Nyepi

In this update, I share about a unique Balinese tradition, Nyepi.   

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Once a year, for twenty-four hours, Bali goes silent.  Airports shut down, cars and scooters stay parked, thirteen million dollars are saved in electricity bills.  Only members of the Banjar (select married community males) go out.  Even they use reserve—leaving their homes each hour to make sure no one else is out.  Pedestrians are punished.  Why?  

To honor and purify for Nyepi.  Balinese New Year.  

The day before Nyepi is Tawur Agung Kesanga, or the “Day of Great Sacrifice.” Colorful monsters dressed in coconut hair called Ogoh-Ogoh (picture a cross between a Chinese dragon and the Sesame Street dog, Barkley) are brought to afternoon temple ceremonies to receive offerings of rice, fruit and flowers, and then let into the streets at night for Ngrupuk, a procession to entice demons.  In villages, artisans spend upwards of a month making Ogoh-Ogoh—painting intricate slanted eyes, flaring nostrils and gargantuan teeth.  Everyone donates.  For establishments that don’t, Ogoh-Ogoh destroy or steal what they can during Ngrupuk.  (This told to me by the awesome taxi driver, Gede, who is also a banjar.)

During a temple ceremony on Tawur Agung Kesanga, Erica and I offered fruit and shrimp crisps with our heads bowed in gratitude.  A holy man with a strip of cloth tied to his head doused water in our eyes and mouths, smashed rice (nicely) on our foreheads, and wafted incense to bless us.  We felt honored.  Humbled.  And bouleh (foreigner.)  Many bouleh living in southern Bali don’t attend ceremony.  (Bouleh living in villages and in Ubud. I gather, tend to.)  We backed up with our hands in prayer as the holy man chanted, and surrounding dogs ate the bananas, apples, rice balls, shrimp crisps, and sweets spread across the ground, pausing occasionally to blink with glazed eyes and belly bloat.  (Once an offering is given, it is available. Dogs get there first.)

At midnight, after the procession gave demons the chance to land inside the Ogoh-Ogoh, the exquisite monsters were burned. Dogs yelped.  Chickens squawked.  Children swerved in finery.  Masses gathered; women in white dresses, men in short white caps and traditional black and white kekak pants.  Thus began Nyepi.  

Twenty-four hours of darkness and silence.  Not so much as an electric light.  My friend Tom tells a story about seeing a lit cigarette last year seventy feet away—the only light—and feeling that he was communicating with this person who could, he was sure, see his cigarette.  As Erica and I live at Villa Zen, where silence abounds, it was a usual writing day and evening, though our minds were noticeably clear.  At night, after squatting before our refrigerator to eat (we hoped involuntary light away from a window was tolerable if we were quick) we spent long moments looking at a black sky flush with white-blue stars and listening into the silence.

According to legend, during Nyepi demons fly over the island looking for life.  Since Bali looks abandoned, the demons pass over until the next year.  Many of our Balinese acquaintances were nervous.  Our grounds caretaker, Ilu, reported correct procedure numerous times.  We understood that she did not want demons coming to Villa Zen.  (Our refrigerator really is far from the window!!)

In Bali, superstition and wisdom live side by side.  I’ve heard even U.S. born bouleh report fears of being cursed with black magic.  But through this superstition, a profound ritual like Nyepi generates life.  At five a.m.—exactly one hour before the end of Nyepi—I woke to a surge of rain.  Thunder crashed so loud, I sat up.  (Bali thunder can be frightening.)  At six a.m., the downpour turned instantly to mist.  Stunned, I went outside.  The sky shone peach, an abundant, actual sense of birth.  I gazed out, awed by the earth according with tradition.  In Bali, the sacred is literally not separate from the manifest.  
 

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Namaste,
and Love,

Nikki

The Heat

Now that the rainy season is coming to a close, what we got is heat.  I’m not talking, let’s detox with a nice sauna gym sweat.  I am talking pure succotash heat.  By noon, Erica and I are roasting to such a degree before our laptops that I have turned around several times to gaze at the refrigerator.  Not because I am hungry.  Eating is out of the question in this squelch.  I look at it because I am trying to figure out how to put myself in.  If I can just get my head inside the fridge for ten minutes, will this fever succumb?  Maybe if I lie on our adobe floor and stick in my feet?  Then I could close the door, sort of? 

Let me explain.  I am a gal who likes heat.  I love heat.  I lived in Nicaragua loving heat.  But when it gets into your pores and you find yourself angry at the fan for rotating toward your fellow writer and not you, even though the fan will return before the minute’s up, you know you got serious heat.  Lately Erica and I have taken to going for dips in the pool we share with our neighbors, which is more like a large blue bathtub.  With the sun shining down all day, pools don’t stay cool.  You get in and get out and realize with shock, that while you are wet, you are still hot.  Some days, you’re hotter.

I have tried the wet handkerchief on my head.  In fact, I am wearing one right now.  I’ve had it on less than ten minutes and it is already drying.  I kid you not.  And the fan just went back to Erica, who is napping in her writing space because with this much heat, what to do?  Her skin is steamed, shiny and wet.  Her computer awaits but the heat does not abet.  I would keep writing, come to some erudite point, but truly my friends, I have to go in to re-wet the kerchief.  Body temp control is calling.  From very close to the equator, sending you love.  

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

On the Rains

The river beside our house rages.  Brown rapids rise half way up the stone walls that make up the bank.  All manner of debris—soda cans, popsicle wrappers, animal parts, sewage—run through it.  The river has yet to flood the property, though I have heard the children say, “when the river comes in,” so I assume it will.  Last night the rains came down as if in reminder that humans remain limited as expressers of wrath.  The deafening thunder would easily silence a scream and came down not in a roar, but as a crash.  The sound emitted static—two magnetic forces breaking together. 

When I stepped down to my room off the main house, the golden retriever, Bettina, held herself crouched by the door, visibly trembling.  She is an outside dog infested with god knows what, but likely ticks and mange.   Still, she is sweet and innocent.  She gazed up at me with a real prayer of hope.  Without a suitable way to explain the colossal sound of thunder to her, I did feel that the least I could do was protect her from it.

I opened the door and issued her in.  She watched me, quivering.  I got to my knees and stroked my fingers along her jaw.  She pawed my knee but stayed outside.  “You can come in just this once,” I said, knowing full well that once Bettina discovered life inside, she would be quick to exploit me.  She jumped through the door, nearly landing on me.  I carefully laid out a bath towel hoping for my friends’ forgiveness, and, in great obeisance, Bettina curled her shaking body on the rectangle of terry cloth and watched the storm intently through the glass.  

I got into bed and untied the net, veiling myself under a canopy of mesh.  I noticed dull blue-gray marks in the slatted ceiling, where the rain was bleeding through.  The rain sounded like b-b gun shells smacking the roof.  Loud, light, deep, louder.  Visceral, actual, unafraid.  

When I crave freedom or sense the possibility of self imposed limitation, I remind myself to dance in the rain. I’ve been witness to intense moments of happiness in the rain.  Surrender to rain frees me.  Yet to accomplish the bulk of my endeavors, her pervasive wet limits me.  I protect myself, holing up inside or carrying myself beneath a poncho.  In an effort towards comfort, I stray from rain.  In courageous impulse, I run to it.

Water symbolizes the realm of feelings, yet still I allow rain a generosity of spirit that I refuse feelings.  Rain appears innocent or at least faultless to me, merely following gravity’s lean to reach the depths of what it touches.  A feeling, defined by Merriam-Webster as “the undifferentiated background of one's awareness considered apart from any identifiable sensation, perception, or thought,” appears, like rain, to be innocent.  Still, I accord feeling an intrinsic bond to story and even wrongdoing when a strong one sinks into my crevices, making its way beneath and through my resistance.  What is full of effort is not my feeling, but my scratchy response, my itch to ward off the sensations, perceptions or thoughts that follow my feelings with action and distraction. 

Lying beneath a roof of furious Bali rain led to feeling vulnerable.  Next, a desire to be physically held.  I inhaled, noticing distaste and my clever proposals of avoidance.  I could get up and paint.  The power was out, but if my laptop had battery power, I could read by the light of my screen.  I could do yoga in the dark! 

The rain was immense.  I breathed, turned to my right, and curled into a ball.  Wow, this is loud.  I breathed, turned to my left, and curled into a ball.  A symphonic cacophony.  I gave up and lay flat on my back.  What to do but listen?  

If I remain able to block feeling through an almighty enactment of fear, at least nature’s expression remains unabashed.  Whether fact is on my side or not, I am certain the rains rushed down without hesitation or apology.  In the tropics nature presents with force.  In contrast, Colorado appears dry, sunny and temperate.  On the wide planes of Colorado, I see slight movements across a distance.  In Indonesia, nature is boisterous and surrounding, breathing me every second.  I feel no pressure to sound into the silence.  I listen.  I am quiet.  Relieved.

I am reminded that I am not separate.  I cannot escape.  Water leaks through the roof and onto the floor.  Wet drops find holes in the canopy of mesh, finally holding court in my sheets.  I wake up the next morning and discover a gut threatening nest of ants and their white larvae on the tile.   The tropics magnify aspects of feeling so literally it is impossible to remain numb.  Meanwhile, it becomes easier to accept.  To flow.  Dance.

 I crawled out of bed and sat on the tile next to Bettina.  “Beh-tee-na,” I soothed, “You’re okay.”  I pet her thick itchy coat.  Her trembling diminished slightly.  We sat together, she and I, gazing out at the rain from disparate worlds, in unison.