the sloth & the surf

Jon and I decided to hop some cheap flights to Costa Rica. While we’d normally be performing or partying on New Year’s Eve, we both wanted to get away, find something beautiful, peaceful, inspiring. It was a rare moment of decisive action for the two of us. Only minutes before booking, we were naked in the kitchen, wearing only an apron, finally putting to bed a longstanding conflict that had plagued us for the last four of our seven-year relationship. Our commitment.

We were that “will they, won’t they” couple whose vacillations eventually became a bore to our friends. To be fair, Jon vacillated. I was cautiously committed to a commitment-phobe, so I had no choice but to begin to vacillate on something I’d spent years being sure of. Despite all the art and work we created together. Despite seeing the world largely the same way and having complementary sensibilities. Despite our immense respect for each other as people and artists, despite our having lived together for five years, and despite the clear fact that we really loved each other, my boyfriend couldn’t seem to make sense of it all and had a hard time fitting me into his future. And because of his extraordinarily optimistic, cheerful, and gregarious nature, it was difficult for me to understand what was amiss. I was baffled by both his generally joyful way of being, his admiration for me, and the consistent rejection I felt from him, from his inability to make future plans, from the fear I could always smell on him.

Finally I told him, You do everything in your life at 11. You’re always turned up. You’re always bounding out of bed. I’m the only thing in your life you’re not enthusiastic about. And that’s not fair to either of us. We both deserve more.

He agreed. Though after years of this, I was secretly becoming less clear about what I believed I might deserve.

And so we took a two-month break from each other. A blackout. A rumspringa. And it was during this time that I fled to a tiny and isolated equine farm in Malibu to be with my thoughts, to start sifting through what I assumed was the end of my relationship and scrambling to rebuild my self-esteem after years of subconscious contraction. Years of painful and unnerving confusion. Years of this numbing and festering wound that had begun to devour my spirit without my consent. This love, truly the love of my life, in all its complexity and depth, had gradually turned me into a piece of dank, knotted, rotting wood; into the darkest version of myself. Where I was once vibrant and loud, I had been slowly retreating. I begged of myself to regain my senses, my balance, my ground and to move forward at any cost.

On the other side of this sabbatical, I returned to our Brooklyn home, ever skeptical that anything had changed, and continued to plan on my new life in LA with the producers I’d always coveted and the men I planned on dating. But much to my surprise, the two therapy sessions Jon had gone to, seemed to have had an impact.

I’m sorry, he said. You were right about so many things. I’m ready to work on this.

My brow furrowed; we had some negotiations in our future.

Over the following six weeks, we sat down three times to use The SPAR Method, a method of conscious fighting I had created that helps two people have hard conversations. The first two sessions were lengthy. We both had long lists. Fears, Resentments, Deal breakers & Desires. We were making movements. But within the first five minutes of our third session, I heard him backslide. I can’t remember exactly what he said but it felt old, worn, like finding a holey pair of underwear I was sure I’d tossed out. I closed my journal, blew out the candles and told him, Enough. This is a conversation I can’t have for the 100th time. We’re either moving forward, or we’re moving apart. And since we’re not moving forward, we’re moving apart. I’d like you to leave for a couple of weeks so I can figure out where I’m going.

I walked into the bedroom. Ok. This is happening. You’re ready, I told myself. You’re ok. The big wide-open world out there is ready to receive you.

Jon followed me into the bedroom and again I asked him to leave. Instead, he presented three doors.

Door number one, he said. We keep things the way they are, we know we love and respect each other, we get along…but you’re miserable and it turns out I’m miserable too. Door number two. We break up, which sounds awful but maybe it’s just what we need to do if it’s this hard for us to feel good and settled. Or Door number three. We just commit.

I looked at him and sighed. I was thinking about how much I would throw away. How little I would take with me. How many sad songs were in my future.

Fuck it, he said. We’ve never really done door number three. We’ve never really committed.….Let’s just fucking do it.

As I searched his face for signs of dementia, he said it again.

Come on, let’s do it! We’d be assholes to have come this far and never actually be together.

I didn’t believe him, but I humored him. I asked him how we’d commemorate this very important moment if this were in fact a true moment.

He said, Let’s make a secret handshake.

So we gave it some time. Fifteen minutes later, we had agreed upon this ridiculous choreography which would suffice for our secret handshake. I wasn’t convinced.

Meet me in the kitchen, I said. And grab every candle we have in the house.

I undressed completely and donned only an apron. He had a thing for aprons. I assume it’s something to do with his southern upbringing. There was some old cording in the tool closet, a remnant of the corded living room wall we’d created together. Perched on our barstools, wearing only an apron in the candlelit kitchen, we traded vows. Admittedly, they’d been written by someone else for my dear and brilliant friends who’d had a gorgeous ceremony the year before. But they were absolutely beautiful and I’d asked the groom if he’d email them to me afterward. For the moment, they would more than suffice as we bound our hands with the crafts from our closet and declared,

“These are the hands of your beloved. Young and strong and full of love for you… These are the hands that will work alongside yours, as together, we build our future… These are the hands that will countless times wipe the tears from your eyes; of sorrow and of joy… These are the hands that will give you strength when you need it… And these are the hands that even when wrinkled and aged, will still be reaching for yours…”

After our ten-minute impromptu ceremony, we looked at each other. It felt almost as though we’d just met, and in minutes decided to commit to a relationship neither of us knew.

That’s when he looked at me and said, Let’s go to Costa Rica.

Fuck yes, I said.

And we booked our flights.

The next morning I rolled over in our bed. Jon was already up and out. When he found me at work at my desk an hour later he came over to give me a big kiss.

Good morning my sweet, beautiful, totally 100% committed girlfriend!

I scanned him closely and with some cynicism, I replied, Uh, hi to you too, my um, totally committed boyfriend… Are you… How are you feeling this morning?

Different, he said. I feel really different.

And so did I. Somehow I could sense the very distant possibility of something good approaching. Something living.

We drove down to Tennessee to be with his family for Christmas, and we drove to Atlanta to pick up our flights to Costa Rica. We’d both heard for years about its beauty. And it didn’t disappoint. The gigantic nature reminded me of Maui’s landscape. And for good reason since volcanic ash was largely responsible for such massive growth.

We were able to rent the very last car the country had to offer and not without incident. We took a white water rafting trip which deposited us towards the Caribbean coast and we headed into the rainforest. We listened to Ready Player One while we made our way across the country. We found a hotel run by two ex-pats. They offered a delicious homemade breakfast and the tin roofs atop the single-family cabins were a white noise immersion experience, a constant rapping, tapping cacophony. And the howlers, my god, at dusk and at dawn in the sopping drip, they’d shriek and yell. They sounded almost human. If it hadn’t been hysterical to us, it would have been horrific.

Jon surfed in the rain and I watched. For the four hours it wasn’t actively raining, we went to a sloth sanctuary nearby. It takes 30 days for a sloth to take a shit. I guess that means they only take 12 shits a year. Which makes sense considering the rate at which their metabolism drives. Sloths have almost no muscle or fat. They’re skin and bones and barely a bit of brain. That’s it. They’re not even suitable prey because they offer so little nourishment. And there we all were. A crowd of 40 or so marveling at these dull creatures. Doing nothing but hanging and sleeping, and taking their monthly sojourn to dig a hole in which to defecate and bury their feces, far from their sleeping tree so as not to alert any potential predator to their whereabouts. And slowly but surely, and surely bizarrely, they camo-crawl their way back up into the foliage that keeps them hidden while they do nothing much more than sleep.

Ultimately, I marveled at them too when I found myself asking, Why? I mean, what in the hell for? Why in God’s name, did creation create…a sloth. It does nothing. It feeds no one. It sleeps. It shits. And does almost nothing in between. It doesn’t even bond. It DOES NOT BOND with its mother. It’s solo. Alone. In the emptiness of its being. And what grew up around these creatures of nothingness is this sanctuary, and communities of people all over the world who look out for the best interest of the sloth. And it occurred to me at this moment: God bless these boring, bony, babies. If there’s a God, a Creator, an unknowable, multi-dimensional, highly creative, supercharged energy that begot the sloth and placed it among what is surely the most extraordinary, interconnected, and interdependent design we are aware of in the known Universe,

then what I’m looking at for the first time, what I suddenly realize, what makes perfect sense when I study this motionless, fur ball, clinging to its tree:

Is that I am looking at the truest, deepest, form of “being-ness”. Is-ness. Am-ness. It was all so simple. And boring. And uncomplicated. And suddenly profound.

Do you understand what I’m saying? What I felt to be so true and so present?

A sloth is as bland and meaningless as a fucking piece of dry, white toast, and it’s still entirely lovable. Valuable. It was created for a reason I can’t imagine, and I realized then that no reason was necessary. It’s just a thing to be loved while it does almost nothing.

And I am also just that thing. A thing to be loved and valued no matter what I’m doing, or not doing, no matter what I have or what I don’t have, whether I’m fatty or fatless, muscly, or just skin and bone. I have that same being-ness. And it was so clear. I don’t have to be anything at all, in order to be loved, or to love, or to feel valuable.

I burst into tears now when I think about how important this lesson was, because it changed me. It changed my mind about myself, and about every person, and every creature and thing in the world. In existence. For all of time. But in that moment, I must have just raised my brows, nodded my head, turned down the corners of my mouth and laughed to myself…Hmph. This is often the case with epiphanies. I think we expect our Ah-ha! moments to clobber us the way answers come to math problems or the crossword. Perhaps because people spell and say Ah-Ha! with a big exclamation point. I think more often than not, our epiphanies arrive as quietly and gently as a feather brushing against our shoulder. Be sure to write them down when you feel that wisp. It will mean something more in the future.

The rain came again. We hadn’t been dry in three days at this point. Not our bodies, not our clothes. We were pruning.

Let’s find some sun, Jon said. And the next morning we got in the car and drove to the opposite coast. To Domenical where we had learned a friend was staying. It was New Year’s Eve day and we’d heard that the beach at Domenical was a perfect place to take in a local party. We set a course and drove the six and a half hours, watching the land and the lush green, feeling as free as we could possibly feel.

We arrived at the rocky beach just as the sun was dipping behind the ocean. It dropped quickly and the locals lit their bonfires and played their stereos loud. We walked down the beach. Jon acted strangely as he put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a small box. Rather abruptly he handed it to me and said,

Here, I have something for you.

What’s this?

Just a token, he said.

A token?

I opened the box. It was a ring. An unusual ring. Not one I’d ever buy for myself. An ouroboros. And not a particularly beautiful one at that. There were tiny stones in the eyes. I squinted and inspected them closely but it was already far too dim on the beach. The jewels seemed dark, like they might be blue or deep red. Not diamonds.

Ok…what…is this? I asked.

It’s y’know, a new beginning. The start of our new commitment, he said. And uh, …I…know you like animals, it was the only animal they had in the shop.

While Jon was one for big surprises and grandiose gestures, I wasn’t sure what to make of the casual chucking of this snake ring. So I said nothing, found it fit on my middle finger, and we teetered awkwardly and unceremoniously on the pebbled beach in our flip-flops as we made our way to our friend’s party. The fireworks were small and low in the sky, hovering just above us. Set off only feet from where we stood, and all the way down the beach. From each tiny campfire spat swirls of exploding color 25 feet in the sky. Barking up ash and cheers.

The next day we went out to explore the area. We were told the most beautiful and quiet beach on the coast was only 10 minutes down the highway. We grabbed our books, packed our rental and made our way.

We did as the locals do. They would park their cars right at the edge of the beach, underneath the shade of the palm trees which were abundant. Hanging their hammocks between the trees, spreading out their blankets under the shade. The beach was long and wide. Very wide. The sun was hot and the sky cloudless. There were no umbrellas planted in the sand. We all stayed well-shaded back by the tree line, far from the water. Jon and I found a log to sit on in the umbrage and we read our books. The temperature was perfect. A gentle breeze brushed the hem of my dress against my legs as I read.

And the sand, largely empty of any sunbathers or ball throwers, stretched out ahead of us and the surf was typical for the pacific. Shallow for 30 or 40 yards, with layers and layers of ocean lapping up against the beach. There were no waves. Just this eternal lapping. You couldn’t hear any waves crashing the way I’m accustomed to the sounds of the ocean on the east coast. Like breathing. With an obvious pause at the end of an exhale. Waaooosh………crash…. waaaoooshhht……..crash… This was only wsssssshhhhhhhhh. It was loud continuous static. When I closed my eyes, that’s exactly what it sounded like. Like one deep eternal exhale…or perhaps it was an inhale…

The thought confounded me. That I was listening to a never-ending inhale and exhale, and imagining the consequences of each. The curious feeling that each possibility brought. And I smiled. Closed my eyes. Felt weightless. The most aliveness and peace I could ever remember feeling in my body.

Thank you for this body, I thought. For this body to allow me to experience this level of freedom and peace. I looked down at Jon who was laying in the shady sand reading, his head using my feet as a pillow. Wssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhh said the waves.

And I heard my heart say the strangest thing. It said: I think this might be the place I wish to come just before I die. This moment might be the memory I’ll carry secretly for a lifetime, only to conjure it at my death. Whatever my death may be, I won’t be surprised if this memory is my final thought. For this moment, with this breeze, and this perfect sky, this moment, pregnant with immense possibility and a peace so divine I’d never known it until now, blooming with love and life, and this unending, un-ordinary exhale, is perhaps the most beautiful moment I have ever known.