Sense-Memory

a (long and long-overdue) travelogue

My body was slicked with sweat again. The thin sheets soaked. It was 5 am. The roosters were doing their thing, and loudly. A lone mosquito had slipped under the mesh net at some point in the night. I could hear its dull ring and swatted around my face. I soon would feel my body balloon with pink bites, adding to the achy constellations at my ankles. It had been nearly a month, but I still wasn’t used to what felt like a chaotic wake up. I rolled out of bed and dropped a slick bar of soap and bottle of generic shampoo into a plastic bag. I padded across the field toward the shower: a garden hose draped over the edge of a wooden shed, a patch of gravel concealed with a blue tarp. The cool water pebbled my skin, temporarily easing my stinging legs and cleansing away the humidity that clung to me. Once dressed, I grabbed my clippers and headed to the sprawling tulsi paths, pruning the browning flowers, cutting away the dead parts of the plant. The farm woke slowly while I finished my morning chores: tend the fruit forest. Give water to the horses. Transfer manure and crisp leaves to the compost. Gather offerings from the almond tree. Rub the eager bellies of cats and dogs caravanning the property. The last one wasn’t technically a chore, but still, a necessity. 

This month marks four years since I flew to Puerto Rico to apprentice on a permaculture farm with a woman I randomly met on the internet. Little seeds of curiosity had accumulated over the years - an herbal medicine course I took on the weekends for a year at a cabin in northern Idaho. A stint working on a vegetable farm in the Puget Sound. And how, while living and working on that farm, I stumbled upon a woman named Jey who stewarded a farm focused on herbalism and Ayurveda in Hatillo, Puerto Rico. As I ended my stay in Washington, I emailed her, asking if I could come be her apprentice, not thinking too hard about the details. And after a few back-and-forth exchanges, she said yes. It almost doesn’t feel real to me now, looking back, that there was a time so recently in my life where I was acutely in tune with where my curiosities were leading me, and wholeheartedly trusted they would work themselves out. 

I landed in San Juan on New Year’s Eve, still without a set date to arrive on the farm, located about an hour and a half outside the capital. I had booked a fairly inexpensive hotel and when I arrived, found out they had upgraded my room! I eagerly hauled my backpack of mostly overalls and old t-shirts up a few flights of stairs and unlatched the door “Are you kidding me?!” I squealed as I dropped my stuff and danced around the room. It wasn’t a room, not really. It was a sprawling indoor/outdoor oasis with views of the neighborhood, private outdoor shower, three hammocks, and a king-sized bed. I flopped on the bed, reveling in my good luck. 

The little restaurant at the hotel was hosting a five course dinner for New Year’s Eve, so I took a shower and put on the nicest thing I brought with me. Once downstairs and seated solo at my table, I suddenly realized the entire patio was filled with couples. Lights were strung up around the garden. Candles glimmered on tables. Beautiful women were dressed in sheer black mini dresses with their partner’s hands resting on their upper thighs. Okay, that was one woman, but it was painful how stunning she was. And speaking of it, every single person in this goddamn place was hot. Or maybe I was just woefully single. I had brought a book with me and was trying hard to just be cool and nonchalant and not look at my phone too much. I’ve eaten by myself at a number of restaurants and have sat alone at bars, but I had never felt this kind of alone. Even my waiter was tall with curly black hair and a coy smile that shifted on his face in a way that felt particularly pitying. I was eating a five course meal on a candle-lit patio in a tropical paradise and was itching to escape back to my room where I could put on pajamas and watch tv in bed and save everyone the misery of seeing someone alone in public pretending to enjoy their own company. But I was trying to - enjoy my own company. I enjoyed the garlicky mushrooms. The plantains fried in coconut oil with caramelized edges hugging their pale centers. I enjoyed the full moon hung up in the black sky. I enjoyed stealing glances at the young people working at the hotel, sending flirty eyes to one another as they passed back and forth through the kitchen doors. I enjoyed my legs and the miles they would walk around the city in the coming days. I enjoyed my hope of apprenticing myself to something interesting, and that it would be slightly less solitary.

That night, I finished rewatching old episodes of New Girl in bed and a few days later finally arrived at the farm. A car dropped me off at the end of a dirt road. At the gate were two dogs, three horses and a woman with long auburn hair and a bandana tied around her torso as a shirt. “Hola chica,” she called out, “bienvenida!” as she cracked the gate for me to shuffle through without the animals getting out. When she wrapped me in a tight hug, I immediately began to panic about my lackluster Spanish. I soon realized I wouldn’t have an issue. Jey was chatty in all things English, Spanish, Ayurveda, horses, farming, everything. She lived in Miami for a number of years and had moved back to this neighborhood to be close to her family and start her permaculture vision. The vision that I was now beholding! I looked around at the lush property and saw only green.

She walked me to an old shipping container where I would be staying for the couple months I’d be on the farm, told me to get comfortable, and that she’d be making us some dinner. I set my bag down and looked around. A small table with two chairs, a hammock. A bed draped in a mosquito net and dresser. No real doors. One of the dogs had followed me into the container and was wagging its tail against my shins. “Hi buddy,” I stooped down and offered some belly scratches. I would learn his name was Cúrcuma, after the abundant turmeric growing around the property.

My days on the farm soon slipped into a familiar rhythm. Folks came and went in different forms. A young couple from Miami stayed for a couple weeks. They were incredibly cool. I can’t remember their connection to the farm, but one of their mom’s was in a Cuban band Afrobeta that Jey knew in Miami. Like I said, very cool. They were recent college grads with hot bods inked up with tattoos and a film camera ready to take on the city. And they were not shy about anything, least of all their attraction to one another. Which was annoyingly sexy, or sexily annoying? I gawked on as he grabbed her ass while she squatted around an avocado tree layering compost. As they spooned in the hammock, whispering. As she combed her fingers through his hair after plucking out a small leaf caught in the curls.

---

Every week, Jey hosted a course where people drove to the farm for a long afternoon to learn about Ayurveda and spend time working around the property. This is how I met Dani, a woman my age who was finishing up a sustainable agriculture degree program near where she grew up in Utuado. She wore loose psychedelic pants and strappy crotchet tops. She had short curly bangs and twirled the rest of her hair on the top of her head in a way that said “yes, I could be a supermodel, but right now I’m shoveling horse manure because I’m also hot for composting, so what?” After class one day, she generously offered to drive me and a few others to a secret beach, which was a huge win because I didn’t have a car, and the beach was too far to walk. She tied a sheer cotton slip around her waist, grabbed her hula hoop and speaker from her trunk and we set out for the sea. My skin drank the humid air like water into thirsty soil. I stopped at a stand on the way to the beach to have a man in the back of a rusty pickup hack off the end of a coconut and hand it to me with a straw. I didn’t really care that it made me look like a tourist, I just wanted the hydration. If I was alone, at least I’d be dewy. We popped out onto a sandy bluff through a cluster of mangroves. Everyone slicked off their clothes, revealing slinky bikinis and I silently chastised myself for not owning a sexier swimsuit. Or any clothes really that might suggest I had a body. 

After dipping in the water, Dani put on a reggaeton mix and started hooping. By that I mean mesmerizing everyone by twirling the hoop in smooth motions, gliding it round and round her body to the music. I’d seen videos of girls on Instagram dance like this with a hula hoop, but never in real life. She flowed seamlessly, like she was skating over ice, not walloping the thick sand the way I had when I tried it. 

“Really push your hips out into it,” she encouraged me, when, to my embarrassment, I was offered the hoop for a spin. Push your hips out into it?! Oh God, I thought. I either thrusted my hips around too fast, awkwardly jerking it side to side before it dropped to my feet, or swirled too slow, overly emphasizing my movements, but never hitched the hoop to my rhythm. Or lack of rhythm. It’s like everywhere around me since I’d been here was asking me, “you know you have a body, right? So why are you so afraid of it?” 

My days on the farm dwindled down. I hung a final batch of laundry up to dry. I savored my assorted breakfasts, gathered from the fruit forest. Tart passionfruit, juicy papayas, tiny and tender bananas eaten while swinging in my hammock, reading a book I picked up from Jey’s shelf: Earth and Spirit: Medicinal Plants and Healing Lore from Puerto Rico. Here, I learned to wrap a bundle of dried tulsi in a leaf from the rainbow eucalyptus and light it on fire to cleanse my sleeping quarters of mosquitos. I learned to chew a neem leaf for clear skin and use the tree’s skinny twigs as makeshift floss. I learned to crush what Jey taught me to call oregano brujo and mix the soft leaves with fruit and water to make a menthol-y drink to rehydrate during a scorching day. I learned to soothe the wiley teenaged rooster by picking him up and stroking the back of his neck. I learned where cashews come from and how you can eat the astringent fruit around the seed like an apple. I learned to make a passiflora tincture with the passionfruit flowers that looked like they’d been plucked from a Georgia O’Keefe painting, extract them in local rum and take a teaspoon before bed for peaceful (magical) dreams.

I couldn’t believe how imaginative Jey was. Every ailment had an answer from the earth. Every problem posed an opportunity for creativity, not outsourced consumption. I had spent my weeks integrating not into one new culture, or even two, but another third way - what Jey affectionately deemed Ayurrican. Her own personal blend of Puerto Rican and Ayurveda, from a woman who had spent years studying in India, living in the melting pot city of Miami, and devoting her life to the earth and Krishna - proving you can be as many things as you want. You really can build a creative life sourced from all that matters to you if you want to. Here was my proof.

Being here was inviting me to apprentice to new ways of being. To try on her devotion by placing an offering under an image of a Hindu god’s blue body and singing a chant I could never remember. To wake at dawn and pick whatever was ripe for breakfast. To forgo makeup and instead peel open a pod from the achiote tree, rub the bright red seeds into my palm and dab my cheeks with the pigment.

Everything I was experiencing was foreign to me. Not in the way wandering around a new city is foreign, but the way touching a lover for the first time is foreign. Holding something alive in your hands, drawing it toward you, remembering with the body. I was learning about different plants and processes on the farm, but at the end of the day, the knowledge lived in my body. The tart guava. The sensation of running my hands along the branches of the pomegranate tree to feel which branches to cut back. Brushing the horses’ thick necks. I was apprenticing to a new growing climate and a new culture, but at the same time, I was apprenticing to a new body.

At the end of my stay, I was ready to leave the cold garden hose shower and compost toilet. Dani had invited me to stay with her and her partner for a few days once I left the farm. I hugged Jey goodbye, with a deep gratitude for all she had so generously taught me. She smelled like tulsi.

“You’re part of the farmilia now, Makita,” she affectionately referred to me and dotingly called the people on her farmstead. “Come back anytime.” I made the rounds to say goodbye to Muñeca (the pony), Curcúma (the dog), and the rest of the cats, bunnies, chickens, ducks, and other animals I had grown fond of, floating around the finca, still a little in awe of whatever strange intuition that led me here, and an even greater awe that I had followed it.

On my last night with Dani, we walked from her beachside apartment just outside of Rincón down to the ocean. We sat together and watched the sun pull away from a sighing horizon, the waves relatively still, slipping into the sand. She lit a joint she pulled from her pocket and we passed it back and forth in silence. That week she had taken me to a swimming hole where we stripped down and covered our bodies in clay dug up from under the rocks in the water and watched the sun dry it to our skin. I met her friends and partners (or partners who were also friends or friends who were also partners?) at a bonfire and watched her hula hoop around her house to cool music I’d never heard before. I was apprenticing to a new life here too. One where I learned the ways of a woman who owed nothing to anyone, and everything to her pleasure.

“So you really never just fuck someone for fun without dating them first?” She broke her meditative stare and turned to me. She had been asking about my love life earlier — me being a single traveler and her, my local guide. It seemed she was caught up in the details of my prudish dating life and was trying to coax more out of me. I looked down at the sand, tugging on the sides of my bangs I was still growing out - the awkward result of a mental-break-down pandemic impulse. I had felt like Mandy Moore in A Walk to Remember this whole trip, the humidity plastering my stringy bangs to my forehead. I oscillated between shoving it under a hat and praying to the hair gods after a cold garden shower. And maybe the part about Mandy Moore’s character being the reserved reverend’s daughter in contrast to her rebellious teenage love interest, Landon. Dani was the Landon Carter to my Jamie Sullivan, minus obviously the teenage romance and high stakes terminal cancer diagnosis. But still, it was like by being around her, she was building me a telescope and saying, look at all this sky.

“No, I don’t know, I guess that just doesn’t sound fun to me,” I responded, not entirely sure if I believed my answer in the moment or that was what just came out. She listened and sighed, exhaling a cloud of smoke. What I didn’t know how to say to Dani was: how do you do it? How do you always live from a place of desire when it feels so easy to forget the body as the animal it is — here for only a little while, and so hungry with want?

But even if I had asked Dani, she couldn’t answer for me. I wanted an answer to transform me into the person I thought coming here might make me. Always I wanted someone to give me a map, their map, any map, rather than tune into my own internal navigation system. I was far from home, but not far enough from the insecurities fogging up the compass. I was experiencing something new, but I was the same me, so the story goes. Here I was, apprenticing myself to nature without being able to make the leap that after all, I was nature. And wasn’t I worth apprenticing myself to?

Recently, I was listening to Martha Beck discuss something called sense-memory therapy. She was recovering from a severe sinus infection where she completely lost her sense of smell and was trying out a practice where you reconnect to the experience of smell. So, she’d hold a lemon to her nose, close her eyes, and conjure the sour citrus in her mind. In another instance, after struggling with achy joints, a physical therapist told her to remember a time when her joints didn’t ache and try to really feel it in her body. She called to mind a certain tree she’d climbed hundreds of times as a child. She said, to her disbelief, her ache dissipated.

The mind is the center of such strange power. I understand the way turning our attention to what we long to feel draws the reality of it toward us. In the same way continuously living in states of fear with no present biological threat wires the brain and body to anxiety. Plunging myself back into deep sense-memories from years ago doesn't feel like a daydream. It feels like a tool of creative survival. Hello body, remember pleasure? Remember even, the longing for pleasure? Remember rinsing the red clay from your chest under a cool spring? Remember the smell of cacao laying out to dry in the sun? Remember the thrill of chasing a red-hot intuition? Remember?

Maybe travel doesn’t necessarily change us. Maybe it creates a bank of sensory experience we can always access when we need to remind ourselves of how many different ways there are to be in the world. How brave we can be. How many ways there are to feel good while we’re here.

After coming home from Puerto Rico I bought a hula hoop, certain that activity would be the thing to help me remember my body as something wild. I followed a few YouTube videos but soon got bored and frustrated with how awkward I felt. I realized hula hooping was Dani’s thing, not mine. It was only a symbol of something I wanted to feel but couldn’t name. The hoop moving in sync with the body was a kind of force of creative ease. What I really wanted was to hurl myself toward what made me feel alive and find myself steady at the center of how I’m meant to live. I think that’s what I’m still trying to do.

Nowadays, in the heart of winter, I remember to close my eyes. I call the pleasure of a ripe mango to my mind, my hands, my tongue. I mine my body for memory, I draw it toward me.

---

Mangoes

On the farm I learned to ease a mango from 
the tree, pluck it straight into my palm. Peel 
the leathered skin like a welcome. Eat it barefoot 
in the field, gnawing the sweet from the core. 

There are ways I used to be brave that now 
feel impossible – shedding a religion, sleeping alone 
under stars, staying alive for an unknown future.

Maybe that’s how it is, growing older. Shrinking, 
little by little from all that’s possible. But God, 
I want to reach for life while it's slippery. Wrestle it 
into my hands the way I learned all those years ago – 
like it’s a wet heart, willing to give what it can give.

---