I had surgery once where I thought the panic attack would kill me before the surgery did. I clung to the nurse’s arm and squeaked out, “I need a Valium”. Now, let me say that I don’t take valium, nor have I ever. But I saw all the shows on TV for decades where that little pill seemed to be all too friendly with women to help them sleep, manage stress or simply just check out from being a Stepford Wife. My nurse said, “Oh, honey, we’ve got something far better than that for you,” as she hooked me to an IV drip and I was out in LA LA land in four seconds.

Costa Rica is my IV drip.

I arrived here in a hurry.   I arrived here living a hurried, fast paced type A life. I had no clue how to do it otherwise. And pretty much upon landing, setting my toes deep in the hot sand and sipping agua de pipa, I unplugged from a power source that in almost every way, I had become addicted to.

Suddenly, I was drifting off to a deep sleep at 8pm once the blackest curtain of dark was drawn over the jungle, precisely at 6pm. For a girl who had never thought to see 4am, I was up with the first spark of pink light. My gate slowed, my needs of the day thinned out like plucking weeds from an overgrown garden, to reveal the fact that I could get it all done today, or maybe get it done manana. It did not matter.

Now, five months later, I am not only type B, but I am not concerned with moving to any particular destination in my day. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I work, I see a dozen clients a week on Skype, edit a half-dozen books, write my own stories and yet there is no inner coil of tension from the decades of living in urban life and off a grid of energy that never shuts down. I can be in the thick of writing a scene and not lose my place when I pause to watch the scarlet Macaws fly over. I just take the bliss of that moment and pump it all into the next sentence I write.

Here there is no need for Valium, or vodka tonics, or having to read Eckhart Tolle for the hundredth time on how to be here now. I am here now. Nature requires it and her grid of energy is so powerful that unless you let her reboot you, you will simply go back to where you traveled from.

Nature is my drug of choice. Nature never leaves me with a hangover in life. She simply returns me to the rhythm that is innately humane.