Costa Rica was a special place for the Blake family. They’d spent several working vacations together in the small country, researching indigenous cultures and advocating for their rights. By the third day of their current visit, the rain forest had somehow slowed Lisa’s metabolism down to the speed of life.
Her skin began to glow and an awestruck, involuntary smile lit up her face. She felt embraced by the forest’s damp and vine-covered trails, thick with pheromones and fragrances communicating invitations, warnings, and celebrations. “It feels like the rain forest is painting itself!” She realized, more deeply than ever before, that humans need to absorb nature’s colors and cries of distress into their hearts, or face bitter existential regret as life continues to decline.
They stayed in a two-room rustic casita without power – kerosene lamps for light – absorbing the nocturnal sounds of cicadas, tree frogs, owls and howler monkeys as they performed an interwoven symphony, each animal occupying its own unique audial niche: “taca, taca, taca… sissit, sissit,” like a smoothly running printing press.
She was especially fascinated by the commerce of the leafcutter ant, provider of sunlight, soil and protein. Climbing in service formation high into the tall canopy, the ants pruned tons of leaves, allowing sunlight to reach the forest floor. Then the colony’s millions of workers carried the leaf fragments back to underground fungus gardens, like a parade of surfers toting bright green surfboards. The leafy compost nurtured fungus, the ants’ primary food source, leaving rich deposits to replace what the forest had used. “Why can’t human life be as interconnected and purposeful as ant life?” Lisa commented to her anthropologist father. “Human industry is infantile. We’ve only had hundreds of thousands of years of invention, but the ants have had 160 million.”
From the novel Tickling the Bear, How to Stay Safe in the Universe, by David Wann, also author of Affluenza and Simple Prosperity.
