Jack Can Save the World

Image credit Consciousazine

Mercury Retrograde  has been finally kicked out on its arse.

What a long three weeks that was. And it did not go quietly at all.

She hung on for dear life with her gnarled toenails hooked into all drama around me and my car.

It was nearly enough to send me to the drink. 

Only I don't drink.

Going way beyond “trusting that everything happens for a reason” I am now practicing radical self love in the form of just damn well loving the shit out of every moment. 

The sun rises over the escarpment to the monkeys and toucans calling out to their loved ones.

Love it.

The rain fills my favourite water hole and I sit under the waterfall massaging my neck. 

Love it.

My car breaks down AGAIN, my phone runs out of minutes so I cant call anyone and my son is at someones house whom I cant contact.

Love it.

I cant get home for two days and end up sleeping on a couch and find myself doing naked yoga in the forest.

Love it.

My son comes home dosed up on flu like symptoms and is grumpy and feeling sorry for himself. Love it.

Love it all. 

Why the hell not.

Not loving it only causes me to feel upset, angry and confused. I have spent way too much of my life feeling that way..so now it is time to feel this way. In Love With It All. No need to trust, no need to hope, just pure LOVE baby!!!

As soon as Mercury left its retrograde chaos where we all had the chance to renew, revisit and recharge I personally went into re wild mode under the full moon of May that reached from Libra to Taurus. An auspicious full moon, known as the Wesak full moon, it celebrates the birth, enlightenment and death of Lord Buddha, formally known as Siddhartha.

We are certainly in for some changes on the planet as it is time to shift our attention onto new role models.

As the paradigm shifts we shall see trends in the world where men are daring to live their femininity and are not held back by the social dictation anymore and do what they feel and not just what they think is right for them.  

Aho  to that !! I am so ready for that one and will be celebrating any man I find along my path that dances and eats fruit naked !!

Speaking of fruit, I want to talk about Jack Fruit.

My new love. 

Not only is it a taste sensation to rock your world with the flesh being used for ice creams, smoothies and curries whilst the seeds are used for flour and hummus, it is being hailed as the miracle crop and could be the solution to worldwide food insecurity saving the world from hunger.

No wonder I am in love with Jack !!!

Consuming 10 to 12 bulbs of the fruit you don't actually need to eat for half a day.

It is the largest tree borne fruit on the planet and grows up to 35 kg in Asia...

that is a lot of fruit!! A good source of dietary fiber, protein calcium and iron it could possibly replace crops such as wheat and corn due to its high calorie content.

I generally make ice cream from it but whilst I was cooking for an awesome group of people during the “Secret Energy' retreat with “Sevan Bomar” I branched out and made a rocking curry and a “to die for” birthday cake.

One person went as far as to say it was the best cake they have ever eaten !!!

Oh my love for Jack only deepens.

 

With all of this going for it I have added hugging jack fruit to my loving routine along side of hugging trees, my son and myself.

Generally eating a truck load of fruit is not entirely a bad thing. 
In fact peoples lives are devoted to it with retreats designed solely around eating fruit and entire festivals where you can go and eat a truck load of fruit !! Woodstock has one and so does Costa Rica. In fact I am going to the one in Costa Rica to massage and cover people in the fruit of chocolate !!

The rainy season is upon us.

 Filling up my favourite water hole, greening all that is around us, making soil into mud and putting a stop to afternoon activities.

With the rainy season comes damp conditions both inside and outside of the body.

Neighbours are dropping like flies with the Flu including my son, who is normally climbing trees like a monkey.

So I went into the forest to find us some medicine.

Food foraging is one of my new favourite things to do.

This morning I found a small and sweet pineapple, I dug up turmeric and ginger, collected katuk greens and picked up the pipa ( coconut ) that fell out of the tree last night by our kitchen window.

With all of these ingredients I blended them up to make juices, one green with the katuk and one without it to make some super powerful flu fighting drinks.

Combined, turmeric, ginger and black pepper provides a great immune boosting injection of goodness. 

And so does more hugging. Always hug more. Laugh more and love more.

Yes Life Is Awesome.

Australia to Costa Rica

Australia to Costa Rica

As Published in The CostaRicaNews

http://thecostaricanews.com/ 

Raising my son on the road.

This is the third time we have been to Costa Rica and this time we are here to stay.
According to my son whom is about to turn ten years old next week, we are not moving.
Well he isn’t.
I am free to keep on travelling and visiting other countries if I want to but for now he is staying put.

He declared this to me a few weeks ago whilst we were lazing in hammocks on our balcony overlooking the forest that lay between us and the not so distant ocean view.
In our hands we held the first pick of the guanoabana season.
To be more precise the guanoabana was dripping all over our hands,fingers and arms whilst running down our chins.

I have not been taken by such a delightful and heart stopping taste sensation of a fruit since I tried the  perfect Lucuma in Peru two years ago. And that experience was like eating soft fluffy caramel.

The delectable sweet white flesh of the guanoabana tasted better than any sort of ice-cream I have ever had. Until this experience I had never seen one or known that this fruit existed.

Exotic Mangoes

Back in my home country of Australia growing up in the eighties and nineties mango was the most exotic and sought after fruit around. If you were lucky that is.
Here in the mountain range between Dominical and Perez Zeledon , at an average of 700 colones per kilo ( about  $1.40 ) in our local surrounding markets mangoes are as common as apples use to be.

Where we live in this small community of a mix bunch of both foreigners and locals alike, everyone is excited for guanoabana season.
The fruit is regarded as a treasure.
Eyes glaze over whilst smiles broaden at the mere mention of eating one.
  Our house is surrounded by trees that grow the fruit and we spend each day keeping a close eye on the large green bulging spiky balls of deliciousness making sure we spot the perfect time to pick them before the Toucans get to them first.

This is how I saw that the fist guanoabana was ready to pick. A huge toucan flew above and rested in a branch not far from where I was sitting. Dribbling out of its huge colourful bill was the white flesh of the fruit. I retraced a path from where the toucan had flown and found a half eaten very ripe guanoabana about to fall from its branch.

Jack Pot. 

Rescuing what was left I spent the afternoon in fruit heaven with my son beside me declaring his love of this country and his complete non interest of moving.

And I have to say I can’t blame him.
We left Australia three years ago after making a relatively easy and for all tense and purposes quick decision that life in the west was not for us.
Sitting on the floor of the small shop in the industrial estate of Byron Bay in New South Wales from where I was attempting to run a clothing label business, my then six year old son and I made plans to sell everything and leave.
Life in Australia was typically geared towards the need to work more for more consumption and it was glaring down at me way too brightly for my liking.
Leaving was only the real plan we had.
 The mere act of packing up and flying out would surely set in motion the realisation of where we would need to go.

No fixed plans 

 

 

With no fixed plans at all we spent three months in Bali followed by three weeks in France and Belgium visiting grandparents to then arrive in San Jose just after my sons seventh birthday.

Having never set foot onto Central America before strangely enough nothing felt out of place at all.
Feeling at ease as if we were at home we quickly found our forest groove living in an intentional community outside of Nosara in the Guanacaste area.
Never being one to have worn shoes even in cities such as Brisbane or Sydney and definitely not on the island of Bali in Indonesia, my son found his kindred posse of young boys with bare feet and wild long hair amongst the howler monkeys running through the over growth of dense greenery.
Tarzan, Mogly and Peter Pan all seemed to be gathered in the one spot and it happened to be close to the small wooden cabin with no walls we then called home. 

 

After six months of a simple but wild life of beach days, hot days and intense rainy days filled with snakes, monkeys, humming birds and turtles we decided to go to Peru to live for awhile. Although he had learnt to speak many words of German and Hebrew, community living was not giving my son the chance to learn Spanish. It was time to go further south on the continent and try some mountain living and local village integration for the chance to grasp the Spanish language.

Two years later

That was exactly two years ago now.
Back in the warm climate of this lush land of Costa Rica no on can quite pick where we are from. I use to live in Paraguay decades ago where I learnt my Spanish and still can be heard to have an Argentinian tilt of an accent from a marriage in my late twenties.
Constantly jumping from his Peruvian street twang to the local slur of the “Tico tongue” many now believe that my son was born here. I am proud to say that no one ever guesses we are Australian. From Brazil maybe, and not often asked if we are from the US of A , our origins are a constant flux of conversation.

So for now Costa Rica it is.
With local food markets that are like theme parks with new rides and sights each time we go, the extensive variety of fresh fruit and vegetables alone are enough to keep us here.
We drink fresh water straight from the spring and every sunrise is accompanied with the sound of howler monkeys on the ridge.
Birds of every colour, butterflies as large as my hands and wild horses grace our every day.
Brightly coloured frogs, lizards as green as can be and insects the size of small mammals are everywhere.
Armadillos come by noisily at night rummaging through the pile of opened coconuts that lay beside our house.
The surrounding nature is a living playground with the animals as the characters that keep us highly intrigued, entertained and in constant awe.

Life in our little patch of paradise here in Costa Rica is rich with surprises, intense colour and constant joy. Pure Vida may be the local catch cry to describe everything from health, state of mind and the weather, but our life is a pure life in deed when we get to live in surroundings so alive and incredibly beautiful.
I am with my son on this one.
There is no need to move and for now Costa Rica is definitely our home.




Hailing originally from Australia Melissa has been traveling the world on and off for the past twenty five years.
A blogger, chocolate maker, clothes designer and fresh water lover her biggest passion is raising her beautiful and wild son with the world as their classroom.
Currently living in Costa Rica and writing her first book you can find her on Instagram and Facebook as “yeslifeisawesome”.