In this Bali-life update: Transportation, roadways, paths. 

Erica and I wonder if the idiom, “Don’t go too fast, you might hit a pothole,” was invented in Bali, particularly as the width of the potholes augment with each rainstorm (making Nicaraguan potholes seem like child’s play, though I’ve heard Kenya offers decent competitors.)  Erica, who prefers riding a bicycle to driving the scooter, was just posed with the source of this idiom.  Riding behind two dangling boys on a bike last week, she thought to pull a Lance Armstrong fly by.  She pushed her legs into action, lifted off her seat, and, just as she was sailing past the middling boys, WHOP!  Crater pothole.  Bike chain flew out of basket, apples to the road, our female Lance was forced to pause and bow as dangling boys stooped to pick up her chain.  Idiom manifested as reality as Erica humbly thanked the boys, (with her gracious smile) placed her chain and apples back in her basket, and rode on, scaling carefully now around inevitable craters on the path.  Why do we ever think life will go straight? 

Which brings me to crossing roads.  In Bali one cannot be a chicken and have a chance of crossing one of her wildly trafficked roads.  Yet, the chickens still do it.  Stranger still, are the massive iguanas crossing roads.   It’s true they move fast, and according to Erica, they possess enough directive force to run their course (whereas the chickens run back and forth before vehicles, unable to choose which side would be best.)  Still, when one is speeding by on a scooter, the iguana’s proximity to earth is strongly against their favor.  Even the enormous ones look like a flap of tire from a distance.  Obviously, no one has informed them of the inherent risk of crossing a road with a similar color and texture to your own body.  Another challenge, I suppose, of life not being constructed straight.

That said, curves can be fun.  Take our motor-scooter helmets.  Erica and I sometimes call each other by our helmets’ names.  She is J-King and I am Genio.  Before a ride, we might look at each other and offer compliments.  Nice Ball head.  Way to make alien sexy work.  Hi hot-stuff, need a ride to Saturn?  Twice I have envisioned Erica bringing the helmet to my yoga class as a prop for her headstand.

The helmet is not the only link I’ve found between doing a headstand and driving a scooter.  The headstand, known as an inversion in yoga, offers many benefits. It stimulates the lymphatic system, increases circulation and ultimately calms the mind.  With the head upside down, a yoga student also benefits from a disoriented view of reality, learning to find relationship to breath and length when familiarity is not immediate.  Similar I find, is driving the scooter in hellfire rain on a craterous road shared with tribes of Bali dogs, pedestrians and vehicles.

When arrows of rain fly under the Genio and into the eyelids, sight is naturally impaired.  As with inversions, finding relationship to breath is key to balance.  When, as happened yesterday, a man in a gasoline truck decides you should be the one to move, you must breathe wide into the belly so as not to Freak the Fuck Out and lose the grocery bags squeezed between your knees as you veer off the road.  (Two eggs broke and I lost the expensive chocolate to a brown pool of gutter water, but other than that, cargo stayed intact.)  It’s all about breath.  Full belly breathing leaves your arms free to steer and lets legs move fast from bike to road to bike.  (When carting groceries, this movement must be especially fast.)  The belly breath becomes the difference between maneuvering the unforeseen bumps and dips with grace or ineptitude.  Breathing wide and feeling out in all directions becomes literal.  In fierce rain, you cannot see what is ahead of you, and the poncho flapping loudly in the wind, letting in more water than it purportedly keeps out, does not aid your visibility, but you can feel what is there.  You can actually tap into the breath and know.  Amazingly, you swerve around scooters, crater holes, and dogs in heat without depending on your sight.  You realize your breath is literally your life, and you conduct that breath with the presence and care you would offer your own newborn.  In this way, you stay—and can cross--the road. 

Namaste to each and every one of you,

Nikki