The Twists and Turns of Journey-Making

I have been here for a month now. And, what a month it has been! As I write this, I'm listening to the constant flow of rain outside my little cottage - beautiful. I came home this afternoon with plans of a rest and then an evening visit either to the weekly Buddhist meditation session or a yoga class. But, the rain has kept me here, and willingly I settle back into the sound and the glorious feeling of being gifted with this wondrous life.

My journey continues to inspire me. It continues to unfold and I marvel at the changes that have already been birthed within me. I can feel the different processes taking place within my mind, step by step altering my perspective and thoughts about my reality. I never had a very well-thought out plan coming here in the first place, it hung loosely – something to tell people when they asked, “but, what are you going to do?” In fact it was something to tell myself too, a reliable excuse for dropping everything and ‘running off’.

Now that I am here I have slowly begun to loosen my hold on my path, let go of any feelings that I need to find a job or I need to do this, or go here, or see this. The realization that I have worked hard for the last two years and can now enjoy my fruits of my savings took a while to seep in. My parents, as always, have been extremely encouraging of my journey and urge me to just be and experience – to spend my money, eat delicious food, have enchanting, enriching experiences. The need to follow some kind of set of rules, and work like the rest of the world is doing, is strong within me, of course, and it is these strict boundaries that I have had to hurdle over, within myself. I am blessed to have the opportunity to attempt to do so.

So, now I try to let the days take care of themselves. I wake up early with the roosters, sit on my verandah drinking hot water and lemon, eating my pan-roasted oats and nuts, journal and try to meditate. I usually go to yoga in the morning, sip on a coconut (one of my best things about being here) and then during the day allow myself to have a gorgeous meals at a little restaurant or warung. I am a planner and so not having a plan can be challenging for me at times. Two days ago, after a very long morning of walking I found myself at a restaurant overlooking terraced rice paddies. I was famished and after ensuring that they had my other new most favourite food (tempe – wow, I'm in love) I settled down on the couch to let my body relax after a very long and good walk. They brought me some delicious homemade chips which I quickly wolfed down followed by a fresh mango juice. It didn't take long for my food to arrive, it was pretty average by the usual standards but the tempe and thick peanut sauce was good!

And, after that was all gone, I looked around and thought…now what? And very quickly I slumped into a post-feast ‘depression’. Amidst this gray cloud, which swirled around me with all the lonely thoughts one can have when they’re on their own and without a plan, I realized that these are the kinds of moments I must accept and expect. That this journey is in no ways always easy and that the aloneness that I've brought upon myself is both rich with liberation and spontaneity as well as ‘slump’ moments. These slump moments are just more opportunities for an understanding of myself - a self that appears below the surface of daily joys and routine. I just have to sit with it, and watch it flow.

And on the other side, the other side of the drop, I am in awe with my life.  I’ll end off with what inspired to me sit down and write my blog now, this evening, while the rain falls down. I feel extremely blessed to have met the Balinese family in whose garden I am living. They are loving and generous and kind and seem genuinely pleased with me being here. Jeru (the wife, whom I have mentioned before) and I have developed this lovely, mutual adoration for one another. We chatter away, her teaching me Indonesian phrases or laughing because neither of us knows what the other is saying. She has gifted me with quite a few little meals, all given with such love and generosity, and all delicious. The other day she kept some Balinese black rice pudding aside for me, and my oh my, that was good!

This evening she came to adorn the little temple outside my cottage with offerings and to say prayers and do a ritual blessing (I really am at a loss to what it’s all about, and it’s difficult to find out with the language barrier – but the daily dedication to the ceremonies, offerings and rituals are really inspiring). She loves to say to me, “Caitlin cantik!” (Caitlin is beautiful!), and the reason I tell you this is because I am inspired by how cantik she is. Her devotion to the big and small ceremonies that are conducted daily, her constant smile and open heart. I am buoyed up by the love I feel coming from her - for all that is in her life.

Anyone who has even been to Bali will know what I'm talking about when I write about the daily offerings that the Balinese make to their Gods. As I said, I am still pretty much in the dark about it all, and I want to try understand it further. These offerings are given in little square coconut leaf baskets and usually hold flowers, rice, incense and some other food offering, perhaps an animal-shaped biscuit or a sweet. To an untrained observer, it all seems quite bizarre!

The ceremony that Jeru did in my cottage tonight is apparently a prosperity ceremony. It certainly felt prosperous with the abundance of offerings she brought and left on my little porch. Before she left though, she plied me with all sorts of food from the offering baskets! At first I was shocked, won’t the Gods be upset that I'm eating their cake?! Apparently not, as I had to try it all – two types of fruit, two types of cake, a peanut cracker thing and something else which was sweet and delicious but unnamable for me. She left for the temple (after teaching me to say, “I go to the temple now in the rain”), and after she left and I put all my uneaten loot in the fridge, I was completely, once-again, overwhelmed by her love and generosity. This family does not have a lot of money, but the money which they do have is used to give generously and abundantly to others. Their lives seem dedicated to their Gods, their families and the people who arrive on their doorsteps.

Now, that's pretty inspiring.

Last thing to share: Two days ago I stopped to have my coconut at the little stall in the rice fields where I met the delightful lady who is now a firm friend. I spent just less than an hour with Wayan, the stall owner who showed me all the organic things he is selling, and cleaned my jewellery with the jewellery-cleaning fruit. He happily posed for my photos and asked that I ‘put them on the internet’, to advertise his business. So here we go. If you want organic rice, herbs, jewellery-cleaning fruit, or a delicious young coconut through a bamboo straw – this is where you need to go, and Wayan is the man you need to see!

My House and My House-Mates

I naively believed that I was the only one living in my cottage – delighted to be living all by myself, making my own rules, wiping my own crumby counters, sharing the water in the kettle with no one but myself. It was not long before I realized that I was very much mistaken. Of course there are always those creeks and noises and scuttlings in the night, ones that you simply must accept when you’re living in an old cottage in a jungle-garden. One night however, the presence of the ‘others’ made themselves known – it was the night when I learned that I was merely a visitor and by no means the sole occupant.  

I thought that I had seen most of the small wildlife there is to be creeped out by, but apparently Africa has nothing on Indonesia. Since I have been here I have seen the biggest geckos I have EVER seen in my life. I did not know that they could grow this enormous. For me geckos have always been rather cute, no longer than your middle finger. They become less cute when they’re the size of your foot. I am not joking. Why has no one ever told me that geckos can get so big? They look like they should be lizards, but then you know they’re geckos because of their little (or, in this case, not so little) gecko feet - the small round pads they use as toes. I have two of these monsters living in my kitchen, and I don’t much mind them but they do give me the krills a bit – so now, when I walk into my darkened kitchen at night I give a few claps of my hands to let them know that I'm here and it’s my kitchen right now, and I see their little over-sized gecko heads scuttle behind the kitchen cupboard.

One night I put out chickpeas to soak, in preparation for my first lunch with friends at home (how exciting!). In the morning (and this was the morning after the evening  I discovered that there were giant geckos in my kitchen), I came into the kitchen to find that there had been a little visitor during the night. The little visitor has pushed back the tea-towel, helped himself/herself to some chickpeas and had a lovely meal – while leaving all the shells in a neat little pile next to the stove! I wasn’t sure if I should toss the chickpeas, as perhaps this little visitor was carrying some little diseases. I decided to wash them again, boil them and tell my guests the story – we all ended up tucking in, and since then have had no serious problems to report. When my landlady’s wife, Jeru, came in that morning, I attempted to tell her / act to her what had happened - our communication is conducted in a mixture of very basic Indonesian and English, and so I had to get out my notebook and draw a mouse, my gut-feeling telling me that this was the little villain. Clearly my artistic skills are improving as she laughed and nodded, “Tekus, Tekus”. Naughty Tekus!

I am loving the wildlife here – it is all so interesting and beautiful. I wake up every morning to the raucous sounds of roosters all greeting the morning, repeatedly, from about 5am onwards. In the mornings I sit on my verandah and have my tea, laughing at the chickens as they come scampering past – there is a white one I call Hopi, as he seems to make use of only one of his legs. The other day a dragon fly sat on my foot, and yesterday morning I watched a beautiful butterfly sit on my fruit-cutting knife and reach his long, skinny tongue out, to get to the juice. That was amazing! One night I arrived home, desperate to use the toilet, only to stop dead at the sight of the cockroach sitting on the toilet-bowl. YUCK! I think divine intervention helped me get rid of that one!

Here are some photos of other interesting creatures whom I have had the pleasure of meeting:

 Oh! And this is just me drinking a coconut – wanna join me?

Goodbye Hair!

I think that any person’s journey of self-exploration often comes with some personally daring actions. Mine was cutting all my hair off and shaving it to about half a centimeter of its life. I have always wanted to do this, daring myself quietly from the back of my mind. For me, it exudes a kind of freedom, independence and self-reliance – the kind of qualities I, and many other people I'm sure, have yearned for. I remember thinking about doing it two years ago, and then telling myself that no parent wants to meet their darling child’s teacher and find her nearly-bald and Buddhist-monk-like. It was bad enough that I was just out of nappies myself, and so felt that doing the deed then, just as I hoped to get a job as a young, respected teacher, was as bad as getting a tattoo across my forehead.

So the desire was pushed towards the lyrical future of my travels. I’ve spent the last eight months growing my hair so that I could tie it into a joyful pony-tail, always knowing that the heat of Bali might just give me the push I needed to ‘realize my dream’. And so it was. In the last week or so, my hair was becoming limp and annoying in the humidity. No sooner had I prettily clipped it back,  was a hair elastic grabbed to tie it crudely up and out of the way. My hair and I were beginning to have a bad relationship, and one should always try to have a friendship with one’s body parts (recently I’ve been trying to make friends with my bowels, but that’s a story that probably won’t appear on this blog). So, it took a few days of upping and downing in my mind, thinking about the things that people will think about me. Reasoning with myself in and out of it, until the decision became too unbearable and I knew that the only decision was to ‘do it’, because then I'd know, I'd have done it. Luckily cutting one’s hair is not like cutting off one’s arm – it always grows back.

So after realizing (once again) that my journey was a personal one, and that the very fact that I was concerned with what “people would think” was to me, exactly the reason why I should go through with it. I needed to stop caring about whether or not I'd look pretty, and accept that I probably wouldn't! So it was decided. And on the morning of ‘the deed’ I pushed the details and questions and wonderings firmly out of my mind. I told a few new friends here and they fully supported me as well as discussed the disadvantage of pointy-out ears. I did not tell anyone back home, I did not want to scare myself out of my decision.

So it was then that I found myself sitting in an upstairs beauty salon, watching as my very flamboyant hairdresser “Risky”, prepared his electric razor. I think he was secretly delighted as he waved his hands about, telling a tale of a French woman who came in with her hair down to her bum and left his salon with a completely bald head. I reassured him I was not going that far. My American friend came with me, and it was good to have her moral support. She took a video of the ‘cleansing process’ and I can now watch as my face changes from complete apprehension to looks of delight that it was all coming off. Because, as I was sitting there, it felt so completely right and good – I was clearing energy of the past few months and starting afresh and anew. The feeling of walking out with my almost bare-head in the breeze was one of the most beautiful things I have ever felt. And so now, I wander Ubud feeling cool and fresh, giving myself a fright every time I catch my reflection in a mirror or the glass of a store-front window.

Down the garden path.

I’m sitting writing this on the verandah of my new little home. I’m surrounded by the sounds of birds, insects, the soft rumbling of traffic and general clatter of life. When I came to Bali I had the idea of the home that I’d live in, firmly created in my head – with the intention that this would manifest itself into my reality. On the day in which I found myself sitting on the platform in the middle of the rice paddies, I realized that while it is important not to settle for less than you desire, it is equally important to be open to what the universe offers you, as maybe, just maybe, what you desire and what you need are two quite different things.

The previous afternoon I had turned down a home which was in my budget but neither had a rice field in sight, nor any access to the internet. As I rambled through the rice paddies that day, I realized that if I was living in and immersed in them, I probably would not be rambling, and perhaps I would not find the small glories I was stumbling upon now. Perhaps, I would be content to sit in my little house in the rice paddies, too comfortable to move or explore beyond. And, did I really need easy access to internet? Already my mail-checking habits were starting to annoy me, perhaps distance from this would also be a good thing. Nearly every little café has access to wifi, and so what a delightful excuse to go and hunt out new places to sit and be, drink my cups of tea and do my ‘internet stuff’.

So I came and looked at this little house, nestled in the bottom of a garden of a Balinese family compound, surrounded by beautiful bushes and trees. I fell in love pretty quickly, the family charmed me with their kindness and smiles and the cottage felt old, simple and quaint. Even though the family would prefer long term rentals, I have signed a one month lease (a hand-written contract on a page torn out from an exercise book) because Gustut, the father (and the only one who can really speak English) told me that they were happy to have me, as for them, I am a gift from God. And they too are a gift from God for me!

 I moved in on Saturday, the whole of the last week I spent in my little self-imposed retreat, gathering strength and grounding for my inward journey onwards, vacillating between boredom, loneliness and extreme joy at being where I was. So arriving at my new home was a wonderful experience for me, walking down the little path reminds me of when I was a little girl and used to head down to my wendy-house at the bottom of the garden after school. I have arrived at my new little home, a place where I can grow, be quiet and find myself in my joyful solitude. I feel so absolutely blessed. The Balinese family have welcomed me in, laid a bowl of flowers out on the table and the mother includes my home in her nightly Balinese ceremonies, making me feel all the more seen and safe.

 I have spent a good few hours in the last couple of days cleaning, as the previous tenant’s cleaning habits and mine don’t seem to match up. Yet, I’m grateful for this process too – it’s like I’m making my own space and claiming my own magic. I am very thankful to her as she has left all her kitchen things for me to use, as well as her books, bed and musical instruments. I have come into a fully kitted-out home (albeit a little on the dirty side!) a real joy for a girl who has arrived only with a very heavy backpack and no frying pan. I have never considered myself terribly musical, but last night I enjoyed the space and quiet of finding my own rhythm as I sit on my little verandah, looking out into the garden and drum to the beating of my heart.