thePlace

    I watch the evening fades into yesterday – dimly and inescapably. The fathomless sky is thick with grey clouds, tinges of violet reflected in a small opening. Soon I’ll be covered with total darkness. I watched myself wedged, waiting to see the journey end. I feel my wish to move silently into the impermanence of things, see myself fluxes with the emptiness of things.

    It is as though I have been living in this part of the world for ages and ages, and it seems that I knew every tree outside the Space, in the horizon and beyond. I have watched the new banana leaf shot up from the middle of the trunk, twirled into a straight forceful tube impatiently waiting to unfold, sprang opened into majestic lime green oblong fan, turned into dark green, wafted sideway by the new ones, trampled by the wind and rain, gave way to rutted tatters, turned yellow brown and dwindling off. The past was here, the present was here and I could imagine no other future than the banana tree, the new shoot, the perfect lime green sheet, the broken brown leaf, and again another shoot, the lime green, the brown, over and over again….

    How ordinary everything seems - simple and just is. Life passes, moves on and disappears. Droves of flying ants fluttered in flurry around the light, next day only masses of wings and overfed geckos remain. Next came the scarabs - the little black reddish ones, the big grey ones and the white ones. They horded the bulb for a few days and then noiselessly vanished. Mob of tiny caterpillars invaded the space, lingered for a week and mysteriously left no trace….

    There is no separation between the ‘I’, and the width and breath of the surrounding. Not knowing where ‘I’ end, and another begins – there are no boundaries. There’s only one thing that is certain - it all came to the same thing in the end, death. There is no reality, the essence is all emptiness. What is this ‘me’ that I feel? Who is this ‘I’? Where is it? It sees, it thinks, it feels – so fleetingly seductive, none of it is real. The eyes & thoughts still growing blur from living in confusion; it’s the mind’s perception that has lodged immovably within for eons that is playing the tricks.

    The ‘I’ has floated out, sojourned again and again in the space of boundlessness. It needs to be grounded, to live life. And it is wishing to be united - while work, growth and change consume the ‘me’. Wishing to expose the hidden hypocrisies, for the heart to be opened up, for the space to be cleared up, wishing to surrender, to connect….

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    I just found out that I might have lost my email account – the one and only one since I started yahooing more than 10 years ago. So goes the blissfool one. It’s time to learn detachment again, to let go. It’s time to start anew.

 

    I have lost all contacts so please write me at leenarliew@gmail.com

                 After my first ride on the newly purchased scooter (a 2^nd hand tiny Korean made Kymco automatic 125 for $900) to and from the Place, I fell sick.  The adventure was more than my body could take – the mid-day heat, the billowing dark fumes in my face,  and most of all - the trauma from the real life computer game like hurdles where portholes, sand traps, villagers, chicken, dogs, bikes and cars pop out haphazardly every corner.  To add to the tribulation, the engine kept dying on me while going down the steep hill; its tendency of veering right without shock absorbers utterly froze up every muscle of mine. What's more, the 20 km journey back took thrice longer when I heroically took an unfamiliar quieter street and got misdirected repeatedly.

            I must have looked like a complete retard with my SF baseball cap in a borrowed half-cup battered helmet without straps, wobbling on the scooter, visibly jerking my body instead of shifting the bike to avoid obstacles.  I should have practiced riding the scooter first before taking it on the road.  Of course I wasn’t tested.  I bought the motorbike license from the police like everyone here, except mine is for the tourists and renewable every 3 months with a fees of $20.00, while the locals pay once every 5 years.

            How mistaken I was to have expected owning a motorbike as a high-spirited adventure (I almost bought a Harley many years ago - perhaps it’s a lot different riding a one-seater 899 Sporster in California).  Instead, for the rest of the next 2 days I sneezed uncontrollably and thick phlegm clogs up every pore in my body. I am down with a violent cold.  The exhaustion from the scooter ride still caroms around my psyche like a pinball machine.

            Of course the adventure is not entirely to be blamed on – my body has been stressed from acclimatizing to the excessively hot humid days and cool nights of the monsoon, getting wet in the rain with sweaty shirts, inadequate rest, skipping dinners, etc.  All these and the load from the project contributed to the illness. 

            I still feel like a deflated punctured tire but I’m determined to ride the scooter like one of locals - with a full Darth Veda like helmet and jacket in the heat.  Before long, like them, I (not just dreaming) would dance and skip the scooter about in play like an effortless tango - after I have it serviced, the right-veering tendency corrected and the shock absorber reinstalled. 

            Who knows, as so commonly done here, I might even turn smooth corners heaping up 2 or 3 passengers at the same time, packing in one another airtight without helmets, and with feet tangling off the tiny scooter….

            I smell the burning wood. I hear the wind soughs through the oversize leaves of Breadfruit trees, the distant sounds fill the air - baby crying, random crows of roosters, incoherent gentle hollering of villagers, dogs barking, faint ceremony wailings, murmuring screech of speeding motorbikes, birds chirping… In the quietness of the Space, all these humming and thudding are part of the sound of silence. They are melodious because they belong. 

            I finished the Project’s accounting. Learned a new program – Microsoft Excel, played with it and proceeded to make ‘Book 1’ looks like a real professional with up-to-date totals, comments, colored and all.  Staring at the numbers, the things I know for certain are that quickly and surely the amount spent on the Place is mounting, the certificate of ownership will take a long time to materialized – still waiting for the property surveyor to do the measurement, major works have to be done with the water pipes and the source of the spring water - the seller has negated his promise to meet repeatedly, the House and the Pool are going through major overhauling to correct the capriciousness of the builders…. Another one of those ‘endless list’ I have to face.  

            Although the starting and working of the Project thus far have adhered to strict Balinese horoscope, spirits and gods have been appeased by continuous offerings, land has been cleansed; the hope of moving into the House any time soon seems like a far-away dream. I have no say in any of these of course, I just let them be, with respect – the Balinese can’t do it any other way.  Still I wonder the effectiveness of all these extravagant practices.

            It’s interesting watching how the locals work- one has to have the good humor of seeing beauty and finding reasons in things the locals do, no matter how frustrating it is.  It’s hard to understand their decisions making process - specific instructions with accompanying pictures showing the details are ignored and questions are not asked.  Instead decisions seem to base on the calling of awkwardness and paranormal impulses that contradict convenience and logic. Here, consistency is irrelevant.  

            Or perhaps it is just that my limited so-called logical sense has missed the point of Balinese-way-of-going-with-the-flow.  

            So light switches are placed at the most inconvenient places, the erratic height of the steps in the stairs are created as if to please an unseen floating apparition with no legs; the color of the wall is garishly pink; the stairs to the room upstairs are built outside and not part of the house – one has to go out of the house to go upstairs and in the rain if there is a storm; the tree is planted to block the view instead of giving shade; trees have to be removed and replanted because the structures are built too close to the already planted trees, kitchen counter is made without thinking of the appliances to be used, the veranda made is unproportionally small and has to be extended…. I asked for steps to be made in the pool- which I have explained and painstaking found a picture to show to the contractor.  Instead tiny concrete seats with column that spend the depth of the pool are built. And in direct opposite of each other cutting off the width of the pool into almost half!  I almost scream at the sight – who would in the right mind think of building such a horrid looking, space-taking things! 

            Those columnar seats have nothing in common with what I told and showed them to do.  Why didn’t anyone ask if they are unsure????

            Unless of course, if they are trying to make a chess set out of the pool!

            Then there are the irreversible unthinkable mistakes that I have to deal with, like the possible water seepage, etc. Why they did what they did when they are experience builders (I have seen some of the works they did) – is a total mystery to me. 

            Perhaps I should find out just how my presumed betters are violating the locals sense of code of norm.  Maybe I should rapidly grasp the deeper mores and etiquettes of my new surroundings, and start communicating effectively…make them start writing down things on their own, get a list on the wall to refer to when there are questions … or I would just have to be there daily to keep close surveillance.