Jungle Diary: Escape to the North
Opening myself up to what might be present and possible
This Jungle Diary entry is the modified transcript of part of Episode 2 of my podcast “Birth Balm,” available here.
March 2024
It’s hot here in Nicaragua, especially where we live, which is on the southern Pacific coast. But there is a consistent wind, for the most part, these days, which is unusual for this time of year. Normally during April and May, the winds die down, and it’s muggy and still and almost morbidly placid. This is when the iguanas start to come out of the jungle and hang out on the roads, inert as statutes until our car comes around the bend, when they slither-trot with incredible speed back into the scrub brush: a disappearing act.
The breeze has stuck around, though, which is such a blessing. I am presently on-call to support a mother when she gives birth. After the baby is born, we are planning a family trip to the northern part of Nicaragua, to visit Matagalpa, Jinotega, maybe even Ocotal, and into the cloud-forest coffee-farms that surround these remote towns and cities. It’s much cooler in the mountains, and although I love our beach community (and our kids, especially, are very much at home here), I can’t wait to put on a pair of jeans and maybe a sweater in the mountains, and to explore this beautiful country properly. It’s hard to believe that we’ve been here for three years and we haven’t ventured north of Managua.
I am also looking forward to attending an Orthodox Christian church service in Matagalpa, which happens to be the home of the only Orthodox Church in this country. Nicaragua is predominantly Catholic, but my Spanish still isn’t good enough to really understand what’s happening during a Sunday sermon, and in all honesty, I can’t do the magical thinking required so that I can tolerate Catholicism anymore. We have been part of a spiritual community here in our town for a little while now, and we gather with a group of friends every Sunday morning under the palapa of an outdoor pizzeria that acts as a makeshift church, and I feel so grateful for the individuals and families who contribute so much to make that gathering happen. But I grew up Anglican, and I have been on a “personal journey” (as they say) over the past… well, decades, really, that keeps leading me to Orthodoxy.
Last September, while pregnant with Margaret and on a visit to my hometown of Vancouver, I visited an Orthodox church with my mother, and during the service, I experienced a visceral sense of intimacy with the divine, and a deep and abiding Truth. The beauty and simplicity of the liturgy, and especially the transcendently gorgeous singing was incredibly moving to me, and I had a distinct feeling of recognition. So I’m looking forward to visiting the church in Matagalpa, and opening myself up to what might be present and possible in that encounter.
We’ll make this odyssey north as a family by bus—a 14-passenger bus, which will accommodate me and Lee and our eight kids (including Horus, our 15-year old). Our nanny and her kids (who are both around the ages of our older kids) will come too, partly to support us, as I’ll still be working on the road to some extent, but also because it will be a fun adventure for them as well. Our beloved driver, Elber, will be at the helm—and let me tell you, Elber’s presence is important for a number of reasons, not least of which is the preservation of my marriage to Lee.
Lee and I have some residual discordant energy around driving, on both sides, and we have found that it’s always best to have a driver whenever we’re taking a road-trip—here in Nicaragua, anyway, where the roads are treacherous and punctuated by potholes and boulders and carts pulled by oxen, and cowboys and horses and tuk tuks—which are essentially motorcycles around which little metal boxes with seats have been built so as to accommodate a couple of passengers, operated like taxis in many of the smaller towns, so overall it’s an obstacle course. Furthermore, I have heard that the roads in the north are all of that plus treacherously steep and winding, which sounds terrifying to me but also a little bit romantic in the way that the real-life dangers that are still allowed in certain parts of the world can be.
Honestly, every single time Lee and I have ever, ever gone on journey with more than one of our kids that involves driving for more than one hour, we end up vowing to never ever put ourselves through such an intensively horrific form of torture ever again, and yet even as I speak those words aloud, I cannot entirely suppress the glimmer of hope I have, that this time, I will gather all eight of our children into a tiny enclosed space, with no distractions other than the repetitive lull of the rolling countryside outside the windows of the vehicle, and keep them in there for an entire day, save for bathroom breaks on the side of the highway and at filthy, sketchy truck stops, and something will happen that does not involve immediate arguing, whining, kick-fights, mental breakdowns, vomiting, diarrhoea, and food getting smeared from one end of the vehicle to another.
I mean, what if this time, it’s different, and we just end up having a wonderful adventure? Right? No, it’s not all bad. It will be a wonderful adventure even with the aforementioned features, I’m sure. Elber is saintly, and he has a preternatural capacity to remain calm in the face of every variety of breakdown. And… here is a confession: car-rides are my exception to the general rule of no-screens. I will unabashedly load up all the devices I can find with material that skirts that line between as captivating as possible yet still appropriate, for the good of all.
I find myself thinking about good and evil more and more, and what it is to be Good, and what it is to be evil, or to express evil, or to sin, and the ways in which technology is increasingly blurring those lines—again, through the terrible deception that is AI, which continues to unravel in such insidious and demonic ways with its siren-song of ease, and efficiency—which is really just sloth, but as with every stage of this unravelling, as the next layer is revealed, the previous iteration is better understood—of course the internet is everybody and everything and every option all the time….
It’s for these reasons, among others, I know that I need God and repentance, and a framework for how to live, how to be. I need a structure beyond just “mental health” or “wellness” (which is largely vanity) to discipline myself. Yes, I want my children to thrive, and to be well, and to be happy, but actually, I want them to be saved. Not spared, but saved. Especially as a mother, I find myself increasingly compelled and driven by ever-deeper forms and layers of motivation that brings me inexorably to God.
Recently—with the elaboration of social media—there is a performativity to the way that we have come to understand ourselves as mothers, and the widespread obsession with the screen has cultivated this to a significant degree. It’s fascinating and chilling to me, to think about how these platforms—Facebook and instagram, and TikTok—have changed so much. They have changed our ways of being and of seeing ourselves, and this is reflected too in the continuous reconfiguration and redesign of these platforms towards consumption (in a multitude of ways) which is at once insidious and explicit. These technologies culture US—they literally enculturate us, and when the interface changes, incrementally, as it does, we adopt that new interface, often without questioning—or perhaps we do question it, for a moment, but that doesn’t stop us from continuing to participate.
Do you remember when Facebook was a novelty, without any advertising at all, and we were invited into it with so much innocence, before it became the literal marketplace? Back then, 2006, 2007, it was a topic of conversation when Facebook changed its interface. People would get annoyed, and ask Facebook to bring back this or that button, or format. How innocent we were. I noticed just today, that at the top of my instagram “posts you might like” or “discovery” page, what was, just yesterday, the “search” field, now has a plasma-esque spinning pink and purple circle, beside which the words “Ask Meta AI Anything” is written.
I post on Instagram infrequently, but every time I do, I feel deeply conflicted, and I know through my work in birth, and my work in health and healing, that conflict—the double-bind, internal discord, contradiction—is indicative of some form of bypass, and that circumnavigating the truth. The truth of the body, the truth of the soul, has a spiritual and physiological cost. Always.
This is one of the primary themes of my book, PORTAL: The Art of Choosing Orgasmic, Pain-Free, Blissful Birth. PORTAL is a book about God, and life, and truth and suffering and love, and also birth, among other things. In it, I reference Christian Orthodoxy a few times, but my intention was also for it to be… not secular, exactly, because it’s not that at all, but… welcoming to all. But the final manuscript of PORTAL was influenced greatly, I have to say, by my wonderful editor, friend, and former student, Sophia, who is an immensely talented editor and writer, and whose spiritual and theological input and influence—and that of her husband, Christopher, was immensely important to me during the editing of PORTAL. (Speaking of instagram, I encourage you all to follow Sophia at @wildsagewomb.)
Thank you, Yolande - wonderful!