Paradise

The space in between those imaginary lines, referred to as Tropics, has created that word which we all know so well and which elicits similar and specific imagery for good reason. Tropical. Conjures up palm trees, azure waters, lizards, snakes and maybe the odd monkey, sun and humidity. It's all true - after crossing that magnificent line, The Tropic of Cancer, the changes are immediate, the most obvious being barometric pressure. Simply, what had since been hot and dry is now hot and damp. As anyone who has been through a summer in New York or Chicago, in New Orleans or Miami, in Bogota or Rio or wherever will attest: You'll sweat bullets in this kind of heat. Disregard the FDA's eight 8-oz.-glasses-per-day recommendation, here you'll want four times that. With strenuous cycling, I'll often go through two-gallons-a-day, nearly all lost in sweat! And it doesn't stop when I stop - I made the first-night mistake of sleeping in my down bag and woke up parched and drenched. Whew! But I'll stop with the personal physical evaluation - It's good to be here.
Edward Abbey wrote of the desert, "The strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here...by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity..." I certainly agree, yet i wouldn't say "life crowded upon life" in reference to the (what is here relatively arid) jungle. Everything seems to occupy and be content with it's own space (Who knows? I can't ask the trees and birds!), but it's just everywhere. Mango trees have taken the place of the ubiquitous cacti, green the place of brown-orange-red, the buzzing of insects is now ten-fold and accompanied by the incessant chatter of thousands of birds. It's so full of life - a veritable Garden of Eden. Which brings me to another Abbeyism, which popped into my head as I ecstatically descended a heavily-jungled mountain, en route to San Blas. A canopy of one hundred shades of green flew past overhead, to my left and right, shafts of golden morning sun bursting through. The smells of rotting tropical fruit and burning leaves blew across on the sea breeze. Invisible and unnameable birds sang mysterious songs from all around me. On the horizon, the beautiful Pacific Ocean.
"Paradise is not a garden of bliss and changeless perfection where the lions lie down like lambs and the angels and cherubim and seraphim rotate in endless, idiotic circles, like clockwork, about an equally inane and ludicrous - however roseate - Unmoved Mover... That particular painted fantasy of a realm beyond time and space which Aristotle and the Church Fathers tried to palm off on us has met, in modern times, only neglect and indifference, passing on into the oblivion it so richly deserved, while the Paradise of which I write and wish to praise is with us yet, the here and now, the actual, tangible, dogmatically real Earth on which we stand."
Amen, Brother.