thePlace

The insects have laid siege to the House like a grisly army advancing on the good guy’s castle in the Lord of the Ring. In days, flies claim their territory shamelessly, mobbing everything in sight. The traffic of those black plump medium ants clot up every pillar going up to the room upstairs. In nights, insets of all kinds buzz round the lights, vying to kill themselves. The dead ones cling to every crack and fissure… more ants appear, loading and unloading the dead ones – a feast to be enjoyed in the secret of their home.

Dragonflies, butterflies and everything that flies stun themselves in the glass, wings buzzing, confounded; I end up having to engage in endless rescue missions or Blackie would just snap them up with his jaws at the right moments. He once caught a dazed little bird, dismantled and swallowed it bones and feathers without a trace in 2 minutes. Blackie is salvage - he recently killed twenty young chicken at Agung’s (while I was out of the island) and taught Orca, his Rockweller, to corner those poor chicken.

It’s the end of December, the monsoon is flaunting its mysterious power. The sky is perpetually heavy with unrelenting brewing dark clouds threatening to assail the earth with its cascading torrents that bring everything down the hills, into the breaking rivers and onto the churning black-brown Bali Sea. The street down the hill is peppered with hundreds of potholes and is clogged with grime of all kinds.

The horizon is a patch of gray – the sea and the sky inseparable. The country side has turned to an immodest green. The villagers begin to plant their one time money crop – the maize, the paddy fields scatter around the hills below.

These last days, after the guests came and left, the exhaustion sets in, a kind of tiredness that pervades as soon as I pick myself up from the bed. I was hard at getting the cottages ready for the first real guests. Spent most of the last 2 weeks fighting the traffic in the south, finding the right shops, bargaining…then another 2 ½ hours drive back to the North. Followed by the furnishing, training and directing the workers…an endless amount of work!

The whirlwind of preparation took every bit of my energy (plus all the pounds gained from my time away and more.) Although the rooms are finally ready, and looking good (after I nearly bled dry my account), the Place is still at the testing and learning stage, there’s still much to be perfected.

Christmas came and left. Tomorrow is the New Year. Here, there is no stressful holiday season, no people to visit – just a couple of friends that will come and stay for 2-3 days. With plenty of space and clouds in the sky, a patch of grey in the horizon, I am only aware of the start of the rainy season, it’s the beginning of an end – the dry season; everything is full of potential, once again.

I marvel at the novelty of the images around the Place, SamyogaBali – where perfect union is found in space and nature. When I alienate myself from nature everything seems so chaotic and annoying – the flies that get into your food, the ants that take up every space, the mosquitoes that sting, the threatening termites…. But once I loose myself in it; everything is so organized - so coldly precise, voluptuously real - gross, alive and unhidden, like the overturned beetles that try in vain to right themselves. Wood rotting, walls turning mossgreen, fruits decaying, insects eating each other up, termites invading the house and roots, ants parading, hopeful fogs cruising…everything is just the way it is, and it’s perfect. The only perfection that allows in here.

Everything depends on everything else.

And I, the ego-clinging self, is learning to shred slowly, painfully slowly; so to merge.