a light in the darkness

A tiny country of incredible ecological diversity, Costa Rica offers even the seasoned traveler a plethora of unique experiences. We added one last month to celebrate Munchkin’s eighth birthday.

before the war

The last month has felt a bit like living in suspended animation, our focus halfway around the world, the joys and everyday struggles of our ordinary life somewhat muted. Life, of course, has continued apace; the Earth keeps spinning irrespective of what may be happening on its surface. In our quiet corner of the world that meant celebrating a birthday and preparing for family visits.

winter on fire

Snow flurries swirled lazily, surfing the intermittent gusts of biting wind under a leaden sky. That was the scene three weeks ago when D arrived in Romania to help in the small way he could in responding to the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Europe. 

music for the soul

So about that festival…it turns out that Costa Rica may have the best music scene out of any of the five overseas posts where we’ve served, at least as far as the kind of music that D likes to see live is concerned. 

we contain multitudes

In the run-up to the 2020 elections, we came across an article by a Sri Lankan writer comparing the societal collapse during which he lived in the latter years of the Sri Lankan civil war with the relentless doom and gloom of the American news cycle. It was a plain-spoken but poignant read, and it clearly struck a cord because we immediately recalled it last week as we went about the minutiae of our daily lives while trying to process the shock and grief of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which our household feels on a deeply personal level despite the geographic distance.

gloomy thoughts

There has been a touch of survivor’s guilt coloring our days since the onset of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We are halfway around the world, and this may not be our war in the strictest sense of the word, but it feels personal nonetheless — both because of D’s roots in Eastern Europe and our more recent connections there, and because this is a war for Europe’s very soul and, by extension, for Western ideals and values. The Kremlin’s KGB thuggery and disregard for the right to self-determination by non-ethnic Russians was precisely what motivated D’s family to seek refuge in the United States three decades ago.

living in the past

Strive though we might to live in the moment, the task is almost always impossible. The weight of the past is too great, the pull of the future too powerful to resist. The present is all we ever truly have but it seems too ephemeral to hold on to for long; it may, like the current inflection point in European geopolitics, be too painful also. William Faulkner famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Those words rang with particularly sinister clarity last week as Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine and the Cold War ghosts of Europe’s not-so-distant past took on corporeal form.