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You may have met Lee at the Harmony. She’s the curator of our Tiendita, a long-time Nosara long boarder and a bad ass. Like many of the folks who work with the Harmony, she found her way to Nosara for the waves. When she’s not in Costa Rica, Lee lives and surfs in Miami.
Name: Lee Bailly
Age: 47
Where do you live: Miami
Years surfing: 23
Surfing is…
a thrilling quiet journey that lasts a lifetime. Surfing alters one’s course. It starts by accident sometimes as much as by intent. To experience the first magical moment you have, somehow, put yourself in just the right place at just the right time. That is the instant you know. The act of surfing is bigger than us. It connects us to our internal rhythms as well as the primal pulses that are constantly speaking to us. Surfing is listening and feeling and finding a quiet cadence. It is self calibrating as well as connecting to our surroundings: the sounds, the colors, the reflections, the shades, the tides, the winds, the currents, the movement, all forever shifting. Surfing is being tuned in to the outer as well as the inner elements and becoming one in movement and quietude.
Jan 21, 2014 | Categories: Costa Rica, Nosara, Surfing | Comments Off on SURFING IS… WITH LEE BAILLY
A carbon footprint is the measure of the impact that a person or business has on the environment, specifically in terms of climate change, as measured in kilograms of carbon dioxide. It’s also probably the most over-used term in recent history. Calculate your impact at CarbonFund, where you can also buy carbon offsets—one equals the reduction of one metric ton of CO2—by investing in wind or solar powered industry.
Jan 20, 2014 | Categories: Sustainability | Comments Off on Get Offset
So many incarnations of wave riding tools—all with their own unique qualities. Using excess speed from the drop, a bodyboarder can lay it on rail for an early bottom turn as hard as his stand-up counterparts.
Photo provided by Surfing Nosara
Jan 17, 2014 | Categories: Costa Rica, Creative Culture, Nosara, Surfing | Comments Off on Guiones Surf Photo of the Week
One of the most rewarding parts of contributing to the Harmony Blog involves the people and material I would have never otherwise learned about. This week, as part of our Central Creatives series, I’d like to ask that you read the following poem by Craig Arnold. Arnold was an American poet and professor, a Fulbright scholar and a musician. His first collection of poetry, Shells, (1999), won the 1998 Yale Younger Poets Award.
In 2009, Arnold went to Japan where he planned on researching valcanoes for a planned book of poetry. In May of that year, he disappeared while hiking on the island of Kuchinoerabujima. He is celebrated by numerous honors and the admiration of students and peers alike.
For Alicia
The bird who creaks like a rusty playground swing
the bird who sharpens the knife the bird who blows
on the mouths of milk bottles the bird who bawls like a cat
like a cartoon baby the bird who rubs the wineglass
the bird who curlicues the bird who quacks like a duck
but is not a duck the bird who pinks on a jeweller’s hammer
They hide behind the sunlight scattered throughout the canopy
At the thud of your feet they fall thoughtful and quiet
coming to life again only when you have passed
Perhaps they are not multiple but one
a many-mooded trickster whose voice is rich
and infinitely various whose feathers
liquify the rainbow rippling scarlet
emerald indigo whose streaming tail
is rare as a comet’s a single glimpse of which
is all that you could wish for the one thing
missing to make your eyes at last feel full
to meet this wild need of yours for wonder
Jan 15, 2014 | Categories: Costa Rica, Creative Culture | Comments Off on The Invisible Birds of Central America
Leah with her new board
Last year Leah Greenblatt, a music editor at a large national magazine, found she was in possession of three things: a desperate need for sun, an unusual week of light job duties and some unused vacation time. She searched for a location that was an easy flight from New York and hit on Nosara. With flight booked and vacation time approved, she wondered what she was going to do, exactly, in Costa Rica. Eventually, she decided to take a week’s worth of surfing lessons at one of the local surf schools and quickly fell in love with the sport. Although new to surfing, she can be frequently be found on the local breaks around New York. Read Leah’s thoughts on surfing below.
Name: Leah
Age: 35
Where do you live: Greenpoint Brooklyn
Years surfing: 1
Surfing is: The best thing I’ve ever sucked at. It took me almost a decade after my first time out to get serious about it; I definitely regret all the years I spent watching friends and boyfriends rip it while I doggy-paddled around, afraid I’d never get good enough to catch up. Even now it still makes me crazy how out of your hands it is — the waves and the wind and the board, you can’t ever really control it so you just have to be humbled by it. A few weeks ago when it finally got seriously cold, I packed it in for the season. Now I miss it with my whole body.
Jan 14, 2014 | Categories: Costa Rica, Nosara, Surfing | Comments Off on SURFING IS… WITH LEAH GREENBLATT
A genetically modified organism (GMO), genetically engineered organism (GEO) or genetically engineered (GE) food—it’s all the same thing, under different acronyms—is typically a plant that’s had its genes altered, which is how you get things like golden rice fortified with vitamin A, pesticide-producing corn and “terminator” seeds that force farmers to buy new ones yearly from companies like Monsanto, which produces the majority of genetically modified seeds and crops in the world.
Proponents—including the U.S. government—say GMOs are harmless. Opponents point to studies that link these so-called “Frankenfoods” to food allergies and other health problems, as well as the high levels of pesticides and herbicides that many GMO plants are designed to tolerate.
A full 85% of U.S. corn production is genetically modified; the same can be said for soy (91%), cotton (91%), canola (85%) and sugar beets (95%), not to mention the milk, meat and eggs from animals that eat genetically modified feed.
Despite the fact that 60 other nations label GMOs, and that 93% of Americans want labeling (according to a New York Times poll), it is not yet required by the federal government. In the meantime, look for USDA Certified Organic foods, which are guaranteed by the government not to contain GMOs. Bonus!
Jan 13, 2014 | Categories: Sustainability | Tags: food, gmo | Comments Off on Know Your GMOs
Tico Turn: There was a time decades ago when traveling Surfers from near and far passed through the Nicoya and ooooooooo-ed and aaaaaaah-ed residents with their abilities. That time has long since passed. Now, on any given day along the peninsula, even if the Surf is momentarily not world class, the Locals’ Surfing certainly is.
Photo provided by Surfing Nosara
Jan 10, 2014 | Categories: Costa Rica, Creative Culture, Nosara, Surfing | Comments Off on Guiones Surf Photo of the Week
NOTE: Today we launch a new series: “Central Creatives”—Wednesday posts featuring artists who create projects in and around Costa Rica! We hope you find their work as exciting as we do. Kicking it off are Lee Fritz and Jenna Morse, whose incredible short documentary Adelante Con El Sol: The Solar Women of Totogalpa was an Official Selection at the 2013 PovertyCure Film Festival and inspired this new column.
Names: Lee Fritz & Jenna Morse
Where do you live: New Orleans, LA
What is your main artistic practice? We run a small full-service film production company out of New Orleans and do a little bit of everything: shooting and editing our own projects- We also dabble in many genres from commercials and music videos to documentaries and narrative.
Tell us about a project that brought you to Central America:
Adelante Con El Sol: The Solar Women of Totogalpa is a short documentary we made about a group of women rural Nicaragua empowering themselves and their community through the use of solar technologies.
We first heard about the Solar Women through Lee’s dad, an engineer at Cornell University who travels to the village of Sabana Grande every year and collaborates with the women on various solar oven designs. At the time we had just left New York City and were spending some time in Ithaca trying to figure out how to be the filmmakers we wanted to be and work on projects we felt inspired by but also have it be on our own terms. We had never made a proper documentary before but the story of these women and their work was compelling in many different ways; it had environmental sustainability, it had women’s empowerment in a male-dominated society, and it also had a community in the developing world lifting itself out of poverty. We only had a week in Nicaragua so we had to quickly figure out how we were going to tell the story. The shoot was nerveracking since this was the first thing we ever shot together and conducting interviews in another language was one of many hurdles to overcome. We had to iron out our roles fast and learn how to communicate with each other in this new way but once we got it down it was very exciting.
Where can we find your work?
All of our work is on our website as well as our vimeo page. However, the full length version of our documentary is only available on vimeo right now
http://calmdogproductions.com
https://vimeo.com/calmdog
What are you working on next?
We have several projects in the works. Besides our regular freelance work for clients around New Orleans we are collaborating with a friend on a narrative web series as well as writing our first feature together.
Jan 08, 2014 | Categories: Creative Culture, Sustainability, Travel | Comments Off on Central Creatives: Lee Fritz and Jenna Morse on the Solar Women of Totogalpa
