vagrant

We’re getting ready to leave Central America after a few months here mostly in Panama and Nicaragua. We’ve made some good friends, had a puppy briefly, cataloged many exciting insects new to us, befriended a toucan , pulled our hair out, planted trees, became human feasts for tiny bugs, pulled a boat out of the jungle, ate new and alien fruits, learned how to surf (?), built a cassita, stared at the stars, saw an octopus, learned how to shell a coconut and make patacones and coconut rice and cut metal with a machete and get rid of bed bugs and do more with less. We climbed a volcano, swam in the ocean, searched for a boat, made pasta, read our year’s share of books, went to a carnival, learned some Spanish, discovered a disturbing allergy to mangoes , saw two waterfalls, drank the best coffee of our lives, swam in a crater, and had long productive, frustrating, wonderful conversations about the state of everything.

Now is the right time for leaving though, I miss New England and friends and family and pine trees and shingles and wood fires with no plastic in them. It’s nice to know that we’re leaving when we are ready and a little homesick, not feeling like we’re just getting started here and having the rug pulled out from under us by obligation or perceived necessity. Returning to the states is sure to be interesting, a pile of mail waiting to root through, friends to see, the projects I want to do and be involved with are starting to pile up in my mind like stacking firewood and I’m wondering how well we will cope with the tale end of winter after wearing sandals and eating fruit from the trees for four months. Departing and arriving, they make me more introspective give me lists of resolutions which may not come to pass but at least I have the time and space to articulate them. I still want to learn how to sail, build a bike trailer, make some long bike trips and learn more about building bicycles, keep working on my cabin, learn more metal fabrication, visit more farms, renovate a teardrop trailer, start cultivating a little land around the cabin, work on some longer video projects, go contra dancing, play more music, make more sculpture and go night swimming. Obviously I’ll need to whittle this list down a little since I will only have a couple of months in New England and then we are off to Madagascar for the summer to work on projects which will hopefully be related to that vague and unruly list of short term goals.

After I gave up trying to make money a couple of years ago I find that I have much more time and space to pursue things I’m interested in, for me the process of making money for it’s own sake was destructive, depressing and counter productive. I found myself with the couple of hours of “free time” I had at the end of the day, I would stare blankly at the walls and wonder where all of my energy and ambition had gone. Of course there was a huge psychological hurdle to get over, the perceived security of a regular paycheck is seductive, it plays on our fears and not our hopes, grabs us by the neck like a belligerent Scot and punches us in the neck. Sometimes I get the same feeling when I’m involved in one of my intermittent bouts of hypochondria, this vaguely uncomfortable bubbling in the pit of my stomach usually precipitated by some conversation with another American about the necessity of health insurance and some accompanying horror story to accentuate the point: you are never safe, bad things can happen at any time. It’s an intellectual trap, fear breeds fear, we end up living our lives as if the biggest catastrophe of our lives is looming, shadowing all of our actions. It’s these moments when I think that I should probably get a steady job, a 401k, six more insurance policies, a filing cabinet, a gym membership, a guard dog, a new bike lock, some better sunscreen, and a nice reasonable low interest mortgage. Then I take a deep breath and remember the imminent collapse of the dollar, the limitations of traditional economic value, the inherent hypocrisy of the insurance industry, the price of a barrel of oil, the rapture of the nerds, the long now, the possible digital nature of the universe, new economies, true security, local currency and the taste of fresh blueberries in Maine.