February 2, 2023 

In Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman I came to understand that a place is not always physical but also just an understanding or capacity for understanding.

I call this place, Culebra, my paradise while knowing full well the problems.  It is like loving a person wholly and completely while at the same time seeing every flaw.  If there were no flaws it could not be paradise because it would not be real and how could we hold both that a place was paradise but also unreal.  We feel the unreality and recoil.  When we try to cultivate the paradise into our lives we are attempting to maximize the positive attributes while diminishing the negative, but all of that is personally subjective so we all work at cross ends and only end up working in paradise...another obvious oxymoron? 

Or, Like love it is simply loving the light and the dark equally.