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.