thePlace

Woke up with puffy eyes and a day of blankness – unsure of what my next step should be.  The morning sky was the Singaraja’s typical whitish blue, patches of clouds hung about. The sun was only one quarter high but demonstrating his might shamelessly. The day started heavily hot. I stared into the paddy field meditating.  Vaguely distracted, I felt dense and a little weary.

            The humid hot air added a tinge of listlessness to my fatigue. This afternoon I have to return to Sanur for a promise to be the photographer for Ibu Wayang and her music troupe in a big temple upacara.  Reluctant to be once again mixed up in the rumba of motorbikes and cars in the ever-growing traffic jam of Kuta area, where there is no apparent order of the movement of things.  The memory of the night with corked-up ears and grotesquely loud music jarring in the background still gives me an objectionable taste. 

            Appreciation comes when one finds harmony in the chaos of Bali – that’s what I told myself repeatedly in the discomfort of fume and noises when I first returned from a 2-month of driving, hiking and camping trip in the backcountry of NZ.  Still missing the sublime colors of the sky and the sparseness of the Kiwiland.

            After all, Bali is my first stop for the search of a Place in realizing a hazily beautiful dream – I must give it time. 

            It’s been 2 ½ weeks now, the days have been filled with endless driving around small and overly-congested roads, looking to find a piece of land where my dream could be fulfilled.  I have given myself one last month to actively seek for the Place in Bali before deeming it unworkable.  If I have made the efforts, no time to wait around and struggle for something that is not meant to be….

            I have already decided on the next probable island to explore – Cuba.

            Meditating and unable to stop my wandering mind, shafts of sunlight penetrated through some whimsy clouds over the paddy field, radiating the space with splendor; a strange feeling of affirmation that today is the day for finding the Place engulfed me. It filled me with aspiration again.

            The day was almost ending, Ruli and Made made no signs of stirring from the sweltering agitated heat. I packed in silence.  We have all been quite exhausted, looking for the Place.  I told them I’m tired of looking.  Ruli suggested that I should give it a rest and think about all the beachfront properties and the hill area in Tabanan & Ubud I have seen.  I agreed-although I was not taken in with a particular one, all of them were not too bad and anyone could be the Place.  Just have to consider price, area….

            While on the way back to Sanur from Singaraja, Made said that he managed to arrange to meet an agent to show me a piece of land - the last attempt. This time, up on a hill instead of the usual beachfront properties around Singaraja. 

            A down-sloped clove orchard, 4 KM from Lovina beach, on a hill overlooking the calm Bali Sea and distant Java.  The land is fed by spring water up the hill a kilometer away.  Except for some clove and fruit trees, a broken house where the guardian family of the orchard lives in, two long-forgotten broken ponds, the almost a hectare of land is quite stripped of vegetation.  It was the big boulders that ruggedly jugged out around the sloppy land that attracted my attention. 

            The sun hovered over the horizon, this time, sheepishly, lost his earlier mightiness.  I looked at the sun-drenched countryside on the east and west, at the long lines of trees, sloping up toward the skyline and the hills, the hot brown soil dappled with vivid green, and here and there a lonely house sharply outlined against the light.  I watched the silent sea.  So different when one is right next to the it – the salty wind, the crying waves…. It was then I saw the light playing with the water,  painting it, molding it, reflecting her changing mood as the sun caress the earth in a long drawn goodbye.  The surreal brilliance dark water shimmered under the sun, the texture, the shapes, the expressions of the glittering water transformed from one moment to the next -  deeper, calmer, meaner, stronger, lonelier, colder, more vulnerable, restless, bursting forth, so alive.  The perfect potentiality of nature……. 

            A thought came – “this is it, this is the Place.”