To Touch & Be Touched By Nature
We moved to Costa Rica from Los Angeles almost 5 years ago. I gave birth to our son at home in Topanga, and when he was a few months old, our house we had been building in Costa Rica had just finished. Although it was never the intention to live here full time, during the first newborn months with Charlie it was clear that we wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to slow down and raise him closer to raw nature like this. My husband Robbie and I had also spent our entire adult lives in major cities, having a lot of fun living very fast paced lives while focused on our careers, so we felt ready to experiment with new ways of living. We decided to let go of the life we knew and began anew, in a very exotic jungle surround, in our newly finished home we designed together. A life that we had been dreaming up since we met 10 years ago now. A year after our move we welcomed our second child, our daughter Ru, who was born near the top of the Turrialba Volcano.
My husband Robbie is a music composer, musician and artist, and I worked in the fashion industry in photoshoot production for nearly a decade in New York City and Los Angeles, with my favorite Zoë Ghertner, Connect The Dots and freelance for many Art Partner creatives. I left that side of the industry when we had our first child, and now focus on raising our family, while caring to and planting our orchards, occasional performance art, music, film and photography projects, and designing our soon to be home additions (which so far include a theater & concert stage attached to a sunken 70’s style living room for family performances, a secret trap door opening to a kids slide greeting my art studio, as well as a hidden bookshelf passageway to a reading and meditation room surrounded by plants with colored glass, bird feeding installations in the walls and brickwork to include a basketball/pickleball court in our driveway).
My husband and I approach our designs together with much play and fun, and have learned to appreciate the many unexpected twists with language barriers and building in Costa Rica. We’re able to take our oftentimes unusual design ideas and collaborate with our team to find a practical way to use local materials, and our builder is up for the challenge and seems to enjoy it. There is much more flexibility in building here, so it allows more room for our imagination to roam. The result is one big fun house full of color that makes us very happy to live in, especially being that we live very remotely and spend much of our time on our property. We use local builders and materials, oftentimes whom impressively work barefoot and throw cinder blocks 15 feet in the air to one another to build our walls. We didn’t speak any Spanish when we arrived, so the process was interesting and full of surprises with an all Spanish speaking team.
We’ve been working on reforesting our property which was a treeless cow pasture, into an exotic fruit orchard now bearing over 100 different fruit and medicinal trees, all having planted as a family throughout the past 5+ years. We’ve also been reforesting with many important native trees, with the reintroduction of the scarlet macaws to our region in mind, as well as boosting the monkey corridors for the howler monkeys and capuchins (with the helpful guidance of our good friends at Wild Sun Rescue Center, who are largely responsible for the macaw reintroduction).
For us, having our children at least experience their roots, our humanness in its simplest form, I think is the best gift we can give them. Growing, preparing and enjoying our own foods and medicines, saving seeds to a favorite fruit they're eating with eagerness to plant it, to know how to create the best soil for our plants with our compost. To know that we can grow this tree, and from this wood, we can design and build our own home. Or build our toys. To use the cotton from the cotton trees to stuff our handmade pillows and stuffed animals, or to learn the process of turning it into string. To dye our clothes with the flowers and roots that we grow. And to know it is limitless where our ideas can take us. I am so grateful they can know the sources, the process and the results - and in a way that comes from the land, not a factory.
You see, where we live, requires going to a city that takes about 5 hours to drive to in order to purchase good quality home goods, or to go to a good hospital. We live at the southern tip of the Nicoya peninsula, on top of a mountain that is surrounded by ocean on three sides. If you fly to Costa Rica, you have to get on another small 10 seater airplane to get to our area, or take a ferry boat and drive. It is the tropics, meaning extremely humid and hot half the year, and the other half, extremely humid and hot, with rain. You are sweating and full of dirt or sand the majority of the time. Electricity comes and goes regularly. There is no food delivery service or Uber. We do not have mailboxes or addresses, and do not receive regular mail. We don’t live in a consumer reality here (although I will admit when friends and family come to visit, they often bring an extra suitcase filled with specialties for us). The grocery store, farmers' market and hardware store is where we shop. We are lucky to have some delicious restaurants down the hill in Santa Teresa, although we don’t go out to eat often, preferring to cook at home. Each week we have delivered to us our neighbor’s fresh baked sourdough bread, fresh goat's milk from the goat farm nearby, homemade yogurt and butter. We go to the fisherman’s village for freshly caught tuna and mahi mahi in the mornings, and get fresh eggs from another farm nearby. And we really, really like it this way.
In nature, we are all perfect creations. We are each exactly as we are meant to be. The Earth provides most of our needs, if we allow ourselves to strip it all back. For me, plants have all the answers. They are medicine, they are oxygen, they are beauty, they are joy and they bring calm. While some bring pain, poison, disaster or extreme labor, they teach us something with each encounter. The importance of not only nurturing, but to learn and grow, and just be.
Wildlife, has a whole separate set of lessons that intertwine. When you build a house in the middle of the jungle, creatures are bound to occasionally seek shelter, or curiosity. For example, we have had a jaguarundi (similar to a jaguar) in our home, snakes, tarantulas, scorpions, bats. Lizards are a regular. Luckily the monkeys can’t make it in to our home to steal fruits, but they do for many people down the hill from us (or if lounging on certain beaches nearby). I prefer having to live in a state of instinct and calm, in awe, and in touch with intuition, which life here requires of me. To have to learn to navigate new elements of ourselves and of nature.
We are gifted with the presence of spectacular wildlife, and get to coexist with one another. A scarlet macaw family was perched behind our house yesterday, and the monkey families are regular visitors, oftentimes swaying above us while playing and doing crafts outside our art studio. Occasionally an ocelot will walk down the road, or a toucan will be perched on a branch nearby. While boating recently, hundreds of dolphins were jumping around us, sighting humpback and orca whales, stingrays. Swimming with the most beautiful of sea life will always live within me such as the most peaceful of dreams. It is exotic and unusual, but I prefer it this way.
It is fair to say I keep things natural. I don’t own makeup. Plant based products and nutrients are essential for me and our children when possible. Less being more. Simplifying. Being content with my skin, and my shape as it is and as it is meant to become. Self-care being an absolute necessity. I care for the quality of the product, of the material.
I feel that CAP Beauty is an ultimate resource in supporting this way of being.
I often find myself thinking about the products that I use, they smell so good and pure that I could eat them! The CAP Beauty blue cleanser and serotoner are new parts of my daily routine which I look forward to. The scents are (very) delicious, and gentle and soothing on my skin. I can feel the nutrients in them. NeoNutritions Ultimate Foundation is a favorite of mine, a massive help in boosting my energy in a focused and grounded way, as raising a 3 and 4 year old can prove to require a boost every now and then. The matcha is a new favorite addition to the sugar-free banana ice cream recipe that my family loves. My body doesn't tolerate caffeine, so I’m not able to enjoy a cup as tea, but I find I can thoroughly enjoy it in small doses in a little dessert.
Living in such closeness with nature proves a massive support in nurturing and having a close relationship with our imaginations, our instincts, our bodies. In being able to slow down enough to really be with oneself and with each other, to notice the smallest of things and their significance. The butterflies passing by, the new flower bud, the rhythm that the wind is making in the trees, observing the intricacies of self, or the tune that the bugs and birds are chirping about. And the patience and acceptance to overcome the obstacles.
For me, to live life more slowly, is to give space to living in our true essence, rather than this idea of what we are supposed to be. And having moved our family, nestled into the jungle, removed from most modern day comforts and accessibilities, has given us this room to grow, and to just, be. Although, I believe one can access elements of this no matter where you are, as long as you can allow yourself to touch and be touched by nature.
