Does satisfaction with place depend on the place or does it depend on the mind?
Also, if the whole country goes silent, will it silent the mind?

Not everybody knows the answer to these questions.

On the Bali Day of Silence (Nyepi), I sat on our balcony and listened. It started last Saturday at sunrise. It is usually a pretty quiet time of day anyway. The insects had their deep background symphony going – that some people say is almost indistinguishable from the bioelectronic static in our brains. The roosters crowed. The morning doves, which are everywhere here, were cooing near and far. Ducks would occasionally do a crescendo of gaggling. And that was about it. No motorcycles. No aircraft. No cars or horns. No construction equipment sounds. No people talking.

The sun rose higher. Still nothing but nature sounds. Now this was getting increasingly odd. The natural world seemed to be slowly recognizing how odd this was. All the natural life was able to communicate without all the human induced static. The insects didn’t have to back off while somebody walked through them. As the day went on, all the species of life just kept getting stronger. Today was going to be a rare win for the DNA evolving on this island.

I thought about that as I sat quietly. In North America and really almost all of the world, every day of my whole long life have been days where nature lost – had to retreat back further. More poisons got dumped on the soil, more toxic emissions went into the air, pollutants drained into nearly all the streams. Every day, nature lost. The standings where I’ve lived my life show: Nature – 0, Human Polluters – 25112. Here on Bali it’s Nature – 69, Human Polluters – 25043.

On Bali, nature wins just enough to keep the memory of advancing the natural harmony of the islands DNA of life alive. But I wondered, in North America and elsewhere is the DNA of life starting to forget what it is like to advance?

I’m sure many humans on the island were appreciating the beauty of experiencing nature’s brief victory. But of all the days of the year, it follows the biggest exodus of people – mainly tourists – leaving the island. There is an attitude that it is a wasted vacation day, so tourists go to some other place nearby and return after Nyepi is over. Some who stayed said they felt like prisoners in their rooms. Bored with nothing to do. The ‘lucky ones’ had some internet service where they could entertain themselves, others saw their internet shut down for the day. Some business focused people saw it as a day ‘lost’.

I remembered the first 10-day silent meditation retreat I was dragged off to, not knowing what I was getting into. My mind in those days was consumed with political activism and questions like “How do we stop nuclear pollution?” After hours upon hours of watching my brain keep returning to these trains of thought, I went to the teacher and asked, “Is meditative awareness always appropriate?” I was thinking shouldn’t we give this stilling the mind thing a break once in a while. If I quit applying myself to the strategizing of political activism, I was just falling further and further behind. The teacher got right up in my face (which startled me). Cocked his head to the side, and said very clearly, “YES!”.

With that doubt removed, my mind did get more silent for the remainder of that retreat. And I volunteered for (and even organized) many 10-day silent retreats in the following years.

So the answer to the question, Does a whole country going quiet, does that quiet the mind? That’s a clear No. If one is open and leaning into quieting their mind, then yes, the country going quiet supports that leaning. But if one is resistant to quieting the mind, then the country going quiet is pretty irritating.

On to the more personal and larger question.

Does satisfaction with place depend on the place or does it depend on the mind?

There are so many millions of people who are living in a place they don’t want to be. It is a very big part of human suffering. So why don’t they just move? Well, of course if you are living in prison – it’s just not an option. But for everyone else? There are many who intend to move but have to just keep putting it off for one reason or another. There are some who would move but really don’t know where to move to. And there are even a big number of people who have moved and find the place they have moved to still evokes dissatisfaction.

I really want to believe that there are people who were living dissatisfied in one place and after moving to another place saw the dissatisfaction fall away. Maybe someone reading this is saying, Yes – that’s me.

Yet, I just need to say this. There is a very common human quality that rejects what is. When the mind is rejecting what is, there is often a comparing going on – the mind saying, “Things should be like this instead of that!” The mind imagines that the world should be different in some way. And the mind imagines that somewhere in the world, the world actually is different in that way. Sometimes the mind is right. There actually are places where late winter snow storms just don’t happen.

But it is also very often the case that our habit of rejecting what is – that habit – goes with us no matter where we go. If that is the case, there is no place on Earth or beyond, that will end that personal suffering.

And it just might be that the difference sometimes between ‘hell on earth’ and ‘heaven on earth’ happens in that place between our ears.

It is starting to feel like that. Ask and you shall receive. Charlotte had gone two weeks without any chiropractic or deep tissue massage help. The marathon sessions on airplanes. A couple six-mile treks. Long car rides. Heavy luggage. Turns out western style chiropractors can no longer practice in Bali – maybe all of Indonesia. I don’t know the whole story about that. There are deep tissue massage practitioners. Quite a few of them. Thanks to the internet and people who leave reviews about their experiences with each practitioner, we were able to do a lot of research. We narrowed it down. And then one person at Ubud Bodyworks Center looked to be clearly a very good pick. Mr. Ketut Arsana. You can Google him.

This morning we met the Australian photographer and his wife that live next to us. They knew Mr. Arsana and said he is the best. His hands are magic, they said.

Pak Ketut Arsana. Charlotte got an appointment with him today at noon. I waited for her in the most wonderful space at the Bodyworks. An outdoor small pavilion. Distant flute and drum music. Bamboo chimes dancing with the wind. Running water fountain. Birds. Staff quietly going about their work. On a soft bench with cushions, I sat cross-legged, closed my eyes and with a slight smile began following my breath. An hour quickly passed.

Something subtly changed. Charlotte came down the stairs from her session, followed by Ketut. Charlotte had a bit of a glow. Said the session was very good. A lot of pain, but learned a new mantra, “Embrace your pain.” I got to meet Ketut and it is so easy to melt into his presence. I am scheduled to have a session with him next week.

Although we had clearly put this meeting into motion, there was an added dimension of fortuitousness or serendipity. The sense stayed with me (us?) as we left Bodyworks and headed down the narrow sidewalk along the narrow busy street in Ubud. A driver hailed us from across the street, he wanted to drive us. It was a common proposition and we told him we wanted to walk and experience the shops along the way to the supermarket where we intended to look for a more suitable sized luggage. We told him maybe we could use a ride from the supermarket back to our place. He was up for that and gave us a decent price. We continued walking and taking in the sights of all the quite unusual shops. It was like a new age smorgasbord, vegetarian cafes, yoga studios and artistic handicrafts of all types. We walked further than we thought the supermarket was and asked someone for directions and they said we had walked too far, so we turned around to backtrack, when a Japanese couple who overheard the conversation came to us and said, “No”, they gave you wrong information. It’s another 5 minutes or so in the direction you were originally headed. We thanked them and continued on our way. Our driver had been following us apparently and caught up to us and talked us into taking a ride the rest of the way. He waited for us as we did our shopping and then drove us back toward home. There was a huge traffic jam with no cars moving, so he took a detour of about 5 km to get us home. In talking with him we learned his name is Dharma. Yes, really. It turns out he is a master woodworker. He showed us pictures of some of his work and it was impressive. He had been to San Francisco and Minneapolis. The Clintons had bought some of his work and had them displayed in the White House. He lives in a small community not far from Ubud that is famous for woodworking. He is part of a large collective of woodworkers. We arranged to meet again a few hours after the Day of Silence and he will take us to rice fields, waterfalls and his woodworking community. This is interesting in that one of our roles here is as representatives of Fair Trade Green – a business that purchases hand made products from collectives all over the world and ensures that the producers get a living wage for what they make and find a market for their products in more affluent places (Yes, even Mississippi qualifies as more affluent!)

So this evening, I am reviewing these events, and wishing that this sense of easy unfolding would continue and grow. Thinking that maybe feeding my heart, meditating, and being careful to being kind, maybe that might keep this sense of being guided alive. To have good things unfold with very little effort is such a blessing. We’ll see.

Lissa Rankin M.D. takes a close look at the role of discernment in trying to know when guidance is happening.

Here is an invitation.

Join us for the Balinese “Day of Silence” from 6am Saturday, March 17 to 6am Sunday, March 18.

The Day of Silence, here called Nyepi, is the holiest day of the year in Bali. It is the start of a new year.

If you can imagine, during this 24-hour period:

Nobody leaves their family home.

All roads are deserted.

The international airport in Denpasar is shut down.

Radio and TV quit broadcasting.

No fires are lit.

Nobody goes to work.

Lighting is kept to a minimum.

All entertainment takes a day rest.

The government and local religious leaders are considering also shutting down the internet, but others in government say people on their own should just refrain from internet entertainment. Many people take this as an excellent time for prayer and meditation.

In the 3 days preceding Nyepi people prepare by taking all their shrines to the nearest river and wash them. Then on the day preceding Nyepi there are huge processions with nasty looking monsters with eyes bulging, long fangs and scary hair. These represent the demons in our lives. After the sun sets, the demons are burned.

Then the day after Nyepi, people visit each other and forgive each other any transgressions. It is also a day for Dharma study, reading holy texts.

Join us in this meaningful celebration as much as you can.

 

There is really no way of knowing how thick our cultural assumptions are – or how dependent we are on them.

A science fiction writer might have developed the kind of mind that can imagine radically different sets of cultural assumptions, but most of us don’t bother with that kind of exercise. Instead our most common experiences with this issue might be things like that tech whose accent we can’t decipher. A food description on the menu that means nothing to us.

Travelers, cultural adventurers, dabble further. A place where English is not understood. Everyone agreeing to drive on the other side of the road. Miles are gone – it’s kilometers. Pounds are gone – it’s kilograms. Fahrenheit gone – stays in the 20’s (Celsius). Dollars are gone – it’s, well, something else. Here it’s rupiahs. The months have traded summer for winter and winter for summer.  Your sunsets are our sunrises. Your today is our yesterday. And all of this is just on the surface.

Is there a rice deity that controls the harvest?

Is absolutely every thing and every body a manifestation of an all powerful force, Brahmin, mysterious beyond knowing?

And is living a life of Dharma the only liberating path through life?

And is the goal of this path a merging with Brahmin where there is no longer struggle with ‘what is’?

So here is an island of over four million people, constantly making offerings, constantly trying to find and follow Dharma, and in this part of the island they have tourists in front of them that for the most part are totally clueless to this world view.

With religion and spirituality such a deep and essential part of daily life in Bali, it will be a process of discovery, listening, study  to really understand it. I spent the last couple hours reading Bali history, reading about Bali temples and yet some simple instructions from our driver and friend, Made, I think were more helpful than all the rest.
His instructions for participating in the ceremony were to relax, let go, purify, be at peace.

 

With a lot of empathy, I watched hundreds of small mackerels struggling to breathe after being caught in a net and hauled onto shore at this fishing village. I too, have been struggling for the next breath. It was the familiar bronchial infection I get every couple years. The last time we were in Bali, the flight here got me in the same condition. Charlotte found a Z-pack of azithromycin and it appears to be bringing my breathing back. If you are struggling for a breath, it really doesn’t matter whether you are in a prison or a palace, a dump or a garden – that all quickly becomes irrelevant.

(clip from Princess Bride – If you don’t have your health you don’t have anything)

We had quite a food tour in Singapore – I’ll put that story on a separate menu tab.

We arrived in Bali nearly three days ago now. We were careful to follow advise and purchase a visa just before going through immigration. A 30-day visa here is free and automatic, you just show your passport. But that visa is not extendable. The paid one ($35 each) lets you apply for an additional 30 days – which we will need in order to organize the retirement visa.

A smiling fellow named, Made, picked us up and brought us all the way to the north end of the island to the small 5-unit guesthouse he manages with his pregnant wife, Ni Kodek. And this has been where we have been as I have been trying to get my health back, as well as catch up on tax work that I fell behind on while traveling.

We feel grateful that we are on a quiet part of the island right now. It has helped us recover.

Today we are going out to the oldest Hindu temple on the island. It is in three sections. The top section requires a climb of 1,700 stairsteps. That seems like a lot. Talk about a stairway to heaven!

We are on our last day here so today we must organize where to go next. Several considerations: 1) Fairly close to where we must do the three trips to immigration to get the visa extension. 2) Fairly close to the agent we pick to help us with the retirement visa. 3) Walkable distance to restaurants and a good range of services. 4) Not too far from a clean, non-rocky beach. 5) Affordable. 6) Reasonably quiet. 7) Aesthetically pleasing.

A difficult task when the internet is down – like it is now.

One cultural quality that attracted us to Bali is how spirituality and daily life are intertwined. The common greeting of putting the hands together, bowing and sometimes saying ‘namaste’ is one expression. Another is the offerings that are put out in front of every business every morning and sometimes in the evening also. We’ll post a video Charlotte made of Ni Kodak putting out offerings the other morning.

Watching Made drive through the chaos on the roads here was another lesson. No exasperation. Totally even tempered, even when there were events every few seconds that would have a New York cabbie screaming!

There is another lesson about trust that is working its way through us. With all the scams and rip-offs and crime that has been a part of our environment our entire lives, we are now in a place that seems to be more trusting. But our internal skeptical, cautious, fearful habits do not fade away easily. Oh, it would be so wonderful – like floating in a warm bath – to not worry about being taken advantage of. We’ll see how this one plays out.