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.

29 hour marathon travelthon.

Charlotte and I and everything we have has made it to Singapore.

We’re going to sleep and get some of our sanity back.

From Atlanta we got a bit concerned. The flight went straight North. Ohio, Michigan, Canada, Hudson Bay…ya weird huh? This is the way to tropical Bali? Northern Territory, Arctic Circle, North – yes North of Alaska.. I looked out the window. Absolute whiteness. Snow, ice absolutely everywhere. No sign of life. Jeez. After 16 hours in the air we dropped back down to Tokyo. Still the same daylight we had in Atlanta – but now it has a different date.

I’ve been wearing my Minnesota Viking hat and meeting Minnesotans because of it. The steward on the way to Singapore asked where in Minnesota I was from. I told him a little town north of Minneapolis, Elk River. He was from Mounds View just two counties away. He was so up on Elk River’s awesome hockey team. Said we would have a tough time against Andover. I just checked and Andover beat Elk River in overtime 6-5 a few hours ago to advance to the state championship. Local. Global. Local. These are the surprises that can happen anywhere, anytime. It really drives home the point that no place on this Earth is isolated. We are all so mobile and interconnected.

Charlotte is good at meeting new people. A fellow from Michigan who travels the world doing leadership seminars. A top executive from Idaho with Melaleuca, the largest online wellness company. Everyone has amazing experiences and stories and capacities. A crowd is not just a crowd. Traffic is not just traffic.

 

 

 

From an early age I envisioned my engagement in the world peaking at age 65-67. What happened after that was always blank.

When I met Charlotte in the late 1980’s in Jackson, Mississippi, she was trying to move somewhere else. She stayed in Jackson all these years because of me. And now I’m ready to shift to a global perspective and shift my center of gravity to a place outside the country I grew up in.

A friend of similar age recently said, “I have to figure out what I’m going to do for the next 30 years.”

Baseball analogy: When you’ve reached this ‘retirement age’ it’s like getting to third base. It took a lot to get here. Nobody gets here without getting banged up some. A lot of people don’t make it this far. So here we are standing on third base. Out of breath and hurting in many ways, most are just fine with catching their breath. There are some driven individuals who will take a small lead off and hope for an opportunity to get home. Then there are a few folks, Charlotte and I included, who glance at the third base coach, study the pitcher, take a daring lead off, and with everyone unsuspecting and against the advise of the coach, we take off. We’re stealing home!

We’ve sold or given away everything we had. Retired from jobs. Sold businesses. Vehicles. Household stuff. It’s down to just what we can take on the plane with us. Someone said, “Everything you own, also owns you.”

We step onto the plane in just a few days. Atlanta. Tokyo. Singapore. Rest a couple days. Then Bali. And there we will try to organize settling in.

We started this process over a year ago. I had a six page to do list. Now it’s down to less than 30 items and all  together I think they can be done in a few days.

A friend who teaches personal evolution, says that personal evolution is in large part about opening our lives to greater complexity. Moving from seeing something in black and white, to a rainbow and then to 32-bit millions of shades. Embracing the understanding that there is consciousness greater than our own. That there are causes and effects beyond our horizon of understanding. That mystery and unimaginable possibility are an inherent part of each moment.

So this blog is going to be about the story of two folks setting sail in a small boat, out into an infinite ocean, not trying to reach a shore that doesn’t exist, knowing that at some point the boat will carry us no more, but intent on filling each moment with as much life force as we can muster.

Each morning for now nearly twenty years, we have looked into each others eyes and said “I promise to rededicate my life with you to being loving, kind and present…”. So that will be the rudder of our boat as we steer deeper and deeper toward the infinite.

Enjoy the ride with us.

Charlotte and Luke