Living in the Light

“How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world.” ― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

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You can listen to me read this essay here:

It’s Easter weekend so it’s a good time for an inspirational essay.

I am surrounded by beauty! One week ago, I was in Los Angeles and now, here I am, in this paradise, Lake Arenal.

Okay, there are a few bugs, too. Actually, a lot of bugs. Look at this incredible bug.

Someone told me it’s a cuckoo wasp. It doesn’t sting, thank goodness—well, it’s dead for one thing. It looks like some sort of metallic drone, except it isn’t. No gene edited bug, curtesy of Bill Gates, or robotic bug curtesy of our military, could ever compare with the wonder of this natural bug. Being here in the jungles of Costa Rica reminds me beyond a shadow of a doubt how perfect the balance of nature is, and how crazy these earthly overlords are to think they can improve on it.

I was just reading about these Canadian “super pigs” that are invading the United States from the north. They are a mix of domestic pigs and wild boars, that were originally crossbred to help farmed pigs grow larger and tolerate the cold temperatures of Canada. Great idea, right?

Well, they are now running wild and multiplying at an alarming rate. They are highly intelligent, hard to kill, and they will eat just about anything. They’ve been out of control since the 1980s and have been causing harm to ecosystems, spreading diseases and even killing animals larger than themselves. The pigs are able to survive and reproduce at temperatures that would have killed off other types of livestock, and they can tunnel under the snow to create nests in cattail marshes.

But hey, it seemed like such a good idea at the time. Sort of like Bill Gates’ genetically modified mosquitoes. Last summer in Los Angeles, I never saw so many mosquitoes nor such aggressive ones. It was brutal. In Phoenix, for the first time, the mosquitoes were terrible. Before that, I don’t recall ever being bitten by a mosquito in Phoenix.

Please don’t let Bill Gates lose in a rain forest. He’d probably think he had to fix it. Like getting rid of the dangerous bugs. Genetically engineer some tomatoes so they could grow here. What a bozo. Fruits like pineapples thrive because they have such a thick protective covering while tomatoes are eaten by bugs. People used to eat only what was native to the environment in which they lived. Maybe we should go back to that. We indulged our every whim and now, they want us to eat bugs! If we just lived in harmony with the land, we wouldn’t have had any of these problems in the first place.

My first night here, I spied a gigantic scorpion scuttling away under the front door, so I smashed it. Yes, I know it was on its way out, but I don’t mess with scorpions. I didn’t want it coming back—and bringing its friends. Now, I stuff toilet paper under the door at night. Problem solved.

A lot of killing goes on in this beautiful place. But then, that’s life, too. Life and death, that’s reality.

But no mosquitoes here. See? There’s always something to be thankful for. There’s always something good to be found, if you’re open to it. Yes, I write dark essays like, The Three Faces of Evil, I, Zombie, and Cool Cannibals, but that’s not where I live. I live in the light. And I write to shed that light on the darkness. At least, I do the best that I can.

Right now, it’s dark outside. The rain was falling but now it’s stopped. So many noises. First the downpour and now the sounds of life can be heard. This place is teaming with life. You can feel it. All those bugs chirping and the creatures slithering. At around 4 am the howling monkeys start. The first time I heard them, I thought they were some sort of demons haunting the jungle. In the morning, you can see them everywhere, hanging in the trees. By daybreak, the birds are squawking up a storm. Someone saw a puma lounging on a branch the other day.

I’ve seen two rainbows so far. Here’s one of them.

Up on the hill are the goats.

I’ve come to Costa Rica to live in nature once again and to focus more intently on my writing. Besides my Substack essays and interviews, I need to finish the sequel to my science fiction novel, Luminaria—some of you will be very happy to hear that. And I need to finish Land of Talismans, the fourth book in my YA fantasy series, Night Angels Chronicles.

Along with all of that, I’m working on a story about the Anthrax vaccine and the military. I’m very taken with this story and looking forward to sharing it when it’s finished. It will be a while since it requires a lot of research and in-depth interviews.

Living here, there’s no commercialization of Easter, so you wouldn’t even know it was a holiday—no gaudy easter candy or eggs or bunnies. Growing up, Easter was an important holiday for my family. Of course, as a child, what I loved most was the Easter basket Mom put next to my bed while I was sleeping so I could discover it first thing when I woke up.

Below is a picture of me (the smaller girl) and my siblings all dressed up for Easter Sunday. You can see I don’t look very happy. I didn’t like all the fuss. It was so important to my mom that we looked perfect for meeting (we didn’t call it church). She sewed my clothes and my sister’s clothes, too. Who does that anymore? I had to learn how to sew, but I was terrible at it.

There was always a scrumptious midday meal after meeting. Some sort of roast and potatoes and vegetables and homemade pies. We all had to help prepare the meal and cleanup afterwards.

Nowadays, many of these traditions are lost. Families don’t sit down to eat together. I was shocked when I got older and saw how other families ate dinner in front of the TV and how they kept the TV on all the time. We were never allowed to do that.

Oh—just killed another bug. They have hard, protective bodies, like armor. I have to really whack them a few times with my shoe. I wonder if the military is experimenting on creating hybrid soldiers with bug-like traits. I wouldn’t put it past them.

Real life is always a challenge, but which of us would have it any other way? I wouldn’t have anything to write about if I hadn’t lived such a rich life all these years. I wouldn’t have any wisdom to share. Nothing I had to say would ring true. There is certainly more to life than obsessing about the antics of Elon Musk and his desire to drill holes in our brains, or Dr. Fauci and his gain-of-function funding, or Dr. Yuval Harari and his warnings about AI and transhumanism, or CBDCs and the biosecurity state, or the WHO and the next pandemic, or bioweapons and World War III.

The list of nightmares they inflict on us with gets longer by the day. The nightmares threaten to become realer than reality itself. But we cannot let them. We must hold onto the beauty of the world around us. Tomorrow is Easter, a day to remember the greatest story ever told. The story of Jesu’s death and resurrection. I was just talking to a Jewish friend of mine who was telling me all the traditions her family follows for Passover, remembering the liberation of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery. She read me a beautiful passage from the Passover Haggada and I’d like to share it with these pictures of Costa Rica.

THEREFORE, it is our duty to thank, praise, laud, glorify, uplift, extol, bless, exalt and adore Him, who did all these miracles for our fathers and for ourselves. He has brought us forth from slavery to freedom, from sorrow to joy, and from mourning to festive day, and from darkness to a great light, and from subjection to redemption. Let us, then, recite before Him a new song: Hallelujah, praise ye God!

When I travel, the most important decision I make is what books to take with me. One of those books is my well-worn King James Bible, given to me by my parents when I turned 7 years old.

Here’s a few passages about Jesus’ death and resurrection from that Bible.

Romans 5:8:

But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.

Mark 8:34-37:

And when he had called the people unto him with his disciples also, he said unto them, whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life will lose it; but whosoever will lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it. For what shall if profit a man if he gains the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?

I’ve written often about the danger of losing our souls. The transhumanists like to tell us that we do not have any. We are programmable, just like machines.

Dr. Yuval Noah Harari has some disconcerting things to say about it:

“…there is somebody out there who is, right now, trying to hack you. And not just one — Amazon is trying to hack you, and Google is trying to hack you, and Coca-Cola is trying to hack you, and the Russians and the American government and the Chinese. They are all trying to hack you right now.”

But why? Why are they trying to hack us? What do we have that is so desirable that they would go to such lengths to invade every corner of our bodies and our minds. What are they looking for? And who are they anyway?

“There are darknesses in life and there are lights, and you are one of the lights, the light of all lights.” ― Bram Stoker, Dracula

The demons know all about the light. It’s why they want to take it and somehow try to possess it. It’s only a foolish human who tries to pretend there is no such thing as light and dark, good and evil.

This is spiritual warfare between God and Satan, and it is over our souls. Google and Coca-Cola and the Russians and the rest of them, are extensions of the evils trying to possess us. If we want to hold onto our souls, we must live in the light and refuse the darkness. Some of us must go beyond that and fight to expose the darkness.

Below is a drawing I did for my book All the Children of the World.

It is not as slick and perfect as AI would do in its attempt at imitation. It is done by hand, with the emotion of a real woman who knows what it’s like to bear children, to hold them in my arms. To love them with a love that goes beyond all understanding. The kind of love that only a mother, who has born her children in pain, can have. No matter how AI probes our brains, searches the blood in our veins and steals the unborn babies from our bodies, they can never know that feeling of selfless love and they can never take it from us.

The rain has started up again. The wind is howling. Here, you do not go out in the night. There is too much life out there, life you don’t want to run into. But sometimes we have to take courage and step out into the darkness.

“When you get to the end of all the light you know and it's time to step into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing that one of two things shall happen: either you will be given something solid to stand on, or you will be taught how to fly.” - Edward Teller.

This, I believe.

For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul?