Maggie Returns2MonteverdeCostaRica
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Hi! I am Maggie Hess. A long time ago, Monteverde Costa Rica turned my existence into something else entirely - I became a Puravida Quaker, aware I want to live a meaningful life.
This spring I finally bit the bullet at the right time to return there.
I am going to Costa Rica no matter what. I have purchased tickets. Any little bit will help me. If you send more, I might even come home! (kidding)
I wrote this beneath here to give more context...
Hold on to What you Love (Monteverde Costa Rica)
Marvin Rockwell was quoted to have said “I expect us to be around for many years after I’m gone.” I read that in an Al Jazeera article that spoke about changes in the Quaker community of Monteverde Costa Rica since its founding in 1951. Even if I wanted to go back and retouch exact pieces of my past there, I never could. But it is so good Rockwell can be part of a legacy.
This morning I am thinking about Monteverde, what it meant for me to go there an 18 year old youngster and how the words of the people touched and formed my heart.
I have said I want to return there many times before. I have spoken of going back, aimed my education towards becoming fit to teach there. But the Quaker Meeting is the heart of what it means to me.
January- early May 2001 I remember lessons that came through the silence at Meeting while I pretended to sleep and goofed off looking out the door frame at Quaker youth pretending to shoot one another with imagined guns. I'd laugh a bit but if you asked me even then if I wanted to be there, I would say yes with certainty. No one was dragging me to Meeting. That was for sure.
The values of my parents were always Quaker, simple, peace loving, war resisting, activist oriented, environmentally sustaining, deep in contemplation, putting these things long before money but somehow breaking even with their meager earnings. They worked hard to support us and we lived in a Conservative crusted part of the Southern Appalachians, and my parents were early people in groups like Appalachian Peace Education Center which sought bring education around peace issues in the early 80's.
So when I found this patch of Quakers in Costa Rica in 2001, I guess it felt more like home to me than home did to a point. My sister was there to make it perfect, drawing plants on a rare Fellowship that afforded her travels. My life was so privileged because of her affording me time to be free right out of college, to run with the monkeys in the trees, and I spent more of my time in the forest than anywhere else because of her project and her severe dedication and work ethic. She made my life possible then, and I had come from a bump in my life, a health crisis actually that had taken me away from the setting of school bound protocol into a gap year. My sister helped me see the meaning in everything much more than I would have otherwise. So as she scrubbed the plastic bags and I for the first time thought about waste and want and overspending and her commitment to biology and the biome, I learned something fierce from just witnessing her too. Quaker or not.
But she also saw in me that I wanted to be one of these people who do not proselytize but live their good lives in a way that speaks. It took a lot for her to direct me to come to Meeting, but I owe that to her too. In fact, I guess because of a familial fear of dogmatic practices (especially Christianity) she, then an atheist, sat beside me in the most biodiverse place on this planet where she could have been out and about, protecting me from becoming too exuberant in my bipolar nature, or maybe also from the religion that I love. And I am glad for every bit of that. For I learn slow and unindoctrinated, and that is how I found my heart a Quaker in the spring of the year 2001 in Monteverde Costa Rica.
There were days the perseverance of the Quakers there impressed upon me. Determination seems a word that didn't quite make the structured list of principles that some like to call Quaker SPICES, a modern addition to a creed-less religion. But determination is one of the song lyrics of a good old camp song I know (Peace Like a River). Maybe that is a hymn. Regardless, I remember that being one of the chords that struck me, how Lucky Guindon, in her 70s then hoofed up those mountains like nobody's business. There was this walk-a-thon to raise money for the school, and Lucky's son Benito passed both me and my spry sister around kilometer 11 of a 12 kilometer trek – on stilts. I was blown away, though I am not certain he did that all the way. Then there is the whole history in the community, plowing their own cow pastures, that is after moving whole schools and families to a whole new land so so far away. I mean they brought their own cattle in wagons, and when the wagons broke down, they pulled the mules through their own stubborn way – and I'm not sure who I mean.
The words in Meeting really nurtured me into who I am today. They came to me as sort of lessons. There was a story of a man who got one new thing and kept getting new things for his new things. This simplicity lesson always has been high on my list of important virtues, even when I fail at it. There was the story of More Love, someone talking about what the words of a hymn meant to them. “If you can't love each other in daily communion how can you love God who you have not seen.” The lesson spoke to how we should all treat one another despite differences or circumstances. Again hard to always live by, but it touched deep into my developing mind. There was a story book about violence following violence, complete with a farm animal fight. I think I read that one when I was volunteering in the library. These lessons blended with my sister's life stellar life commitments and the puravida lifestyle of the surrounding farmers and tour guides. Together I made in me a version of what Quaker means and it echoed deep into my soul.
Going home was not fun. This was mostly because of my declining mental health, ensuing emotional troubles and difficult time finding this stable dose of medicines that now keep me sane. Now I have an education and sanity (and an outbound and return ticket for another three month visit to Costa Rica. I am eager and committed to find the traces of the people who are still there. I hope they are sound in mind and body but I imagine many of them have much changed as I am no longer a lanky kid running up mountains.
I also hope they still sing all those songs that echo in my soul. I hope they remember me somehow. I guess I should bring a picture. But some things wander in the wind, like a child that I was friends with then named Abe who I imagine a young man now. His father was an American. Some things fade and that is ok, the jungle eats them up. I believe in the impermanence of things above all things. It is a lesson the harder parts of my life have taught me. I know what I cannot keep, what things only my heart may photograph to make impressions in my mind, one way to hold to what I love.
This spring I finally bit the bullet at the right time to return there.
I am going to Costa Rica no matter what. I have purchased tickets. Any little bit will help me. If you send more, I might even come home! (kidding)
I wrote this beneath here to give more context...
Hold on to What you Love (Monteverde Costa Rica)
Marvin Rockwell was quoted to have said “I expect us to be around for many years after I’m gone.” I read that in an Al Jazeera article that spoke about changes in the Quaker community of Monteverde Costa Rica since its founding in 1951. Even if I wanted to go back and retouch exact pieces of my past there, I never could. But it is so good Rockwell can be part of a legacy.
This morning I am thinking about Monteverde, what it meant for me to go there an 18 year old youngster and how the words of the people touched and formed my heart.
I have said I want to return there many times before. I have spoken of going back, aimed my education towards becoming fit to teach there. But the Quaker Meeting is the heart of what it means to me.
January- early May 2001 I remember lessons that came through the silence at Meeting while I pretended to sleep and goofed off looking out the door frame at Quaker youth pretending to shoot one another with imagined guns. I'd laugh a bit but if you asked me even then if I wanted to be there, I would say yes with certainty. No one was dragging me to Meeting. That was for sure.
The values of my parents were always Quaker, simple, peace loving, war resisting, activist oriented, environmentally sustaining, deep in contemplation, putting these things long before money but somehow breaking even with their meager earnings. They worked hard to support us and we lived in a Conservative crusted part of the Southern Appalachians, and my parents were early people in groups like Appalachian Peace Education Center which sought bring education around peace issues in the early 80's.
So when I found this patch of Quakers in Costa Rica in 2001, I guess it felt more like home to me than home did to a point. My sister was there to make it perfect, drawing plants on a rare Fellowship that afforded her travels. My life was so privileged because of her affording me time to be free right out of college, to run with the monkeys in the trees, and I spent more of my time in the forest than anywhere else because of her project and her severe dedication and work ethic. She made my life possible then, and I had come from a bump in my life, a health crisis actually that had taken me away from the setting of school bound protocol into a gap year. My sister helped me see the meaning in everything much more than I would have otherwise. So as she scrubbed the plastic bags and I for the first time thought about waste and want and overspending and her commitment to biology and the biome, I learned something fierce from just witnessing her too. Quaker or not.
But she also saw in me that I wanted to be one of these people who do not proselytize but live their good lives in a way that speaks. It took a lot for her to direct me to come to Meeting, but I owe that to her too. In fact, I guess because of a familial fear of dogmatic practices (especially Christianity) she, then an atheist, sat beside me in the most biodiverse place on this planet where she could have been out and about, protecting me from becoming too exuberant in my bipolar nature, or maybe also from the religion that I love. And I am glad for every bit of that. For I learn slow and unindoctrinated, and that is how I found my heart a Quaker in the spring of the year 2001 in Monteverde Costa Rica.
There were days the perseverance of the Quakers there impressed upon me. Determination seems a word that didn't quite make the structured list of principles that some like to call Quaker SPICES, a modern addition to a creed-less religion. But determination is one of the song lyrics of a good old camp song I know (Peace Like a River). Maybe that is a hymn. Regardless, I remember that being one of the chords that struck me, how Lucky Guindon, in her 70s then hoofed up those mountains like nobody's business. There was this walk-a-thon to raise money for the school, and Lucky's son Benito passed both me and my spry sister around kilometer 11 of a 12 kilometer trek – on stilts. I was blown away, though I am not certain he did that all the way. Then there is the whole history in the community, plowing their own cow pastures, that is after moving whole schools and families to a whole new land so so far away. I mean they brought their own cattle in wagons, and when the wagons broke down, they pulled the mules through their own stubborn way – and I'm not sure who I mean.
The words in Meeting really nurtured me into who I am today. They came to me as sort of lessons. There was a story of a man who got one new thing and kept getting new things for his new things. This simplicity lesson always has been high on my list of important virtues, even when I fail at it. There was the story of More Love, someone talking about what the words of a hymn meant to them. “If you can't love each other in daily communion how can you love God who you have not seen.” The lesson spoke to how we should all treat one another despite differences or circumstances. Again hard to always live by, but it touched deep into my developing mind. There was a story book about violence following violence, complete with a farm animal fight. I think I read that one when I was volunteering in the library. These lessons blended with my sister's life stellar life commitments and the puravida lifestyle of the surrounding farmers and tour guides. Together I made in me a version of what Quaker means and it echoed deep into my soul.
Going home was not fun. This was mostly because of my declining mental health, ensuing emotional troubles and difficult time finding this stable dose of medicines that now keep me sane. Now I have an education and sanity (and an outbound and return ticket for another three month visit to Costa Rica. I am eager and committed to find the traces of the people who are still there. I hope they are sound in mind and body but I imagine many of them have much changed as I am no longer a lanky kid running up mountains.
I also hope they still sing all those songs that echo in my soul. I hope they remember me somehow. I guess I should bring a picture. But some things wander in the wind, like a child that I was friends with then named Abe who I imagine a young man now. His father was an American. Some things fade and that is ok, the jungle eats them up. I believe in the impermanence of things above all things. It is a lesson the harder parts of my life have taught me. I know what I cannot keep, what things only my heart may photograph to make impressions in my mind, one way to hold to what I love.
Organizer
Magi Linkscale
Organizer
Bristol, VA
