9. The First Re-awakening: Indonesia. 1. Bali.

In the early years of my marriage to Bill, he and I had much the same position on things supernatural.  We were agnostics, I guess – not only about the existence of God, but all sorts of other things as well: angels, fairies, ghosts, demons, ETs, clairvoyance and clairaudience, precognition, prophetic dreams, reincarnation, spiritual healing, psychic abilities ... We were prepared to consider the possibility that such things might have some basis in fact. Like many other people, we were somewhat fascinated by the possibility that any of them might really exist, but we thought it unlikely. 

We delved into Colin Wilson's massive tomes, best-sellers at the time, The Occult and Mysteries, which seriously examined the possibility that the paranormal was real, with lots of research and historical background – but which came to no definitive conclusion. Which meant that we didn't either. 

Bali

Bill had dreamed of visiting Bali since he was a child reading his grandfather’s books on Dutch Indonesia. 

He had also dreamed of becoming a professional diver. He already ran a scuba diving school when I met him, but only as a weekend sideline while working with his father and elder brother as a builder. When our Firstborn was still a babe in arms, he arrived home one day with the news that he was about to become an abalone diver. 

He had been driving home when he heard on the car radio that the State Government had unfrozen abalone licences, which for some months no-one had been able to acquire. So he drove straight into the city and bought the first one issued! I thought he’d gone mad, but I also thought a good wife did not interfere with her husband’s dreams, so I managed to smile instead of screaming. 

I was wrong and he was right. He remained an abalone diver, and a very successful one with a comfortable lifestyle, until his retirement by the time both our sons were university students. 

His payments from the abalone cannery were big enough to be exciting. He announced that we could take an overseas holiday. He had long dreamed of visiting Bali.

We had three longish family visits there. Here's a recent haibun (a combination of prose paragraphs and haiku) on the subject.

It Wasn’t Me Who Had the Epiphany

I kept bursting into tears! It was our first visit to Bali – me, Bill, and our two little boys. It was 1974, the tourist boom just beginning. We visitors would collectively alter that Paradise beyond retrieval … but we didn’t know so then. It was still unchanged. A naked family, showering under a roadside run-off, waved unembarrassed as our taxi passed.

the setting sun

falling slowly into

a wide flat sea

‘Island of the Gods’ the tourist books called it. We agreed. Enraptured as I was, why was I constantly bursting into sudden tears? 

We read the histories. Some postulated combined ancestry, Indian and Chinese. Later writers say those influences arose more from trade visitations. We could still find old Chinese coins, with holes in the middle, dropped in the street. I brought home three to use with my I Ching.

Suddenly Bill got it. ‘It’s the Indian in you!’ 

My maternal grandmother was mixed-race Anglo-Indian. (I have to add ‘mixed race.’ There are other definitions of the term, from the time of the Raj: one meaning completely English but living long in India, the other meaning completely Indian but thoroughly adopting British culture.)

He was right. It burst on me as revelation. It wasn’t the people but the artefacts. I was re-experiencing things I’d grown up with, lost along with my childhood. I was eating out of bowls I ate from in my grandparents’ home, I was surrounded by reminiscent ornaments, I was admiring familiar designs on cloth … 

There were connections with Chinese artefacts too. My mother’s family had put in there on the long boat trip from India to Tasmania, and bought some pieces. 

I’ll pass to descendants the carved Indian-silver containers and vases, the polished bamboo bowls with Chinese dragons painted around their outsides.

My Dutch-born husband wanted to visit Indonesia for the soul connection to an ancestor who had lived there and left diaries. I didn’t care. I hadn’t been out of Australia; I was happy to go anywhere. How odd that it was I who fell into connection with my Asian roots (who never got seventies Bali out of my blood for evermore). But …

I never returned 

to the isle of the gods –

vanished

6/1/26

I fell in love with Bali as one would with a person! Even aside from the family memories it evoked, there was the extreme natural beauty. Then, I saw people living in a way I had always thought, deep-down, we all should live. They were spontaneous, authentic, respectful and kindly in their day-to-day interactions with each other. 

Back home after our first visit, the two things I hated most were wearing shoes, and that no-one spontaneously smiled at me in the street.

Having our little boys with us helped. They were pre-school age and very blond. The Balinese thought them as beautiful and exotic as we thought their bright-eyed little dark kids. There were lots of mutual exclamations of admiration. I soon discovered that both mothers and children don't need a common language – they already have one. Having our children with us opened many doors. We made real friendships, cemented over our repeated, fairly lengthy visits. (We didn’t just go for a few days and travel all over, packing in lots of sights. We liked to allow time and leisure to sink into a place.) 

The third and final time I flew home on the plane, I cried quietly all the way (and it was a long flight!) because I had an absolute inner knowing that I would never return. And it was true. Life happened, and as things turned out I never did travel back there. (It's most unlikely that I ever will now. Due to ageing, I don't even travel within Australia any more.) But, more than that, it is as I say above. I soon came to realise that even if I had physically revisited, the Bali I fell in love with was no longer there to return to.

These epiphanies and revelations, however, are not what I class as the re-awakening of all that I had shut down so determinedly in childhood.

That began when I saw a youngish, cheerful-looking Balinese man sitting cross-legged by the roadside, with a sign offering to read people's palms for money. Partly from curiosity, mainly ‘just for fun,’ I sat down with him, handed over his fee and held out my hand. Then I got the shock of my life.

He did look at the lines on my palm. But simultaneously – I kid you not – a tunnel of white light opened up, going directly across the short space from his third eye to mine. I was so stunned, I didn’t say anything or display much reaction at all. Besides, it wasn’t scary. I felt safe and peaceful, and very alive. 

He spoke in quite simple English, and repeated his words a few times in several different ways to make sure they were understood. But somehow the message was also being conveyed, with a feeling of deep knowing, via that third eye connection.

His first words to me were startlingly accurate. 

‘Ah, you are … artist. And a little bit philosopher.’  (I’m not an artist with paints, but poetry is an art form.) He’d never seen me before in his life. That is not run-of-the-mill fortune-telling stuff, nor an educated guess! (Conventional palmistry could account for it, by the shape of my fingers. But I had some knowledge of palmistry, and I didn't think my fingers fit that description. Anyway ... )

He told me,

‘You have strong mind, strong heart and strong spirit.’ Then there was something about me worrying that I might not succeed in my task, but he didn’t identify what that task might be. (I thought he must have meant my poetry, but now I think perhaps he was talking about what I might call my energy work, or my work for the Universe – of which, more MUCH later.) He simply assured me:

‘With strong mind, strong heart and strong spirit, you WILL succeed.’ There have been many times when it’s been good to remind myself of those words.

He asked if I had any questions for him. Just one: I asked him if my marriage would last. It had been through some ups and downs by then. He considered this for a little while, then told me,

‘Don’t worry. You can make your marriage work.’

So it was all up to me? I had been privately hoping for reassurances that Bill would always be the husband I wanted him to be, but the young man – perhaps picking that up – reiterated, in case of any doubt, and phrasing it a little differently:

‘YOU must make your marriage work.’ 

(OK, I decided that if I could and if I must, then I would.  And I did, for nearly 20 more years, until finally I chose not to do what it was going to take at that point. Having suffered from my parents’ divorce, there was no way I was going to put my kids through anything like that. Nor was I going to subject them to parents in an acrimonious or loveless union. And it wasn’t as if Bill was a bad person! But after the kids were grown up …)

On that third visit, we had a woman friend from Australia accompanying us, on her first visit to Bali. I raced back to our hotel, to urge both her and Bill to come and consult the fortune teller.

The only thing I remember about his reading for Bill, which I listened to, is that he picked up on Bill’s burning ambition to become a millionaire by the time he was 50 (which was no secret to anyone who knew him, but this guy didn’t know him). He said,

‘All your life, you get up, go to work, come home; get up, go to work … always until you die. The same, not different.’

It turned out he was right.  At the time, though, Bill wasn’t very impressed. He brushed off questions as to what he’d experienced during the reading. (Did he not have the same experience as me, or did it scare him perhaps?)

I didn’t listen to what the fortune-teller told our travelling companion, so as not to infringe on her privacy, and she never confided it. But she did later remark, rather shaken, on the tunnel of white light from his third eye to hers!

‘I thought it was only me who saw that,’ I said. True to form, I had kept quiet about it until then.

It was immensely reassuring to know I wasn’t the only one.