Its not so much the place where I am its about me being in that place

    I miss the howlers, no not the ones from the street, the real ones, the howler monkeys in the jungle trees of Puerto Viejo. I have spent the last two weeks in the Caribbean Coast of Limon, at the beach in Puerto Viejo. I went to volunteer at a Waldorf inspired school and study about happiness in Costa Rica. I have looked at many definitions of happiness and they all seemed to cover many different elements of happiness that I think are all interconnected. When they are all balanced and combined then, I think, that is ultimate happiness. But I am also unsure if that can ever be achieved.
I wrote an e-mail to my mom the other day that brought me to a better understanding of what I have learned. To catch you up, in the last e-mail she wrote me she talked about a pair of ducks fornicating behind her house, Easter and Chocolate, always chocolate. Here’s a little bit of the e-mail mixed in with a better explanation then what I had wrote to her:
Hey mum,
   I am home. It was nice to see the family. A LOT has happened for them in two weeks, which is a little strange to think about, as it has seemed like no time at all for me. It’s Sunday, in the middle of the day and I feel the stress of these next two weeks creeping up on me as well as the itch from all the bug bites I have inherited from living in the Caribbean.
    I think your thoughts on happiness definitely fit into my theory that I have created. I made it into a circle a sort of circle graph with different components of happiness that equal a large overall happiness for a person. So I start out with a person and lead into the lifestyle that they have (if they are living healthily and all the things that naturally go with that) then lifestyle leads into the person’s environment (many of the interviews that I have done in Puerto and based on the study that was done naming Costa Rica the happiest place on earth - they include the very low carbon footprint – shows that having a healthy environment and living in nature is a very important component especially now in a time where the health of the environment is deteriorating). These two categories lead to health. Physically and mentally when things are balanced in a healthy manner then that allows a person to be happy. Health is a broad term that allows, for me, temporary sickness, depression, and life crisis, all those natural events that occur. Your spirituality is another component to happiness. I read a book on Tibetan Buddhism because I was toying with an idea that happiness could merely be a trick of the mind. It turns out I disagreed with a lot of what Buddhism is about because it focused solely on the mind. I do think this is an important part of overall happiness but I did not like the idea of stripping all my emotions and living desires to reach an enlightened state. Although spirituality is complicated for me, I think that a positive attitude and your own belief system are good for peace of mind and a healthy inner life. Then what it all comes back to is the person, the human being, what would we be without each other. My theory becomes full circle from where it starts, us, me, you. I think human connection brings me the most happiness, i journaled every day my happiest moments in Puerto and most of them were about people. There's a reason why isolation is the worst form of torture. All these elements are interconnected and lead back to each other.

   I think I understand you a lot more with the idea "where ever you go there you are". Just looking at your life that principal makes a lot of sense to me now. I think it’s a good thing to look at for my project also because although I struggled with where I was in Puerto and in general being in Costa Rica, it’s like here I am, now do something with it. Its not so much the place where I am its about me being in that place… if that makes sense?
And I love that Maharaji quote ["If you want to look gorgeous, it's not in the makeup. Be with people who love you and you will be gorgeous! Love will not see the flaws”].

  One thing that I did read in the Buddhism book that I really liked was that they do emphasize the brain and the inner world. Making everything outer not important, yes we are physical beings but we are also intellectuals and that is really important because not a lot of other animals, well none (that we know of) have evolved like we have to have this whole other conscious, to be able to conceive of things that we do. LIKE SPACE AND QUANTUM PHYSICS something that I infinitely find interesting but will probably never fully understand. And that’s ok; I think I like the mysteries. That’s why I don't pick a religion, I don't want something to tell me everything, I don’t want to know everything and I know that I can't.
I am attaching a picture from this website that takes pictures of space and post them everyday!

Explanation: The Tarantula Nebula is more than 1,000 light-years in diameter -- a giant star forming region within our neighboring galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). That cosmic arachnid lies left of center in this sharp, colorful telescopic image taken through narrow-band filters. It covers a part of the LMC over 2,000 light-years across. Within the Tarantula (NGC 2070), intense radiation, stellar winds and supernova shocks from the central young cluster of massive stars, cataloged as R136, energize the nebular glow and shape the spidery filaments. Around the Tarantula are other violent star-forming regions with young star clusters, filaments and bubble-shaped clouds. The rich field is about as wide as the full Moon on the sky, located in the southern constellation Dorado.

I want to be able to paint this. I have seen these colors before but I don’t think I could ever replicate them like they show up in this picture. It’s hard to imagine that this is real.

how is the Peace Corp application going?
love you!