Magic

There was something magical about Bali. Although the magic only came in glimpses, at times when I least expected it, it was still there, ever-present, lurking in the shadows.

During my last night, I would say I reached a pinnacle relationship with the sea, with all of my senses. At the peak of a fading sun, I watched the rainy season arrive to the shores of Canggu. With each passing moment, luminous clouds brought a more and more tumultuous wind. This changed the shape of the waves, making them larger than life. I could imagine where a Tsunami could be born. Only this Tsunami did not take away life, it did just the opposite. As I sat, almost alone, overlooking the water, I could feel the moods of the earth rise and fall. The humid air made my hair curl across my face and the salt from a taste of the ocean earlier in the day left a special glow to my skin. Something happened to me then, and it felt like magic.

The sky turned from a deep blue, to a lighter blue, to pink and orange and red. It then transformed into a deep scarlet that ate up the sand before my eyes and had the waves crashing onto the wall in front of me. As the sea sprayed me, I looked up to see the clouds running, the earth hastening its ever-moving path, to go from dry to wet. I sat on the porch, and the wind turned into a torrential rain. I couldn't then -- decipher -- between the surf and the rain -- what water I was encountering when. It all seemed to be one. In Bahasa, water is "air." This couldn't have been more true.

As I retired to my single room behind the porch, and a lone and seldom-visited eating establishment, I laid down and listened to the rain. It pounded the roof, and once again the waves became the rain, and the rain was the sea. My breath, and the taste in my mouth became the feeling inside me, which was the rain and the sea, moving within each other, around each other, together.

As I said before, the magic only came in flashes. It wasn't too long after I laid down that the constant cycle of water was broken by the base of party music -- a reminder that even magic is imperfect.

I would say Bali is warring between the old and the new, and, at the same time, is at complete peace with both the new and the old. Grand resorts have popped up beside modest villages, although most of Bali isn't modest at all. Even the most pre-historic of places are architectural wonders. Even the most disadvantaged families, live in aesthetic grace.

I am not a skeptic, but I am definitely a realist. I don't think I have ever characterized something as magical before. But to me, this feeling of spirituality, even if it was only temporary, of being so closely attuned to nature, comes seldom in life, if ever at all. It was not the distance from development, or a modernized world that gave me that sense either. It was something in the air, in the water. It was just something about Bali.

The old, stone Hindu carvings, the artistic rituals, the sensory experience, traveling alone through it all, brought me closer to myself. Getting to know my friend Brown made me more aware of the cycle of life. To him and his family, life doesn't mean trying to cram in as much as you can in this one life you have to live. For Brown, life and death are an ever-churning cycle. You will live one life, and you will live another. The dead should be honored as the living are, because there is no fine line between the two. Everything, like the sea and the rain, is running into one another. So just be.

As I was driven through rice fields that turned gold with the angle of the sun, and through old villages where people bathed in ravines and carried bamboo atop their heads, I couldn't help but let my guard down, internalizing what I saw. I just was -- Bali. Although Bali isn't undiscovered -- in fact, it is completely dependent on tourism, and as a tourist, you'll know it for most of the time you are there -- I found seldom hours and moments like this that took me somewhere else. I would have needed more time to find many more.

One moment came on my hike out of Ubud, up Champan Hill. Although the path was made of stones, not dirt, completely touched by human hands, I revolved around an untouched field of growing rice. I could feel something inside me start to melt. I thought to myself, this is a place I will always remember, and come to remember. If I was ever alone, at a loss for something in my life, this is a place I would want to be in to remember the loss, to take it all in, to be fulfilled by the sound of the grass swishing in the wind. This is the type of place that could rectify my losses. I'd been in places like this before -- on hikes that took me away from the chaos of every day existence, but this was different. I looked to the West and saw a small house, with many porches that overlooked this hill. I pictured myself as an older woman on that porch, remembering what had brought me there, remembering the memories I already have stored up for that moment.

To escape in Bali, to find its magic, you have to let your guard down, to breathe a little deeper and to try to get away from the resorts, the taxis and the commercialization that can eclipse its spirituality. Everywhere you go, you will see fine, archaic, Hindu carvings. You will see so many that one will become another, one offering of rice and dried flowers with become the next. I encourage you to take advantage of all of your senses at each passing moment, because even within the touristic culture, you can find beauty where ever you go.

In Ubud, beauty lined each store front. The art, sculpture was a phenomenal backdrop for my walk through town each day. The Picasso-like woman dancing with her arms raised high, the people toiling in the rice fields, the Hindu gods, the young meeting the old meeting their spirits -- I allowed all these images to come to life. I tried my best to realize the beauty, the sense in it all -- the smell, the touch, the sounds that were surrounding me as my admiration flourished. And for many solitary moments, it worked -- it was like magic.

Bali just is.