Postcard from Panama

Thoughts from the jungle, and a book of poems

Day one in the jungle. We are staying in an off-the-grid eco resort, the kind of place that manages to feel primitive enough to offer guests the sense of communing with the rainforest, while simultaneously pampering them with morning deliveries of cacao tea and banana muffins. Ten years ago we were married and so this year we traveled to Panama to celebrate, just Davis and me. The trip felt like a return to our pre-pandemic, pre-parent selves, the selves who shouldered sweaty backpacks and navigated unfamiliar bus stations and hitchhiked through the Romanian countryside together. We slid back into our travel routines—the same card games, the same meandering conversations—seamlessly, as if three years hadn’t slipped by. Our room in the jungle is a circular platform perched among trees and geckos and delicately-patterned moths. We shower and sleep without walls, just a mosquito net between us and the rainforest’s residents. There’s not much to do besides read or walk along muddy trails or slide a kayak beneath the twisted arms of mangroves. After months of moving at top speed, bouncing from task to task, our hurry and work and screens go quiet all at once. The absence of their hum makes me antsy. I can feel my brain stuttering as my body comes to a stop. It’s hard to drop suddenly into a quieter place; hard to access the still waters within when I’ve been functioning on autopilot for nearly 16 months, skimming the surface of my days. That’s been a challenge of parenting: being shoved up so close to my life that I can’t read it. Moving too quickly to take stock or make meaning of the days.

Sister Lisa, who I sometimes meet with for spiritual direction, is interested in how we can know God through our senses. I’ll bring some abstract question to her and she’ll respond in the concrete: What does God sound like? What do you feel in your body when you’re considering this option, versus that one? She is always asking me sensory, bodily questions about what I might vaguely call “the spiritual life” (even though, as my friend Charlotte likes to say, all of life is the spiritual life).  Sister Lisa’s questions are good ones for someone like me, who can live for hours in the realm of her mind—possibilities, inventions, anxieties—without noticing the sensations of her body and what they might mean. It’s a continual effort for me to discern through the senses, to follow the Ignatian practice of finding God in all things. But tuning in to the physical world is not a problem here in the jungle, where the buzz of normal life is replaced by an absolute roar: the garbled yells of monkeys, the clatter of insects, the screech and trill and coo of birds. I can’t be anything but aware of the thick warm air and the riot of green leaves and custardy texture of biribá fruit and the fragrance of damp earth and the buttery, bitter flavor of cacao tea.

That first night, I can’t sleep. The jungle is too loud. The white noise of distraction and hurry has been silenced. After hours of lying awake, I get up in the midnight darkness and fight my way through swaths of mosquito netting to use the bathroom. Something leaps away from my foot—a cricket, a frog?—causing me to leap, too. I stumble back toward the bed only to slice my toe open on the corner of a chair. There is much hopping around, much whispered cursing. Davis continues his blissful sleep; I take my whispered cursing up a notch. I hobble to the sink to wash off the blood. Back in bed, something ricochets off my head and startles me upright. My phone’s flashlight reveals a grasshopper the color of a new leaf and the size of my index finger resting on my pillow. The grasshopper gets escorted out of the mosquito netting. Somewhere around 2am, I fall asleep.

My favorite feeling is anticipation. I love change and novelty and the sense of simmering possibility. But the danger beneath this is that ordinary life loses its sheen fast. I have a hard time remaining in place without calculating what’s next. Give me a goal to work towards and I’ll happily march toward it. Give me stillness and I’ll grow antsy. I had hoped that Panama would provide the perspective to see my life more clearly, and to discern some sort of next step. But travel, in this case, didn’t provide the revelation that sometimes comes from distance. Instead I find myself looking closely at my life right now. Rather than imagining my life as it could be, I see the small rhythms and repetitions of my days, much of which involve parenting a near-toddler. And I remember something my friend Rachel said once when we were talking about the tedium of parenting: “I actually think the mundane can be a very holy place.”

It turns out I only needed a day for my mind to slow down to the pace of my body, and to the syrupy-slow pace of the jungle. The second night, I am sleeping so deeply that it takes a few minutes for me to hear the rain. Davis is already awake, lying next to me and listening to sheets of water hit the roof and pummel leaves and pour down the nonexistent walls of our room. The downpour is so intense that we can feel the mist from our bed. We get up, our feet sliding across the wet wooden platform, and pull the thick curtains that serve as walls. We lie back down and listen to the thunder of water hitting dense foliage after falling a great distance from the sky. The air is a roar; my mind is quiet.

Another morning, no longer in the jungle, we wake up in Panama City. I walk outside into aggressive sunlight. The air is full of the rustle of prehistorically-sized palm fronds.  Church bells begin ringing to announce morning Mass. I sit for a long time in the bright morning heat and listen to the overlapping sounds that fill the sky: the shush of palms, the toll of bells.

The ordinary is holy is ordinary is holy is ordinary is

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Read with me:

A few months ago, my friend Eric sent me this story by the poet and journalist Clint Smith about memorializing public catastrophe. It’s an incredible piece of journalism and a moving personal reckoning; Smith, who wrote a book about the legacy of slavery in the United States, traveled to Germany to understand how the country has publicly remembered the Holocaust. I’ve thought about the story often since then and was excited to read Smith’s new poetry collection, Above Ground. Oh my, get yourself a copy.

The poems are largely about fatherhood, but also about the public and private grief that invades our days. They skip from joy (“Ode to the Bear Hug”) to sorrow (“We See Another School Shooting on the News”) back to joy again. There are poems about infants dressed as hot dogs (I mean, what’s not to love?) and poems about Hurricane Katrina (Smith is from New Orleans) and poems about drone strikes and after-dinner dance parties in the living room. Suffering in one stanza, wonder in the next. Beauty and bewilderment held side-by-side with warm and precise language.

As critic Nick Ripatrazone writes, Above Ground shimmers with the Ignatian sense that God is in all things: “It is a profoundly optimistic vision of the world, and yet one that is equally realistic. … The world is beautiful, and it is also confounding; perhaps that paradox is exactly why it is beautiful.”

What are you reading? What are you telling your friends to read? (Also, it’s almost solstice, so you can bet I’ll be revisiting this little treasure of a book in the coming weeks.)

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New writing:

I recently profiled Edna Adan Ismail, Somaliland’s first midwife and a global advocate for women’s health and equality. Ismail is also this year’s winner of the Templeton Prize. She is an absolute force, and was a delightful conversationalist.