SWINGING

In three weeks I have visited two Balinese hospitals and three traditional Balinese healers.

After my initial heartquake that landed me in Sanglah, the people’s hospital, my new neighbor, Adriana, took me to see a traditional balian.  (Adriana is from Slovakia and her husband, Brij, is from India.  They met in Dubai.  I just love how international Bali is.)  We drive about 30 minutes, arriving at a house surrounded by rice fields.  Several others are ahead of us in the waiting room, a mixture of locals and westerners.  A Balinese woman attended by her grown son slowly sips an herbal potion the healer’s wife has prepared.  It is evident that the tea is not a delicious mixture conducive to gulping. 

When it is our turn the balian greets us as a gracious host, makes a sincere effort to memorize our names and, holding my hand, escorts us to a private room.  The look in his eye is clear, deep and direct; a knowing, reassuring look.  We sit together on cushions.  He does his healing work with Adriana first, then Brij; I go last.  He asks us to look into his third eye and keep our eyes open.  He closes his eyes, telling us he is able to view inside our bodies.  Brij is clearly in a high state of discomfort as the balian does his hands-on energy work, a deep and specific massage with coconut oil.  When he works on me, focusing on the organs below my rib cage, I feel no pain at all, just a sense of elation that continues to rise.  The balian says I don’t sleep well and it’s true that I sleep very little.  He talks about my pancreas, but doesn’t say a thing about my heart.  Adriana tells him about my recent heart experience and he says, unconcerned, “Heart is easy!  Just need to see me one time for heart!”  He does a little additional energy work on my heart and we return to the sitting room.  His wife brings us individually concocted teas that look and taste as if she has scraped the jungle floor and added ginger.  The balian and his wife focus their bright and intense eyes on me, remarking repeatedly about how young I look for my age.  The balian insists over and over again that I am from India.  

Once we leave and Adriana asks me what I think of the balian and his healing powers, I am not sure.  I certainly feel uplifted by the experience.  “He is a spiritually conscious man,” is about all I can say for sure.

At home I find a dear friend has sent me the link to a Hindu chant called “Devi Prayer:

Hymn to the Divine Mother.”  I have been asking my heart what will make it sing.  As I listen I feel this chant is one of my heart’s songs; the extended New Age synthesizer notes replicate sounds I have heard during some of my out-of-body travels beyond this world, the Sanskrit lyrics tie in with the balian’s insistence that I am Indian. 

Ma Amba Lalitha Devi

The Divine Mother is everywhere.

She is in everything.

She is the Divine Essence that lives within all beings.

Her domain is the field of life, for she gives to all beings the sustenance that is needed for life.

Her beauty lives in the natural world, and spans the universes in all their splendor.

She has been called by many names, for all traditions recognize Her.

Into each consciousness, the knowledge is given of the sacredness of life.  This sacredness IS the Mother.........

I have spent most of my life paying very little attention to my pancreas, not really even aware that I have one.  Since the balian brought the subject up I do a little research.  Insulin production, part of the job of the pancreas, is not my issue, but I did come across something that caught my attention, a couple of somethings: metaphysically the pancreas has to do with the sweetness of life; and the gemstone that relates to the pancreas is the emerald, my birthstone. 

Just a few days later our family is on another vacation, a long weekend school break.  We begin at a place called Turtle Bay near the village of Jasri, far on the southeast coast of Bali.  Our friend Emerald lives there and has invited us to stay as his guests in the Javanese joglo house he usually rents out.  The joglo, made of teak and standing on tall stilts, has two bedrooms, two baths, a sitting room and a gigantic balcony looking out on the crashing waves.  From the balcony it feels like being on a ship at sea; no human-made structure is visible, just a small island off shore exactly the shape of a sperm whale.  

Emerald’s staff serves us a healthy lunch on the balcony, a combination of the fresh greens I have brought and vegetables from Emerald’s organic garden.  It feels good to me being here, a taste of the sweetness of life.  Emerald has lived in Bali for decades and we have known him for almost as long as we have been visiting the island.  I always feel uplifted by conversation with him, absorbing the depth of his understanding about such diverse topics as the sacred geometry and lay-lines connecting Balinese temples and the intricacies of Balinese politics.  I feel like Emerald gets me; we understand each other.  It does my heart good to be seen and met.  Emerald has recently begun growing coffee and invested in a small chocolate making operation, subjects of great interest to Asher and I.

After lunch I have some physical discomfort.  I can feel the balian’s fingers working my pancreas area, although he is nowhere in sight.  A wave of exhaustion comes over me and I rest on a daybed with abundant, plump pillows.  Soon I feel my spirit begin to journey away from my body and the prickles of fear that rise up in me when that starts to happen.  I hear Asher’s voice -- not his physical voice  -- say, “Don’t be afraid.  Go into the Light.”  I relax more, surrender, and move into a Glow that is yellow in the center and vibrant orange all around.  I experience a peace beyond peace... serenity.  As it dissolves away I find myself rubbing my fingers together making sure I still have a body.  I have been having these experiences with increased frequency the past two years.  They are so real to me that I know beyond any sense of doubt that much more exists than what we know as physical reality.  Each experience is a little -- sometimes a lot -- like dying.  I believe I am learning to die so that I can live well.  To live well is to live free of fear, in absolute trust that all things are working together for good.  To live well is to live in joy.

For the rest of that day and well into the next I am in a state of bliss.

We visit Emerald’s chocolate partner, Charlie, at his gnome-like chocolate factory right beside the ocean.  All the buildings look like elves or preschoolers live and play in them, but actually it is Charlie who makes natural soap and raw chocolate there, living upstairs in one small room with a bed and a chair.  Overlooking the beach, hanging a great distance down from a coconut palm, is a wide plank wooden swing.  I put Sofia on it, but it swings out so far over the sloping land, reaching out to the ocean, that she is afraid to stay on for long.  Asher does the full-on adult ride, pulling the swing up the hill to a wooden treehouse-like platform built around a palm, then sailing out in a long arc high above the ground.  He finds the swing kind of scary, too.  Ordinarily I don’t find frightening things fun.  I don’t care for roller coasters and horror films.  On this day, having walked along the lip of the volcano between life and death, and having staked my territory in bliss, the swinging is magnificent.  I pull the swing up to the platform, let go, and surrender with supreme ease.  I am tasting the sweetness of life.  I relish the sensation of flying.  The swing is a barometer for me and I am registering no fear.

Later, I crash.  An emotional crash.  Having moved into my most expanded state yet, I then take a swing in the other direction.  I contract.  It starts as anger about a couple of seemingly small things, but what it touches off in me is a profound feeling of not being cared for, provided for, assisted by my husband, and by life itself.  I put myself through the worst of my teenage anxiety, comparing myself to others and judging myself harshly.  We had left Emerald’s beautiful surroundings -- Sofia and I traveling by car and Asher on his bike -- to join about about 20 Green School families in Amed, the easternmost part of Bali.  It was much too large a crowd and far too crummy a hotel for my plummeting state of mind. And ordinarily hot, dry, beachy Amed is overcast and rainy our entire stay.

This is a big crash for me and it takes me days to climb out of the pit.  It gets worse before it gets better.  I want Asher to listen, be compassionate, be affectionate, but he tells me it’s all an inside job, I have nowhere to look but inside myself.  True, but still I want him to listen.  The more I want him to listen the less he is willing to do so.  I would like him to be able to hold his own joy while compassionately hearing my pain, but he will not budge from his absolute stance, his insistence that his duty to himself is to selfishly pursue his own joy no matter what.  I think he feels that listening to my fears and insecurities will pull him down.  A gulf widens between us.  I can’t believe this is happening, and at such a tender time.  Of course this is when I am getting to the real emotional roots, the epicenter of the heartquake.  This sense of betrayal by someone who I think is supposed to love and care for me emotionally duplicates wounding from long ago when the imprint formed.

During the week I have an impromptu visit with another balian.  This one has been my friend for 13 years, since our first trip to Bali.  We took one look at each other and became friends for life.  His name is Ketut, but I have often affectionately called him Ketutski.  That’s hard these days when the growing entourage around Ketut calls him Shri Guru.  Yep, he’s been elevated to guru status.  Guru in Indonesian means teacher, but the connotation with this crowd is closer to Exalted Avatar. We have an intimate conversation for a few moments, but the circle of adoring women trickles in and I discover they have lunch plans with Shri Guru.  I join them along with Ketut’s family at a small warung just outside of Ubud.  Shri Guru tells the story of Ketutski’s visit with Avara and Asher in Los Angeles for a month maybe 12 years ago including the story of the time the three of us were together in our West LA kitchen, I passed out, Ketut saw my spirit leave through my heart and when I came back in I was in bliss for days afterwards.  We all pause for a moment, seeing the thread weaving a connection to the present.  I am not entirely comfortable with my propensity for this kind of travel, but sense it is leading me somewhere important.  It strikes an incongruent note for me that Shri Guru tells the assemblage how scared he was when I passed out.  I do not tell everyone that a year later, when Ketut and I were together at his home in Bali one night, he passed out and I picked him up after he bopped his head on the stone floor.  We have a connection beyond this world.

Somehow the enormity of the gulf between Asher and I recedes.  The tides of relationship go in and go out.  Gratefully they come back in again.  Just as the cycles of nature move through birth, life and death into rebirth once again, relationships die and are reborn as they evolve.  I tend to my own needs more deeply and he comes forward with a greater willingness to ride through the moment by moment fluctuations with me.  Just in time.  

A few days later I am having not one heartquake, but an extended series of waves somewhat like labor contractions.  They come on in the night.  Sofia is sleeping beside me and Asher is stroking my hair, helping ride out the quakes.  With each wave I pour forth a stream of consciousness release of every significant trauma I have experienced in my life, sometimes crying, sometimes laughing.  My body is doing something beyond my control; I cannot stop it or alter it.  The eruptions are powerful and they scare me.  I realize this terror is something I have carried my entire life.  I am riding the razor edge between life and death.  I affirm my desire to be in this body, my passion to live fully.  I have only just begun to get the hang of being here.  It feels like the waves will go on forever, but then they recede.  

I decide to go into the hospital again.  The hospital maneuver gets set into motion;  Cynthia finds a cardiologist on duty late at night, Michelle finds a car and a driver.   Asher stays with Sofia and angel nurse Michelle accompanies me.  I notice as I have time to pack my own bag that I am already feeling better.  Each time I go to the hospital it is after the fact.  I go anyway.  All the tests are normal, every single one.  I go back home in the middle of the night and slip into bed with my family.  I am glad to be home.  

I know this is not about a problem with my physical heart.  Asher knows this, too.  He also understands me better and knows me more intimately than he has ever known me in the 15 1/2 years we have been together.  Side by side with me as I died and birthed and spilled my lava, what had previously been a fuzzy understanding came into sharper focus for him.  Now it is easy for him to be compassionate.  

Day by day I feel better.  Some of the physical symptoms continue.  Some of the fears still lurk... will I pass out if I am driving a motorbike?... can I scuba dive?...  

My pembantu (helper) takes me to see her balian.  She comes to my house with her husband and son, during the hours she is usually off duty, and takes me on the back of her motorbike to a remote village.  We sit on the porch of a typical Balinese compound. A middle aged man in a sarong and nothing else struts towards us with the gait of a basketball player.  My pembantu, Komang, and her husband make some comments in Balinese about his physique and he flexes his muscles good naturedly.  At times like this I don’t really know what is happening but just go along for the ride.  No one speaks any English and I don’t know what the protocol is.  The athletic man slips into the house and returns all in white.  So he is the healer... I wasn’t sure.  He takes the offerings Komang brought and goes into his temple where he prays briefly.  When he comes back he asks me in Indonesian (at least they speak Indonesian, a language in which I can crawl along like an infant... in Balinese I am completely lost) if I had an experience where I suddenly fell over, passed out and... his hand trails up into the air signifying me leaving my body.  Okay, that’s impressive.  I hadn’t told anyone present.  He asks me some more questions, only some of which I understand and then begins his hands-on work.  Much of it is incredibly painful.  Komang holds my hand.  He does something between my toes and asks me if I feel heat.  No, just pain.  He massages my heart deeply with coconut oil.  My top is in the way and they ask me to take it off.  I am half naked with my pembantu, her husband I have just met, her son, various members of the balian’s extended family and the balian himself, receiving intense and sometimes excruciating massage, yet I am very much at ease.  In between phases the balian looks at me with piercingly loving eyes and asks how I feel.  I laugh a lot and respond that I feel good, but he is not convinced and does more work on me.  His hands and arms shake as he pulls energy out of my heart.  He is chanting something I cannot hear over the clucking of the chickens roaming around with newborn chicks.  He massages my arms and legs, always returning to my heart with that inquiring look to see if I have released my burden.  This man and I see each other, understand each other, without language.  When it is all over I feel lighter.  He directs Komang to make a jamu for me, a healing tonic of mostly turmeric, some vegetables and, uhhg, a raw egg yolk.

The next day some of my symptoms continue.  They come and go.  It is not intense, but it is not gone.  The lingering question is:  Will there be more? 

I arrange a cardiac treadmill stress test at the hospital.  When I arrive the staff tell me that the machine is broken.  Bali.  Asher gets a little huffy with the employees which is a good thing because they then decide to send us to the customer service office.  I am amazed that they have such an office.  The woman inside schedules an appointment for the test later that day in a private office.  They hook up 10 electrodes to my chest.  The same doctor who saw me in the hospital administers the test.  I walk on the treadmill.  At intervals the treadmill gets steeper and faster.  My blood pressure remains normal throughout and my heart rate is steady.  I pass the test with flying colors.

I receive a clean bill of health from the doctor.  My heart is just fine.  I am not going crazy.  I am not even having heart attacks.  Not really.  I am awakening. 

Whatever my life was about the first 50 years, the next 50 are swinging in another direction. 

Heart Opening on the Lip of the Volcano

I never thought I would... but on a Sunday I went on one of the monster, crazy, off road bike rides with Asher.  Billed by my friend Michelle as a fun couples ride, ten of us strapped our bikes onto an open bed truck and climbed in beside the bicycles for a journey up the mountains.  We unloaded beside the temple at the top of Mount Batur, each person and each bike receiving a blessing with holy water before embarking on our ride.  We started on a paved road, but soon turned onto a muddy single track that lasted for hours.  My friends had said much of the ride would be downhill into the crater.  They hadn’t mentioned that it would be downhill over jagged volcanic rock and slick compressed mud that causes the back wheel to fishtail.  They hadn’t mentioned that in between downhill portions would be steep uphill climbs.  Nor had they breathed a word about narrow trails with shoulder high, thick blades of grass overgrowing the path and blocking the view of what comes next... massive downed tree trunks, for instance, causing us to lift our bikes up and over in order to continue.  

Most of the riders were far more experienced that I am, having bombed around on  highly technical trails for years in places like Aspen, Colorado or Bend, Oregon.  Fortunately my friend Blair was along for the adventure, as much of a newbie as me, and we didn’t have a single qualm about walking our bikes downhill through some -- well, most -- of the really treacherous parts.  Some places were so steep everyone was walking their bike.  It was an extremely strenuous ride, and magnificent every bit of the way.  

Several of my friends fell repeatedly and had gigantic bruises, but I was much too cautious for that.  When I could take my concentration off of the next meter of trail immediately before me, all around us were stunning views.  We were at the very top of the mountain, the lip of the ravine.  The air was cool and fresh.  Sometimes we rode through thick, fragrant pine forest.  On the left was usually a drop off and a cascading blanket of mist.  Off to the right was the open mouth of the volcano, filled in with a lake, beside small villages and a patchwork quilt of farms.  Children on terraced fields of vegetables called after us, “halo! halo! halo!’  I found myself enjoying it all more than I could have imagined.  I found myself exhilarated. The beauty made my heart sing.  I felt tenderized and open, the veil between the worlds was thin.  I surprised myself by liking the exertion of the uphill portions the best.  The riding was fun and scary and earthy and mystical all at once.    Asher said every time he saw me I had a huge smile on my face.  (Couples ride, ha! he was way ahead of me most of the time, of course.)

Even after we left the dirt path for a paved road down into the crater, the curving surface was strewn with rocks, soaked with rain and extremely steep.  We came upon a bat cave in the rocky mountain wall housing thousands of live bats squeaking and flying around, their guano feeding healthy patches of giant bamboo.  “We’re almost done!” they had been telling me for at least on hour, but we still had a long distance to go in a drizzling rain, through the farmland we had viewed from above, past gorgeous rows of cabbages and chillies, rolling uphill and downhill sections.  By the time I met up with the group at our final destination, a warung in the crater, the rain was coming down hard.  We had been on the bikes for 4 or 5 or 6 hours --- I had lost all sense of time --- a huge ride for me and I was feeling it in my lower back.  Just when I had the thought that I’d love a massage, a Balinese woman approached me offering massage service.  It was such an immediate universal response to a request that I went for it.  The massage was fantastic; deep and intimate and personal.  I felt like a professional athlete getting a rub down after a big event.  Maybe 50 minutes into the massage there came a knock at the door.  The rain had let up and the truck was moving out.  The masseuse said we would be driving into more rain and she was right.  As the truck puffed its way up the steep incline out of the volcano (on Asher’s usual rides they cycle up this road and then all the way home), a downpour dumped copious amounts of water on us.  It felt so cold I expected to see bits of ice in the rain.  We huddled together in the back of the truck making jokes, laughing and singing to keep from dipping into frigid despair.  Finally we reached the top of the ridge where we had begun, purchased rain ponchos that we draped across the tops our heads like tarps and continued down the mountain in greater comfort, ending up at a nice little Ubud restaurant, joined by our children.  My friends said to me that it is time for me to buy a bike.  I agreed.

My week proceeded, serving up healthy, tasty raw food in the Green School warung, greeting the ongoing flow of new families and visitors.  Asher and I have become the unofficial welcoming committee, the ambassadors of goodwill sharing information about the school and tips about living in Bali as we offer raw chocolate truffles or fresh roasted lattes.  The warung is a vortex, a place for connecting, for community building, our specialty.

Thursday night, I read to Sofia at bedtime and fell asleep with her.  I woke up a few hours later feeling like an elephant was sitting on my chest.  I went upstairs with Asher and began feeling strange sensations radiating down my arms into a tingling in my fingers.  Asher called our friend Michelle, who was a cardiac nurse in America, and she sent her husband Andy over to drive me into a clinic and stayed on the phone with Asher.  None of us were really sure where to go for something like this.  

Again the veil between the worlds was thin.  In fact, it didn’t exist.  I wasn’t afraid.  I knew my being was continuing to make a strong conscious decision to remain in this body.  And I knew that to leave the body is to merge into the ongoing bliss of the universe.  I have already left and come back.  I know it is okay.  So I surrendered and went along for the ride.

At the absolute epicenter of the heart/soul earthquake, something lifted off my soul.  Truly.  The medical profession calls what was happening in my body a heart attack, but to me that is too violent a description for the quickening I experienced.  What was happening in my body forced me to relinquish control.  When I did, I experienced a release of something I have been carrying almost my entire life thus far.  It felt as if I had been encased in a thin crust of mud and the heartquake caused the mud to crack and peel off.  I had a huge smile on my face, like riding on the lip of the volcano, and my radiance was pouring out.  The radiance felt real, authentic; it felt like the real me.

I opened the little vial of nitroglycerine I had been carrying around since my first heart episode in May 2009 -- the time I left my body for a short while and came back -- taking over an interval of time three tiny tabs under my tongue.  The nitro must have allowed any constriction in my spasming heart to open enough that I fell asleep and slept through the night. 

When I woke up it felt like a St. Bernard was sitting on my chest.  Maybe a St. Bernard puppy, an improvement.  It was Friday, the day of the week Asher, Michelle, John Hardy and anyone else daring enough go on their crazy monster almost all day bike ride.  Asher stayed home with me.  

During my first heart episode in 2009 a chain reaction of events got set in motion when I passed out, stopped breathing and my family called 911.  No one asked me what I wanted.  When the paramedics called the ambulance and the ambulance drivers decided to helicopter me in to the hospital, I said, “no,” but no one was listening.  Protocol took over.  This time Asher repeated to me, “You get to choose.”  I could stay home.  I could go to the hospital.  I could choose.  I liked that.  I chose to go. 

Michelle, keeping tabs on me, aborted the bike ride and came with us.  Cynthia Hardy came over to check on me and sent us all with her driver into the hospital in Denpasar.  She had called around, determined the best place to go and had a cardiologist waiting for me.  Her generosity and her 30 years living in Bali were a blessing of help and support.  Having Michelle as my medical translator and consultant was also a miraculous blessing.

Once again, the hospital stay was anticlimactic.  The real event had already taken place.  I received very good care, including sponge baths and oil rub downs from sweet young Javanese nurses in training.  ER in a developing country was a bit like M.A.S.H.  Even ICU was communal; I could hear the cacophonous beeping of all the patients’ heart monitors.  Soon they moved me into a private room in a different wing that felt like a hotel room.  I had a seating room, the bedroom, a gigantic bathroom and a garden.  I called this my ashram.

In the ashram I continued letting go of fear about what was happening to my body.  I knew with certainty that I have a commitment to being here and that I won’t leave until I choose to go.  I have learned that letting go into the womb of the Universe is exquisitely blissful.  With each heartquake experience and with each aftershock, I take a deeper drink of reality beyond time and space, beyond daily living, beyond worries and fears, a deep, long sip of eternity.  I am unravelling the knots in my mental body so I can be free, freedom being the quality I most desire in my life right now.  Having long ago put a bushel over my radiance, I now want to allow it to shine.  I want to shine all the way.

Malaysia, Part 3: Not Malaysia, Thailand

We rolled and carried and stacked our luggage onto a crowded ferry in the Penang harbor, a myriad of travelers squeezing into every available seat, and sailed the bumpy water to Langkawi, the northern most Malaysian island.  After a taxi ride to the opposite side of Langkawi, officials in a casual port side office stamped our passports out of Malaysia while we watched a flock of hornbills glide from tree top to tree top.  Boarding a speed boat for Koh Lipe, a tiny island off the coast of southern Thailand, we were off to a new country, a new culture, a new experience.  I have not cared much for boats in the past, but am realizing now that every time I am sailing on the ocean -- an experience I am having with increased frequency since moving to Indonesia -- I absolutely love it.  The sky was unseasonably overcast and the waves were choppy.  We arrived soaked with ocean spray.  The speed boat staff unloaded our bags directly onto the sand and, while we waited on a wooden slab bench, an official inside a little shack on the beach processed passports, calling out country names when finished, the most informal immigration procedure I have ever witnessed.  The speed boat docked on the busier, more developed side of Koh Lipe, but we had decided to stay on quieter Sunset Beach.  Wading into the warm water, we loaded up our luggage onto a long tail boat which motored us around to the other side of the island.  It is high, high, the highest high season, but we smoothly find an available room right on the beach.  Three boats, a taxi and two immigration offices later we have arrived for our authentic beach vacation.  

The simple joy of awakening early and seeing the sun rise orange over the ocean, Asher and I sharing a perfectly placed log in the sand, then sitting on our porch enjoying a pot of green tea as the sea breeze rustles palm leaves.  Our porch is front row on the sand, facing long stretches of turquoise water that only gets deep and turns dark blue far off shore, the hazy outline of jagged, uninhabited, rocky islands in the distance.  Between us and the shore’s edge are sparse clumps of stumpy palms and extremely tall pines.  Pines are a surprise for me on a tropical island, their needles wispy, draping like moss, their tiny, round pinecones smaller than a lump of sugar.  Occasionally a motorboat powers by; part time fishing boats, part time sea taxis and excursion transportation, all of a lovely asymmetrical Thai design with a long extension of wood at the bow and an almost dragonfly shaped motor extending off the stern.  When the sun is bright the white sand is blinding.  In places it is so fine a powder it is like pastry flour.  The beaches have tiny, gentle waves, perfect for Sofia the Mermaid to back float across a cove and snorkel in water shallow enough to stand in.  

Every day we do an art project using whatever we find on the beach.  Every day the project begins as a collaboration, Sofia and I, and soon becomes my intense focus while Sofia swims, draws in the sand, dances across the beach.  Sofia the Shell Collector is an excellent assistant when I put out the call for more big white clam shells or more colorful bits.  I take total enjoyment in the process and when I feel complete, leave the creation for the tide to redistribute or the resort staff to sweep.

Every day we swim in the warm, clear, rejuvenating ocean water.  Asher and I take turns snorkeling far off shore where the water becomes deep and the coral flourishes.  One of us stays with Sofia in the shallows and the other gets a good work out stroking against the current, the pay off being bright purple giant clams, sea eels, long, spiky sea urchins and florescent fish.

We walk everywhere.  We do not see one single car. We do see one very small, very short pick up truck twice and a few motorbikes.  Sofia the Barefoot takes to walking everywhere without shoes.  After a few days I join here.  We can go anywhere on this island on foot.  We can go anywhere on this island without shoes.

For years I have craved this feeling of endless days beside the ocean, hour after hour filled only with sand and salt water and sun.  It wasn’t a burning passion, but a quiet desire like a musical note held a long time while other instruments fill up the foreground.  Now that I am in the experience I have longed for I have the time to appreciate the details and to recognize all the pieces that have come together to bring me here.  Some of those pieces had rough edges and yet here I am, on a  gorgeous and exotic beach, watching two little birds hop by, admiring the black and white patterns on their wings and their bright yellow beaks.  Here I am, my body turning a darker shade of brown every day, savoring the sun, the colors of the ocean, the cloud formations, the constant sea breeze, even the rinsing off of sand from my feet before entering our little beach hut.

We celebrated New Years Eve on the busier side of the island.  One walk way connects Sunrise Beach and Pataya, lined with restaurants hawking fresh fish, Thai massage joints and, to Sofia The Ice Cream Lover’s delight, a real Italian gelato shop.  This was the first time we had ventured over on foot and the beach was hopping.  Every beachfront restaurant was packed and many had a dj or live music.  Large groups of Thai locals were playing games.  Two guys with boxing gloves straddling a wooden perch built into the shallows of the ocean punched at each other in a good natured way until one or both fell over into the water.  In the sand they ran a relay race that involved putting on a pair of shorts, in some cases too small for the participants, and running a loop back to home base.  The visitors, mostly every flavor of European, were sitting at long candlelit tables in the sand eating late dinners.  Many were releasing Thai New Years Blessings into the sky.  Shaped like Naguchi lamps, these flying lanterns are cylinders of white paper with a paper top and a metal hoop at the bottom holding a flammable coil.  Up and down the beach people were pouring their hearts and dreams and aspirations for the new year into their lamps, igniting their coils, waiting the prescribed 5 minutes for the air inside to heat up, then releasing their prayers, the lanterns rising like miniature hot air balloons.  Most of the time the breeze carried the lanterns up, over the docked boats, over the bay, a colony of oversized fireflies gliding gracefully out to sea, forming their own constellations in the night sky.  Sometimes a lamp had barely begun to take flight before it lost altitude, tangling into the mast of a sailboat or crashing into the ocean.  If the lanterns predict the future, some were in store for a dramatic year, their lamps rising, dropping dangerously close to the water, then catching the wind for a jerky climb up again.  For hours before midnight fireworks rocketed into the dark sky, not in one centralized location but percussively here and there.  We walked the stretch of beach in shining New Years masks, blowing sound makers, taking in all of the activities, Sofia The Prolific Artist pausing to draw figures in the sand.  Eventually we parked ourselves on a platform in a bar with good music.  Sofia made it until 11:30 and fell asleep, giving Asher and I the opportunity to start off the year with the workout of carrying her back across the island, under the canopy of fireworks exploding.  Earlier in the afternoon she had correctly informed me, “I am heavier when I am asleep.” 

On Koh Lipe every bit of food, other than fish caught locally, is imported from the mainland.  Another tropical setting that imports all of its food supply... I am noticing a strange, unsustainable pattern here on planet earth.  The (imported) curries were fantastic and I added my own fresh leafy (imported) Asian greens purchased at tiny markets.  One restaurant had an agreeable chef who allowed me to bring my own greens and fruit which he blended for us into green smoothies.  After a few days I was training him to make raw food dishes and writing down menu suggestions.

We hired a long tailed boat for a snorkeling expedition, island hopping to new stretches of coral.  Sofia the Snorkeler, afraid of getting her face wet in a pool just a few short months ago, swam hand in hand with Asher and I in the open sea.  We spotted a puffer fish and a lion fish with long mane of fringe.  When Sofia wanted to stay on the beach, Ring, our boat driver, made animals for her out of palm leaves. 

I wanted to stay beside the ocean until I had the satisfied feeling of having enough.  One evening Sofia said, “I’m beginning to get tired of this beach,”  and I said, “That’s good, because we leave tomorrow.”  I was ready.  We were all ready.  It was time to go.

Back to Langkawi by speedboat.  A taxi to the airport.  A plane to Kuala Lumpur.  If you want to take a taxi out of the KL airport you must purchase a ticket inside.  We didn’t know that, so when we finally got to the head of the queue we were ticketless and Asher had to run back inside the airport building.  They sold him a premium ticket, though he hadn’t requested one, and we were wondering if we had over paid, but while the long line of travelers waited for little cabs, we immediately got into a nice big new car.  We liked our Chinese driver, Andy, and hired him again the next day for a treasure hunt.  We had a day and a half before returning to Bali and were determined to find a newfangled ice shaver to bring home with us.  It was an adventure into the outskirts of KL, and sometimes it looked like the trail was going cold, but we ended up sourcing exactly the machine we wanted.  We knew somehow it would work out, because we felt the inspiration, and it did.  We found a company that could order the machine from a warehouse and deliver it to our hotel before our flight.  Like an old fashioned Asian ice shaving machine, our new baby has a spiked piece that hand cranks down hard on a frozen block of deliciousness, then electrically spins on an extremely sharp blade producing ribbons of edible confetti.  The whole thing is encased in pinkish red plastic with a big company sticker on the side that says WELL!, so it seems like something fun is going on when you just look at the thing.   

When we left Kuala Lumpur for travels north, KL was geared up and dressed up for Christmas.  Never missing a consumer sales opportunity, when we returned we found KL all done up for Chinese New Year.  The decorations mostly involve dragons and huge quantities of paper flowers.  In Chinatown Sofia the Fashionista found a hot pink Chinese dress.  In Little India she found another frock covered with beads and sequins.  Pink, of course.  She spent every last penny, or Malaysian ringet, of her birthday money we had been saving.  It was time to go home.

From vacation we return home to... Bali.  That still tickles us. I am experimenting with recipes for my ice shaver like coconut vanilla, raw cacao cashew and mango orange.  In the Green School warung I serve up the flavored snowy confections in bowls made from coconut shells.  It’s a hit with the kids, my first real raw food crossover item popular with the under 16 crowd.  Up until now I have mostly been serving to parents.  Our friend Ben Macrory brought back from his vacation in Oregon Asher’s commercial coffee grinder and his cold pressed coffee equipment.  We are getting tight on space in the warung.  Time to build the restaurant...

Malaysia Part 2: Going North

I fell asleep on the bus from Kuala Lumpur to the Cameron Highlands.  When I awoke, I thought I must have arrived on another planet.  On either side of the highway was an utterly devastated landscape, brutally clear cut land without any sign whatsoever of the lush jungle that used to thrive there.  Not a green speck.  All that remains is terraced red earth, ready for monoculture plantings of oil palms.  I had seen multitudes of palms from the plane before landing in the KL airport.  From the air they look beautiful; repetitive floral star shapes in endless green rows.  On the ground I realized the raw, alive, breathing jungle was being steadily transformed into a single commodity, an orderly, controlled, one crop nation ruled by short term gain.

Farther away from KL and closer to the Cameron Highlands we entered into steeper territory, more difficult to conquer, the jungle still reigning.  The roads were winding and narrow.  We sensed monkeys and wild things in the mountains.  In our travel group of two families we had animals of our own; 4 rowdy little girls with big voices.  The busload of Malays and Indians must have been glad when we reached our destination.

We stuffed the taxi van to the limit with luggage and ourselves, and it deposited us at a Scottish style chalet, built during the colonial era, now run by an Indian family, done up for Christmas.  Both the chalet and the family.  It was Christmas Eve.  Our friends waxed nostalgic for Christmas in England and partook of the evening special with cocktails, turkey dinner, Christmas pudding, songs and games beside the fireplace.  Asher and I opted out and went into the tiny town, during a downpour, searching for something fresh and ending up with vegetarian south Indian food served on a banana leaf.  We returned in time for a round of musical chairs.  I never knew it was a Christmas activity.  Even an Indian Santa arrived, beard askew.  Christmas, in a Muslim country, served up British style by Hindus.  Surreal. 

We intended to hike through spongy jungle in search of the legendary giant Rafflesia flowers while in the Cameron Highlands.  We hired a guide, Balan, a third generation Cameron Highlander of Indian decent driving a heavy duty old Land Rover mounted with cow horns.  Balan was willing to take us on the jungle trails, but informed us we would wade through knee deep mud.  We decided that might be a bit much for the 4 little howler monkey girls and opted for easier tourist paths with a view and a tea plantation stopover.  Half of Malaysia, it seemed, was vacationing in the Cameron Highlands which is rapidly sacrificing its natural beauty to develop into a commercial tourist trap, a phenomena sweeping Asia.  The narrow roads can get clogged to the point where a drive that should take 15 minutes lasts four hours.  Balan knew how to get around so that we never once got caught in traffic.  Our jungle walk was ho hum, but the rolling hillsides carpeted with vibrant green pruned tea plants were stunning.  Asher loaded up on a year supply of Boh tea while the girls had lunch in the plantation restaurant serving up food I couldn’t even look at, but instead feasted my eyes on the surprisingly sophisticated modern architecture design cantilevered over the growing tea.  For dinner Chinese steamboats, a Cameron Highlands specialty of a dozen vegetables you can plop for yourself, table side, into steaming broth -- or, in my case, skip the boiling pot and consume the veggies raw -- finally gave me something to eat that I didn’t mind consuming.

Moving further north, again by bus, we made our way to Penang, the Pearl of the Orient, a large island in the Malacca Straits almost kissing the coast of northwestern Malaysia.  An old trade route, Penang bears Dutch, Portuguese and British colonial influences as well as having seen waves of Chinese, Indian and Armenian immigration.  Word has it that Penang offers the best street food in Asia.  We arrived in George Town, Penang between Christmas and New Years without reservations or a plan, but with 4 wiggly girls wanting to run their legs and needing a meal.  Sofia also needed a toilet, but the bus station didn’t seem to offer that kind of amenity and we found a nice, hidden patch of grass.  We also found, immediately, two taxis able to take us to a hotel that happened to have rooms available at a decent rate and the rooms happened to have views of the ocean.  In no time at all we were on the streets sampling the cuisine, trying a bit of this here and a taste of that there.  It was super handy having our friend Edith with us (mother of the 3 stair-step girls two years apart), who grew up speaking Mandarin at home and could explain to the baffled street chefs, used to tossing everything into a sizzling wok, that I really didn’t want my Chinese cabbage fried.  Really.

George Town is a UNESCO World Heritage site which means plentiful strolling opportunities down side streets with colonial architecture and glimpses into the past.  We found a few wonderfully restored buildings, converted into restaurants or hotels, but most of George Town is more in the category of shabby chic.  Or just shabby.  On an early morning run I found some structures from a previous century that the jungle was in the process of reclaiming, trees and vines climbing through the windows.  Later we found a coffee bar with a wifi signal and were able to sit curbside sipping espresso and hopping on skype with my parents and son while surrounded by the streets of Penang just waking up, a confluence of influences and time periods merging.  Outside our hotel were updated versions of the rickshaw, pulled by a human on a bicycle, always waiting for a fare.  We hired two -- all the rickshaw drivers seem to be older men -- and they took us for a spin around town and down to the original port where the first Chinese immigrants made their homes.  The tiny rustic houses, still inhabited, look much as they always had only now each one has a television.  We determined that Penang offered a more authentic view into 19th century China than China does, Penang never having gone through the Mao era cultural wipeout.  

On one outing we took the munchkins to the Penang State Museum.  Entering the initial exhibit my surprised eye caught sight of a large photograph of the Lubavitcher Rebbi.  I learned that Penang’s Armenian quarter had once contained a small Jewish section and a Jewish cemetery, maintained by Muslims, still exists.  As my friends and the children continued sweeping through the museum, I fell into a lengthy conversation, before the Rebbi’s watchful eye, with two Jewish New Yorkers, Santa Fe transplants.  We had much in common including mutual friends who live in Bali.  This couple had just come from Koh Lipe, Thailand and it just so happened that Asher and I had recently decided Koh Lipe would be our next stop after Penang.  They gave us a big thumb’s up about going there and were able to recommend a place to stay.  Eventually I caught up with our group and had fun photographing the kids in front of the museum’s historic photographs, looking like they had stepped into the past.

Jon and Edith took the children to the Botanical Gardens while Asher and I had a meal with friends of friends who live in Penang.  Kung Wai, native to Penang, works with an NGO promoting organic farming and his Japanese wife, Junko, runs a Waldorf inspired preschool.  We had a lively conversation about raw food, public health and the politics of organic agriculture.  Malaysia, Kung Wai informed us, imports the vast majority of its food from Thailand and China.  What a dead-end course for a country to take, removing itself from its own food supply, choosing to chop down its jungle, import food necessities and focus on a single crop, palm oil, for export.  We left Penang with thoughts of gratitude for the Green School and the opportunity to put our beliefs into practice, serving up healthy, organic, locally grown food, and a sense of how important that model will be in the future.

Part 3 yet to come...