The Way of Wanderlust (34 page)

One of the many riches of the trip was a visit to the violin museum in the city hall of Cremona, where priceless violins hundreds of years old are reverently housed. Each day, some of these violins are taken out and played as a way of keeping them in their finest condition. We were privileged on our visit to hear the exquisite “Il Cremonese” built by Antonio Stradivari in 1715. As we sat in that simple hall, surrounded by 17th-century paintings and 13th-century stones, I lost myself to the strains of the violin. With heart-plucking clarity, they swooped, descended, spiraled, and soared until at one point I was at the apex of the room, just a shining sliver of sound reverberating.

My dad loved music; he sang in our church choir and regularly attended the local symphony's concerts, and afterwards he would speak glowingly about how this pianist or that flutist, that violinist, had played. He also had served in Italy during World War II, and one of the memories that had stayed in the forefront of his mind was how as an aide du camp, he had navigated his beloved general through Italy without harm. So he had been with me throughout my Italian journey—and from Venice to Verona, I would catch myself wondering if he had looked at the same vineyard-latticed hills or cobblestoned squares sixty-five years before.

But it was at that moment in Cremona, at the apex of that room, that I felt his presence most powerfully, felt that his spirit and mine were intertwined in the music of those strings. And I realized that people, from new-made friends to life-long family, inevitably come and go in the composition of our lives, but that once they have appeared, they never really leave.

And I realized too that the people we love—the memory of the people we love, their enduring, pulsing presence in our lives—is like those violins. Every day, in one form or another, we take them out and play them, if just for a while. We become them, swooping, spiraling, soaring to the apex of our minds. We honor them and keep them alive—as they do us, intertwined.

I first visited Bali in 1978, on the same trip where I encountered the layers of Indonesia at Prambanan, which I described in a piece earlier in this collection. This essay describes my return to Bali thirty-four years later. Much had changed in those thirty-four years, of course—inside me as well as inside Bali. And yet much remained the same. Bali is one of those rare places that seem charged with a special energy, where the shields/layers/skins that separate us from the spiritual core of the universe seem thinner, more porous. As a result, magic seems to happen more readily there, more easily. I've been to Bali a few times since that first visit, and something unexpected, magical, has happened to me every time—some gift that fundamentally rearranges and reinvigorates the way I live in the world. In the journey described here, the quest to see a gamelan orchestra led me to a resonant lesson in desire and fulfillment.

IN THE FALL OF 2012, I SPENT
a week on the Indonesian island of Bali as a guest of the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival. This was my first visit to that blessed place since I'd fallen in love with it thirty-four years before.

Like me, the island had lost some of its innocence in the intervening years. Unlike my earlier trip, when the Balinese I met had simply welcomed me with wide eyes and hearts, this time most immediately asked me if I'd been there before. When I answered, “Yes, thirty-four years ago,” their eyes opened wide for a different reason and they smiled and shook their heads. “Oh, Bali has changed much since then!” they'd laugh, though many of them couldn't say exactly how because they hadn't even been born thirty-four years before.

Of course, to my eyes too, Bali had changed. The streets were much busier, clogged with trucks and motor scooters, than I remembered, and the towns were more built up; the road from Denpasar to Ubud was lined with many more buildings and fewer rice paddies than I recalled.

But in a deeper sense, the spirit of the place seemed hardly changed at all. During a few free days of wandering, I passed a number of festival processions flowing through the streets. Every day I was enchanted as I had been three decades before by the sweet, simple
canangsari
offerings—hand-sized compositions of colorful flowers on green coconut leaves, some graced with a cracker—that were meticulously placed outside my door and on bustling sidewalks, off-the-beaten-path foot trails, temple thresholds, and business entrances alike. And while I realize I know nothing about the difficulties of being Balinese—the need to scrupulously follow rigorous traditions, for example, or the unpredictabilities of relying on a tourism economy—the people I met exuded a gentleness, tranquility, contentment, and sense of sanctity in the everyday that was as exemplary, expanding, and restorative for me as it had been thirty-four years before.

But it wasn't until my last day in Ubud that Bali's soul-binding offerings really came to life for me.

I began the day with a mini-pilgrimage to a paradisiacal place I had visited earlier in my stay. I had been introduced to it by a local expat who had taken my all-day writing workshop. During the workshop lunch break, she had described a beatific organic restaurant perched among the rice paddies, a short walk from central Ubud. She kindly offered to take me there, and the following day we met at Tjamphuhan bridge, walked a few minutes uphill along Jalan Raya Campuhan, then turned left up a wide paved driveway. At the top of this driveway was a sign neatly hand-lettered:
to rice fields sari organik
.

After a few minutes following this narrow path, and frequently having to step aside for a seemingly endless succession of motor scooters, we entered what seemed an enchanted land of rice paddies, palm trees, and, here and there, one-story “villas” with red-tiled roofs. As we threaded through the paddies on this narrow path, we passed a spa, an art gallery, a couple of “house for rent” signs-of-the-times, and a fledgling neighborhood of new homes called Dragonfly Villas. After about twenty minutes, we came to a sign and a stone pathway that led to Sari Organik.

An open-to-the-breezes restaurant of some two-dozen tables blossoming in the middle of verdant rice paddies, Sari Organik has one of the most exquisite settings of any restaurant I've ever visited. We sat in this tranquil place sipping juice from fresh-cut coconuts, and as sunset slowly gilded the paddies, the centuries seemed to slip away.

I went back on my last day to pay homage to Sari Organik and to see if it could possibly be as magical in the harsh light of midday. Happily, it was equally lush and glorious and vibrant at noon, pulsing with the peaceful energy of the land around it. I savored an omelet of organic mushrooms, tomatoes, and onions, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and delicious strong coffee, and struck up a conversation with a smiling, energetic woman who turned out to be the restaurant's extraordinary founder and owner, Nila, who told me that her goal is to help the local farmers grow a diversity of crops organically, so that they can preserve the environment and become economically self-sustaining.

After that serendipitous encounter, I walked back through the rice fields, feeling singularly content. I had gotten to do just about everything I had been hoping to do on Bali, I was thinking. There was just one exception—I hadn't heard a gamelan orchestra. I'd caught snatches of gamelan music at a couple of different performances during the festival, but I hadn't had that soul-transporting immersion in the music that I remembered vividly from my first trip to Indonesia.

Just as I was having these thoughts, approaching the end/beginning of the path, the sounds of a gamelan orchestra drifted on the air! I could hardly believe it—it was as if my thoughts had conjured those notes.

I reached the sign for Sari Organik. To my right was the wide, paved driveway that led to the main street, but then I noticed to my left a narrow, hard-packed dirt path that paralleled a rock wall twice my height. The sounds of the gamelan were coming from somewhere beyond that wall. The wall disappeared into a densely vegetated interior, with a couple of red-tiled roofs visible in the distance. I figured that if I followed the path, eventually it would lead to a break in the wall where I could enter and discover the source of the gamelan music. I wanted to see the orchestra with my own eyes.

So I set off down this winding path, following the sinuous curve of the wall and the music's tantalizing rise and fall.

I startled two workers who were on their way to restore a magnificent old house set among the paddies on the other side of a stream that paralleled the trail. They laughed and welcomed me to the forest. A few minutes later, a lone and lanky Western woman with a backpack passed me and pressed on into the green. After fifteen minutes of ambling, I came to a lush setting where palm trees, twining vines, giant ferns, and slick bushes with propeller-like leaves tangled the air. Still there was no break in the wall, and the gamelan music was sounding fainter and fainter.

I stood in the shade of that jungly patch, puzzling over what to do, wondering if I would ever find the break in the wall, when suddenly it hit me: I had already found the break in the wall; it was in my mind. Listen! I didn't need to see the orchestra—my wish had been to hear the gamelan. And there it was, all around me. What more did I want?

I walked back down the path and the sounds of the music swelled in the shadowed air. When I reached a point where it seemed loudest of all, I stopped and closed my eyes. Gongs, flutes, and drums gonged and trilled and boomed in layered patterns, lapidary high notes skipped like diamonds across a pond, bong-gong-gong-booming low notes reverberated in my ribs, rising and falling and rising, staccato and slow, each note like a drop of water from heaven, submerging me in a pool of otherworldly harmony. Time stopped.

After a while—ten minutes? twenty?—the music ceased, and the forest echoed with its silence.

Then the harmonies flowed anew, and suddenly I felt released. It was time to move on; I had a taxi to catch, a plane to board.

I realized that all day I had been regretting my imminent departure, despairing at having to lose this blessed place. Now Ubud had answered that need, bestowing one last
canangsari
-lesson that would allow me to leave: I didn't need to see the gamelan to hear its music, and I didn't need to be in Bali to have Bali in me. It was already there, gonging and trilling and booming, rice paddy blooming, and it always would be.