Balinese Evocations

The Wilderness Within  By Steve Hurt

Looking out into a garden where impossibly tall palm trees draw long stripes into the sky, as though sketched with delicate cross-hatchings for leaves. How does one speak of the fullness of the sky? This visible skin gilded with the humidity of the tropics. My neck stretches to take in the sight of the gigantic clouds that billow upwards. These accumulating forces of heat and moisture, convective sky gods, pregnant with the promise of rain. This sight makes a gasp of my breath. The wind too makes herself known. She is persistent, always warm, filled with island scents, caressing the cliffs that rise in front of me. A volcano made this megalith, steeped in the freshness of a newly birthed volcanic earth. These are nothing like the mountains I know from South Africa made of an ancient sea floor and twisted plate tectonics. Here there is the sense of the earth being new, still in a state of emerging from the crust of the growing skin. Forest creeps and climbs up the steep slopes. Flowers, bougainvillea and frangipani, adorn the view, praising the mountain and sky. Behind me the ocean. A warm tropical sea and a breeze washing over me. It is dusk and the clouds catch alight with fiery hues. A man with a terrible voice sings karaoke, performing Balinese folk songs filled with innocence and joy. The waves join in with his melody, whispering “shh” to the shore. And with that the rain comes. Finally. Feels like it’s been waiting days to fall. The thunder rumbles, warm drops of rain fall on my sunburned skin, my bare chest.

The Earth speaks a different language of being here altogether. A language of being in all places at once, of holding this entire underwater world, this volcanic birthing, these billowing clouds and the voice of my beloved mother ocean. This island teaches softness. I cannot help but just fall in love, allow myself to be seduced by her beauty. I want to point it out to everyone; show them this love that is right here in the centre of creation. I want to write words that exclaim Her beauty. I want to write Her love letters of infatuation and appreciation. Here I feel what many feel when they come to Bali; this cascading fountain of love that permeates everything. Here there is a deeper connection to the act of creation, the act of the world coming into being.

I feel it like a continuous unfolding of love that both obliterates and constellates in the same moment. A little fragment of this love, even just a scent of it, is enough to whisk away the heart into the greatest of seductions. You have not ever fallen in love until She has turned Her gaze upon you. Just one look and you become nothing, reduced to a fragrant dust, brought to the ground. There is no other state to contain this love other than deep prayer. But sometimes there are words that come and these are how I help myself to small, bite-sized portions of this cascading eruption of magic.

“Ready my ears to feel your voice
Let your whispers roll over my skin
I want you. Want your voice inside of me
Let your rolling thunder stretch my throat,
so that unspoken words gush out
As I praise you with my breathlessness

And when the sky opens
And the clouds recede into stars
And the moon makes dappled shadows
And my heart reaches out
And my breath breathes in
And we touch in this vastness
Then, take me even deeper
I’ll get lost in you with no map
Let these hands read the braille of your body
Finding paths that take me home”

In these states of falling in love with the Earth, the beauty of this outer world meets my inner world. It is a chiasmic connection. Seeing, feeling, sensing, my body reciprocates. There is a conversation between this beauty outside and this beauty that reflects it in me. And I become the meeting point of this potency.

Places all have their own magic. Each with its own note of love. And the fragrance of love is present everywhere. To write about Her is the only way I know how to love Her. To draw myself closer into her. And as I feel this closeness, this primal bond, the inseparable wholeness, the whole world disappears inside me. The infinitely big embraced inside the infinitely small.

There is sensuality in this moment. The touch of Her skin and the billion unfolding worlds that dance off the surface of this goddess. Her skin, a magical substance that dances and swirls, a fabric that responds to each word we speak, each state we feel. She is a living goddess of reciprocal entanglement and we are Her billion eyes looking back upon Herself.

A few nights prior, in the deepening stillness of meditation at Tirtagangga water palace, I sensed a distinct presence of this deep fragrance of the gods. Like nectar that fills the air. A palpable presence. It leaves me feeling emptied and hungry. Every cell inside me calls out with an aching to be filled. My senses feel intoxicated, as though a cloud of sacred hallucinogen has come to rest in the valley of my inner landscape. The world dissolves into white, this sacred mist dissolves the mind. Then I see clearly how the gods are alive and watching us. There the gods show me this cloth made of their spirit. It is the fabric of their world and I am shown how it has been woven into this world. They show me how those threads are the living substance of everything we know in this world. The threads of this cloth are the source of this earth, the substrate of this mysterious world. They show me how prayers are threads that are woven into this fabric that permeates the material world.  The island is awash with this scent from another realm. I see how it is their prayers that saturate this place. Every household with a temple, every person offering daily prayers. This is love, manifest. And it has the scent of the extraordinary.

And now, looking out to sea in a tropical haze, my attention turns to the wind and I disappear into that other world, the veils of separation drawn back. The wind washes through me and blows on the embers of my heart. It carries the fragrance of the gods, small wafts of stories that capture you, make you yearn to explore. These drifting fragrances from distant places. The wind is free. It tells stories of what it has seen; prayers told at the graveside sharing half a secret, of a life lived in this place. That scent, the smoke it carries, of frangipani, incense and firewood. It carries the tears from the funeral pyre and it is the story of a soul returning to the ocean of oneness. That scent, it is prayer, it is heartache, it is the end of living and the beginning of being. That scent is the dried tears of the lovers who lament the absence of their beloved. It is the thanksgiving of morning prayer, the sweat of hard work, the sigh of the seasons, the aftertaste of rain. Each particle in that holy wind is a story of praise for creation.

As the eye of the heart opens, the world comes more alive, each particle in the air is a word being spoken in this love story of creation. Without our prayers uttered in love it would freeze over, all this swirling storytelling of the wind would cease and these words would become meaningless. It is said somewhere that when the mountain looks at god, eyes appear on every stone. So it is with us, when we look upon the Earth with this eye of the heart, we become the flesh that reciprocates this seeing and feeling of the world around us. And in seeing with the soul, we merge with the soul, we become this creation, we become the sweet smelling dust of the world.

And so too it is with longing. When presented with such beauty in this place, every sense becomes a hungry lover, longing for satiety, wanting more of this holy wholeness that is the essence of creation, made so alive by the prayers and offerings. Then, as Rumi says, you “feel your lips becoming infinite and sweet like a moon in a sky” and a spaciousness inside that holds all this beauty. Then you sense your spirit and how it is ancient, how it existed before this world, before this body, how before this ocean lapped to shore your heart was already in love, enraptured, drowning in holy water.

Before the Earth became trapped in matter, She too was this scent. She too was the dark, empty night which this love impregnated to form the billion stars. Then the open sky held Her, before She was born and Her love made all this place holy. This soil, this tree, this lapping shore are the signs of this great love affair. This is how it is in this place, there is a magical substance in the air of this island that tells the story of Her love affair.

On this beautiful island the heart learns to love, in her beauty the hand learns poetry. It is her fragrance that makes the soul want to dance, that sweet dance inside the heart that nobody sees. And when that dance erupts, it becomes the art of writing love letters.  The birds remember this secret, they sing it in their morning prayers. They know how, when one is in love with the Earth, anything we utter is really just the longing for Her return. Look, the beautiful flower, the waves rolling in, that forest shade, it is Her we seek, it is Her presence we crave, Her absence we lament. So this is where I find myself now. On the island of love, in love and forlorn, awaiting union, suffering separation, calling Her home.

 She has made a weeping lover of me.