How Costa Rica Invites Spiritual Travel
Costa Rica has a way of softening us. The humidity slows the body. The forest insists on attention. Coffee is brewed slowly. Even pura vida feels less like a phrase and more like a spiritual orientation: be here, fully, with what is.
What Is Spiritual Travel?
Spiritual travel isn’t about escaping real life, it’s about journeying with presence. Costa Rica’s landscapes create the perfect conditions for reflection and pause, if we create the space. This is not a place that rewards rushing. It rewards noticing.
Poetry as a Practice of Presence While Traveling
One way to travel spiritually is to bring words that open us up to presence and wonder. Poems do this especially well. They ask us to pause, to listen, to feel before we interpret, an experience Jewish theologian Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel famously called radical amazement.
Radical Amazement and Noticing the World Anew
Heschel taught that the beginning of spiritual life is not certainty or belief, but curiosity, the capacity to be startled by existence itself. Radical amazement is the opposite of taking the world for granted. It is the practice of standing before reality and saying, this did not have to be, and yet here it is.
Costa Rica practically trains us in this discipline.
Not sure where to begin your journey? Learn about the best beaches in Guanacaste.
Poems to Carry While Traveling
Poems do this especially well. A line from Walt Whitman or a haiku by Matsuo Bashō doesn’t explain a landscape, it creates space to encounter it. Read these once and move on or return to them again and again as you change.
Walt Whitman
from Song of the Open Road
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
Matsuo Bashō
Haiku
Every day is a journey,
and the journey itself is home.
Emma Lazarus
from “Fruits of the Sea”
Until we learn to reverence every gift
Of life, we cannot know true happiness.
Gerald Stern
from “The Dancing” (excerpt)
There are things we live among “and to see them
is to know ourselves.”
Bringing Presence Home After the Journey
Bringing presence home often looks simple: a few quiet minutes, a pen, and a place to write. Bringing presence home often looks simple: a few quiet minutes, a pen, and a place to write. Journaling can help you clarify thoughts, process your emotions, and make intentional choices on your current trip, and the next!
I’ve linked a few travel-friendly journals I like below.
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