Life and Death in the Jungle

The morning after a surprise and violent tropical storm, the entire town of Nosara, Costa Rica, where my daughter and I were vacationing, was left without power.

Until then, the balcony of our hotel room had been an oasis of tranquility, with cinnamon hummingbirds darting among the birds of paradise and monkeys howling from the jungle canopy. Now, it was a soaking wet mess of broken branches, muddy piles of leaves, drowned insects, and a damaged gutter hanging precariously from the floor above.

As I sat with my morning coffee surveying the devastation, a couple of stranded Halloween crabs crept past my feet. They were followed by a group of tiny ants escorting the carcass of a much larger insect across the wreckage like pallbearers in a funeral procession.

The ants, it seemed, were wasting no time in moving forward.

Samsara, I thought. The cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, the engine of impermanence that defines life on earth. No one and nothing escape it.

The Shaivite Tantric tradition describes this cycle as part of Shiva's five acts, or pañcakṛtya - the cosmic processes continuously at play in the universe. The first three – creation, maintenance, and dissolution - were on full display that morning: the oasis of birds and flowers, the storm, and the wreckage it left behind.

My own losses mirrored the pile of debris in front of me. Over the past two years, my life has also been marked by destruction — the ending of a 20-year marriage and leaving a home I loved. That morning, I felt the sadness and grief of those losses even more acutely.  At the same time, I sensed the emerging promise of what comes next. 

Watching those industrious ants, what struck me most was the sheer persistence of life.  Life keeps unfolding, death is never only an ending. Loss is real and inevitable, but so is renewal.

These reflections didn't take the pain away, but what shifted was my perspective on it.

The fourth of Shiva's five acts is concealment, the veil that obscures the truth of our interconnectedness. Concealment is what makes our losses seem uniquely personal and our separateness seem real. Part of that veil lifted for me that morning. My pain was still my pain, but it no longer felt isolated from the larger rhythms of life unfolding around me.

That opening to clarity, however brief, is Shiva’s fifth act: revelation, also called grace.

This is what yoga points us toward: an inner awareness that lies beneath the ongoing dance of creation and destruction, not separate from the cycle of birth and death, but its steady and abiding ground.

When we touch that awareness within ourselves, we discover the possibility of honoring our pain as natural, and part of a much larger story. It frees us to meet the changing circumstances of our lives while taking refuge in the spacious presence that holds them all.

You only need to watch your breath to remember this. Every inhalation arises, every exhalation subsides. Birth, death, and rebirth, over and over again. Like your breath, the natural world lives this truth effortlessly.  Watching those ants that morning with my coffee going cold, I remembered that we can too.  

Active Hope Book Club - Join me!

The ants in Nosara didn't let the storm stop them from their work of rebuilding. Neither, I think, can we.

Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're in with Unexpected Resilience and Creative Power  by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone is the book that helped me stop turning away from the grief I was carrying for our world. It gave me tools to transform that pain into purposeful action and a whole new way to orient to what we are living through — without going numb — and to find my unique role in the collective transition toward a world that supports the flourishing of life. Learn more and reserve your spot here.