Here at Karuna, the afternoon is dimming. Gaps between the polarized clouds reveal a few patches of still fabulously blue sky. Some other part of the world is waking up to the light we are losing. Somewhere over there I imagine someone watches the day being born as I watch it slip away into a living rainbow that becomes the night. A sunset’s majesty is a gradual masterpiece that wakes up the art within you.

The river’s babble is especially lively due to a healthy downpour that droned me to sleep last night. The house held strong despite the deluge and in the morning I rose a few moments before dawn to inhale a thick petrichor, as glorious an aroma as this nose knows.

My eyes move from the sky to the bright colors of Tibetan prayer flags dancing in the breeze, contrasted against the failing light. I brought these from Dharamsala, India when the house here was only bamboo sticks in the earth.

The flags hang from The Hanuman Tree, a massive jocote tree I’ve fallen for. What happens when you fall in love with a tree? It’s like falling in love with your own life.

To me this tree, roughly my age, represents the heart of our land at Karuna. Around it and beneath its expansive branches I’ve have set up our outdoor classroom.

There are six jocote trees at Karuna, but the Hanuman Tree is the most stirring, with six branches emerging from the trunk and reaching radially across the property. She is likely the mother to the other five Jocote trees.

But The Hanuman Tree isn’t doing so well. So here’s yet another practice of loving reality regardless of her pock marks. She’s losing about half of her fruit to early ripening and has lost half her leaves. I asked three different people who might know why this is and they gave me three different explanations. This is where learning in Guatemala begins, sifting through the different conjectures, hunches, stories, guesses, and bs until a gem of understanding emerges.

Back to Being Back in Guatemala

Now that I’ve gone from getting back here to being back, things are in good stead in the development of this project that’s now two and a half years in the dreaming and creating.

We have an ambitious building plan for the next six weeks. Our biggest constraint right now is budget. We are down to a small one, and I’m currently directing all of my income towards it. So I am being agile with our finances, putting necessary things in their place as we transition from a building site to a community. I‘ve watched our project pass 100 critical thresholds, and can see us passing through the next 100 irrevocable stages.

Amid this forward moving, I am also savoring what Karuna is now — the fledging of a beautiful sanctuary where life can settle into a routine that feeds passion, creativity, and purpose.

In that sense, my focus is also on myself. If I can’t nurture the best in me here, it’s a hopeless cause. So I’m focused on finding my fullness in all the places I’ve learned to look for it.

Here I have space, both physical and temporal, to nourish the art within. It is appropriate that last week, after six years of carrying my novel “The Release of Jerry the Hamster”, that it was here at Karuna, beneath the Hanuman tree, that this work of my heart of hearts was finished.

Feeling the beat of my artist’s heart is the most intimate feeling I know. I feel no separation from it and the deepest connection to this body’s mind, soul, and purpose. At times troubled, sometimes discarded, often thwarted, a creator of many unfinished works and worlds—it’s there pleading in sickness and in health to be allowed to lead.

So I’ve taken to every Sunday setting a weekly retreat schedule for myself to begin embodying what this space is built to nurture in others — fully awake creative beingness, artists in stride with their creativity.

Karuna, what began as a small cabin for me to run away to and write uninterrupted, has evolved into a place to invite the whole world to. What Karuna will ultimately be is a story to be told by others who create, craft and commune within the space we are opening to them.

Lying in a hammock now, I think back to conversations from a few years ago that led to me being here today. I see as clearly as the crimson clouds how our hearts fuel the motion that leads us. If we allow it, this motion will take us past any obstacles into the embodied dreams that intersect the edge of our imagination.

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If you enjoy my blog, please check out my latest poetry release, “All the Beloved Known Things”