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.