Mushrooms, Jungle, Yoga
Nosara, Costa Rica
Tired of the scalding beach, its acidic sun, the taut, hip surfers like circus stars dancing on the backs of waves, I walk inland in search of shade and quiet and maybe a bit of death. The dusty streets, murderously hot, narrow into muddy jungle paths where ruffled mushrooms sprawl and spoil like raw meat. So bold is their dying. I want to die that way too. Every rotting cell fully engaged in the leaving, drunk with resignation.
Blackbirds on stilts hide in tree limbs and watch me pass.
Leaving the jungle, I see the main tourist road ahead, lined with hibiscus, splayed red throats retching their stamens out. I know where the road goes, to a yoga center whose entrance is exotic and stunning. Fifty stone steps to the top where Ganesh is perched, then ten more where the stone Buddha hovers over the sleek glistening check-in desk and its twittering skinny girls so eager to help. Then five more to the top, an ecstatic emerald pool, a white woman floating on her back like a crucifix in a stiff well-earned delirium. The juice bar loud with volcanic Kale eruptions. Here the long-legged blonde goddesses of Lululemon hold court, curled like cats into padded hammocks in their sleek black leggings.
So I scuttle back down the stairs knowing I’m not quite ready to leave the slouch and sog of the rotting jungle where nothing is tight with anything, just the humble mounds of quasi modo moss draped everywhere. Swamp. Mangrove. Bleeding fairy fungi. Fragile dapperling. Bridal veil stinkhorn. Trooping crumble cap.
In grade school, why did no one tell us to lean down and inhale the ripe rot of our self as we sat washed and preened, stiff as soldiers at our desks and opened our fresh notepads, the white paper cold as milk, and we so earnestly began our noble wars against mortality?
Why did no one tell us to put our pencils down, that we are already gloriously dying and there’s no shame in that. No, children, there’s no shame in death at all.
ADRIE KUSSEROW is the author of three books of poetry – Refuge and Hunting Down the Monk (BOA Editions) and THE TRAUMA MANTRAS: A Memoir in Prose Poems (Duke University Press, 2024) – as well as an ethnography American Individualisms (Palgrave MacMillan). Read more.
Originally published in The Trauma Mantras (Duke UP, 2024).