Cacao as the Catalyst
By apprentice Maria Quas
There is a strange phenomenon that happens when you begin following something you genuinely love.
At first, it feels insignificant. A passing curiosity. A book you happen to read. A conversation you almost didn't have. A path you decide to walk for no particular reason.
Then something begins to shift.
The world that once felt random starts revealing patterns.
Teachers appear. Doors open. Conversations arrive at precisely the moment they are needed. What once seemed like coincidence begins to feel more like participation in an intelligence larger than your own.
Taoist philosophy speaks of this as living in accordance with the Way—not forcing life forward, but learning to move with it. There is an old saying often attributed to Zen: when the student is ready, the teacher appears.
For most of my life, I understood that idea intellectually.
This year, living at Rancho Mastatal, I began experiencing it.
And strangely enough, cacao became the teacher.
Following the Thread
When I first arrived in Costa Rica, I thought growth would come through plans. Through goals. Through carefully constructing a path toward whatever came next.
Instead, the opposite happened.
The more I released my need to know exactly where I was going, the more life seemed willing to show me. Not all at once. Just enough for the next step.
The first lesson arrived beside a river I had crossed countless times before.
After reading about cacao's origins in Mesoamerica, I found myself walking a familiar path toward the waterfall. Along the riverbanks where cacao once thrived naturally, something caught my eye.
There they were.
Cacao trees.
Mint-green pods emerging directly from their trunks.
I stopped.
How many times had I walked this exact route? How many times had these trees been standing here, visible and unnoticed?
The trees had not appeared.
My attention had.
And once seen, they became impossible to ignore.
It felt less like discovering something new and more like remembering something that had been waiting for me all along.
Perhaps this is how all learning happens. The teacher is not absent. The student simply isn't ready to see.
After that day, cacao began appearing everywhere.
From Information to Wisdom
I started planting seeds in the nursery, reading about cultivation, and asking questions.
Then Victor arrived.
A cacao farmer. A chocolate maker. A living bridge between knowledge and experience.
I had spent hours searching online, collecting information, and trying to understand cacao through articles and videos.
Victor showed me the difference between information and wisdom.
Information can tell you what to do.
Wisdom shows you how to see.
The internet can explain how to plant a cacao tree. A farmer can teach you how to listen to one.
Before leaving, Victor invited me to visit his farm.
Another door opened.
Not because I was searching for doors.
Because I was already walking in their direction.
And that is what has fascinated me most.
The opportunities themselves are not extraordinary. What feels extraordinary is the timing.
Cacao as Lineage
Shortly after Victor left, two brothers from the Maleku tribe arrived at Rancho Mastatal—the very community Victor had been speaking about.
Again, cacao was at the center.
But now it appeared not as agriculture, but as lineage. As culture. As memory carried through generations.
One afternoon, they noticed me working with cacao fruit and shared a marmalade recipe made from a part of the pod I had been throwing away.
A piece of fruit I saw as waste contained value within their tradition.
The lesson felt larger than cacao.
How much of life do we discard simply because we do not yet understand its purpose?
The more I followed this thread, the more connections emerged.
Not because I was forcing them.
Because I was paying attention.
Learning to Flow
Taoism teaches that water does not struggle to find its path.
It flows.
It adapts.
It moves around obstacles rather than through them.
And somehow, despite its softness, it shapes entire landscapes.
I am beginning to suspect that life works the same way.
Many of us spend years trying to manufacture a future. Building profiles. Networking strategically. Searching endlessly for opportunities.
I know I did.
Yet some of the most meaningful experiences of my life have arrived through a completely different mechanism:
Presence. Participation. Curiosity.
Not chasing the next thing, but becoming fully engaged with the thing directly in front of me.
The result feels less like achievement and more like alignment.
As if life begins responding when you stop trying to negotiate with it.
My First Cacao Harvest
My first cacao harvest deepened that understanding.
At four in the morning, I woke with the excitement of a child on Christmas Day.
An hour later, I stood before a wide river, preparing to cross on a hand-built zip line while Jorge, the owner of the farm, rode a horse through the current below.
The absurdity of the moment made me laugh.
This was not part of any plan I had ever created for myself.
Yet somehow, it felt exactly where I was supposed to be.
The harvest itself was humbling.
Everyone moved with rhythm and purpose while I struggled to understand the language, the flow, and the choreography of the work.
I felt slow.
Clumsy.
Out of place.
And yet those moments often contain the greatest gifts.
The unknown rarely feels graceful.
Growth is not the absence of discomfort.
Growth is learning to trust yourself inside it.
The Transformation of Chocolate
Chocolate itself seems to embody this lesson.
What eventually becomes something rich, complex, and deeply nourishing begins as something raw and unfamiliar.
The seed must ferment.
Dry.
Roast.
Transform.
Time does not happen to the process.
Time is the process.
Perhaps people are not so different.
We are always becoming. Always fermenting experiences into understanding. Always moving through stages that make little sense until viewed in retrospect.
The Real Lesson
Looking back now, I realize cacao was never the real subject.
The real subject was trust.
Trust that the next step exists even when I cannot see it.
Trust that curiosity is sometimes a more reliable compass than certainty.
Trust that the path unfolds through participation rather than prediction.
I still know very little.
But that no longer feels like a problem to solve.
It feels like an invitation.
The path does not appear all at once.
It never has.
It reveals itself in proportion to our willingness to walk.
And so I keep walking.
Not toward an outcome.
Not toward an answer.
Simply toward whatever feels most alive.
Read more
Check out these past blogs about cacao and other local foods we are enjoying here: