Not so long ago, my friend Alex and I itched for an adventure. We were both living in Panama at the time and she had a friend in Costa Rica. His family’s land was mountainous, remote, and in the middle of the rainforest. His family was intent on keeping it pristine. They were in the midst of developing an off-the-grid eco-community for like-minded souls.

The house was on the top of a mountain overlooking the ocean with the rainforest bordering it on all sides. At night howler monkeys serenaded us. Vampire bats loved us. And we were more than a little wary of reports that a jaguar was partial to the bathroom.

There were only two rules on this little piece of paradise. The first was that manual labor was mandatory, which we learned only after we arrived. And the second was that no one was allowed to kill any living thing.

After watching the baby sloth video for the fiftieth time, I was reminded of our trip to Puerto Jimenez. The week before we arrived, one of the guys working on the ranch, Chi, witnessed a silent protest that made his work just a little harder. Although this was to be an eco-community, certain facets of the modern world were unavoidable. Behind the house, was a small-scale sawmill.

In the mornings, Chi woke before dawn to power the machines. This particular morning, he was groggily preparing for a day of sawing, hammering, and heavy lifting. As he leaned over the saw, something furry brushed the side of his face. Surprised and a little freaked, he looked down and came face to face with the smiling, sleepy face of a fully-grown sloth hugging the saw like a tree. Chi was at a loss for what to do. As the workers poured in, they all smiled at the sight of the smiling sloth that (very slowly) lifted an arm and turned his bright little face in their directions.

“It was pretty clear that the sloth wanted a day of peace,” Chi recounted at the campfire. “And we couldn’t say no to the adorable little guy.”

Chi, whose name wasn’t really Chi, swore that the sloth had “chi,” a good energy that flowed through him. From then on, his signature move was to stretch out his arms, wrists together, and palms outstretched forming a giant “T” shape. He then grew silent, closed his eyes, and sent out “chi” to the rainforest or anyone that needed it.

Sloths are the slowest mammals in the world and sleep up to twenty hours a day. They are so slow that algae grow on their furry coats providing extra camouflage. They live in the treetops of Central and South America.

I believe that it was Yann Martel that first likened the sleepy mammals to “upside-down yogis deep in meditation or hermits deep in prayer, wise beings whose intense imaginative lives were beyond the reach of my scientific probing,” in his novel The Life of Pi.