A dream, both solid and tenuous in nature. Shared, designed, planned, foreseen, and seen. With heart and eyes wide open, we are going forth knowing that we are doing exactly what we are supposed to be doing.
We are moving to Ecuador.
This is both a nervous laughter inducing dream, and a very real thing. It is beyond, at this point, in the middle of a Tennessee winter, a goal or a plan. It is actively happening. Paperwork, legal processes that make my head swim, selling everything we don’t need, planning our house build. It’s real, it’s happening.
It started with a offhand idea, a co-worker mentioning that she was moving to Ecuador. I laughed it off at first, a crazy idea from my crazy husband. Then I started looking at property listings. It still seemed impossible, ridiculous, improbable. I started listening to a podcast from a couple realtors there, just to get an idea of equator life, cost of living, culture. It was a way to pass the time and dream when we weren’t where we wanted to be. I will forever remember the podcast episode that change the entire course of our lives. Suffice it to say, it was my own personal and internal lightbulb moment, god moment, destiny moment. I told my husband, this is it. This is where we’re going, this is why we’re here, this is it. I pulled us, broke and unsure, along on a trip to Ecuador. I was so confident that this was right that I barely stopped to think that it was crazy, my intention and intuition, or how anyone might receive my absolute certainty. I get a bit embarrassed, looking back, at how bizarre we probably seemed to our now friend in Ecuador, two gringos absolutely hell fucking bent on doing this and only this.
It’s taken us so many more years than we wanted, and sometimes I really wish we had sold it all and bailed out two years ago. But I try to remember everything happens for a reason and that as long as we get where we want to be, together, I will be happy.
I know so many people in my life, and perhaps those not yet in it but stumbling upon this, will question why. Why leave the U.S.? Why Ecuador? Why somewhere hard (Spanish? We barely speak it.).
Here’s why, in part and in a nutshell: Full year growing seasons are a huge thing for us, somewhere without the intensity of so many other climates. Being on the equator, it is just so damned pleasant all the time. There is so much land gloriously untouched, unpolluted, unmarred by humanity before us. The smell of nature is different, the air easier to breathe even at high altitudes. I remember scrambling up a mountain, shuffling through knee high lush grasses, and the rush of rivers. It’s heady and special.
The people. We tried to thoroughly toss ourselves into the fray (jumping into the Sunday market only hours after arriving, jetlagged and hungry) and found that even in our awkwardness, stumbling horribly over shattered language barriers, people were incredibly friendly towards us. Kind and welcoming, something I honestly didn’t expect as foreigners, not even a little bit.
I try to list the whys and reasons and it’s so incredibly complex and impossible to explain. I can lay out a list, bullet pointed and concise. But it isn’t. It’s magic, in all its imperfection. It’s the promise of building our own dream, with our hands and our minds. It’s that damnable lush grass that tugs at my heart, picturing pigs snorting under canopies of trees I don’t know the names of and goats bouncing through pastures. It’s cherimoya trees, and pineapples. It’s the bright vista of multicolored umbrellas at the Saturday market. It’s the way nothing is perfect, and everything sets my smile sideways. It’s sugarcane juice on the side of the road, the mystery magic of freshly picking coffee cherries, and Disney-esque troops of dogs running happily through city streets.
It is the reality of all the dreams I’ve ever had in my whole life coming true, and knowing that that is where they were always meant to come to fruition. It’s a knowledge so deep that no fear can touch it. I have no fear of living in Ecuador, no doubt that is it for us and right and everything we want and need. I have a pile of anxiety in getting there, doubts and lists and binders and panic attacks. But not about being there, never about being there. That remains absolute in my heart.
We are moving to Ecuador.