Two Worlds (Bali and San Francisco)

It has been awhile now. I have been going back and forth to Bali for years, and there was a time I spent nine months out of the year there. But now I have been gone for five months. It's a classic love/hate relationship (much like my typical relationships with men), and now that I have been away so long, I think of it constantly.

I live in San Francisco. They say everthing not screwed on quite tight eventually slides to California, and San Francisco is a time-honored magnet to the far-out, the edgy, the out-there and the weird. (This used to be more true before San Francisco turned into Palo Alto.) We have wiccans and buddhists and vegans and green earth advocates and consultants and all sorts of groups that are more common here than in middle America. But, like the rest of America, San Francisco is devoid of magic. It is the magic of Bali that calls to me. In Bali, witches and spirits and gods are real; black magic is to be feared and balians hold more sway than medical doctors. Villagers carry out ancient ceremonies to the beat of gamelan music and the swirl of dancing maidens, ceremonies that can go on for days, nights and weeks, ceremonies that surge through the villages and sweep up their inhabitants in mystical trances, all far from tourist eyes. Anything is possible...



But it is also the every day living of Bali I dream of. Five months out of Bali, I long for the wind in my face as I ride my motorbike on the road through the rice fields near Ubud. Riding past the temples of Bali, multitudes of terra cotta temples with walls covered in ancient scripts and ancient secrets; avoiding the monkeys as I negotiate the narrow footpath bridge through the Monkey Forest in Padang Tegal; hearing a friend call to me from a warung and stopping to visit and have a beer or a cup of coffee. I crave deng deng, the dried beef delight at the Sumatran-style Padang restaurants, pisang goreng, the fried bananas so readily available from vendors along the side of the road. I crave the sudden rains, the kids climbing coconut trees, the surprise of turning down a street only to meet a large procession of laughing teen-agers and children clanging musical instruments to accompany a barong, that mythical, lion-like, dragon creature who brings good luck. For in Bali, the mundane and the magical are forever intermingled.

But I live in San Francisco now. Maybe I can go back to Bali in a month or two, but not now. So I go to work and I go home and I get ready for a date, because I feel like I should be dating, ready to go to a restaurant or a movie or whatever... but there is no magic.