Costa Rica: Feb 24 2017 10:30AM

Yesterday the world was expanded. It howled itself open wide to me. Once I let go emotionally and literally as I ziplined through the Costa Rican jungle, leaning back on "Pepe el Pollo," letting the young guide support me and accepting I was safe as he said, "Come on mommy, look around. Fly! Pura vida!" then I saw. The ocean one way, the mountains the other way, the deep jungle below, the sky all around. It was all holding me up, cradling me like its baby.

Today I squatted down to get a closer look at what was going on in the tide pools by the beach. I stared for 30 minutes? Two hours? Time stopped. In one crevice just the size of my two scooped hands I saw shells come to life, hair follicle legs popped out and they took their miniscule steps to move an eighth of an inch. Fish the size of a pins sliced through the still water. From the soft sand, a pinprick sized air bubble burst and water sprouted up--a volcano for those tiny creatures nearby. Tracks, holes, nooks, ledges, depths, and sun spot sparkles. All in this pool the size of my foot. How easy to walk past it and never see, never know that it has the same power to widen the world as ziplining through the jungle.

The things that came to mind make no sense at all yet make every kind of sense. My baby daughter's pinky finger just a whisper of flesh. A canyon in a California desert that was pelted and molded by thousands of years of wind and rain yet was unmovable at its core and offered me shade on a hike with my mom. Driving down the river road with my dad in Colorado, silently saying everything to each other. A random, happy howl from my son on an otherwise quiet Sunday afternoon at home, just saying, "We are here!"