me or to the Go Fund Me’s for their neighbors who could use any financial support you might be able to give.

I made a website. Caveat: I am neither a digital artist nor am I a web designer. Apparently this didn’t stop me from thinking I could—without any skills or training—be both. I had an aesthetic vision of a website that looked like a precious and useless book from the 1930s. It took me many months of failure to realize that my vision did not match my ability, so I gave up on it halfway through and just finished the damn thing. So now I have a website that is mostly ok and serves its purpose (which is telling everyone about my 100 jobs).

Cleo and I are currently on season 112 of Grey’s Anatomy. I’ve started writing about the experience, because it turns out that nothing else matters when you are tachycardic. IFYKYK! Stay tuned for the writing that is bound to make me famous and a millionaire. I’ve also watched a few other things on my own (Slow Horses, the newest epsiodes of Severance, and a lot of Below Deck on my plane flights) but I can’t summon the will to have any strongly held opinions, other than Below Deck is chilling and I struggled to look away.

And lastly, an update on my existential wrestling match with technology which I also wrote about here:

Spending two weeks meditating and taking a time out from my phone was a tangible reminder of what happens to my brain and my relationships when I break the tether. I’m back to being glued to the stupid device, but not to IG, which continues to be a place on the internet that takes much more than it gives. It was fascinating to have offline (and a few online) conversations with those of you who are attempting similar shifts. I’ve also had to contend with how uncomfortable it makes me to make visible the personal work that I usually keep private.

I got a fair amount of unsolicited advice about how to manage my technology use in the comments. Despite some interesting and solid ideas, I decided to hold firm to my community discussion guidelines about how these conversations should unfold and deleted them. I know that the intent is to help, but any time the conversation turns into directives and telling people how to fix themselves around addictive behaviors, we enter into the realm of shame and hierarchy. None of us are above our own numbing tendencies, addictions, and neuroses. We all swim in these waters together. Humility is the only way through.

Speaking of humility…reading Thich Nhat Hanh at the Goodwill bins.

Cleo convinced us to go to the Goodwill Bins after we dropped my dad off at the airport this morning. I knew I didn’t have it in me today, but she still managed to be persuasive. About ten minutes into the experience I was in sensory overload and couldn’t deal. I wandered over to the books and promptly unearthed this gem. I spent the next 45 minutes reading it, just in time to meet her at the checkout and bounce.