The Power of This Now

Let me list for you some of my happiest places:

      1.   Dancing salsa with my instructor, Cesar, from Arequipa

      2.  Sitting around a table of food and wine with my favorite people in Wellington

      3.  Now.  Right now.

Let’s pretend that happy place number three is charged with great wisdom.  I’m talking about every ‘now’, every moment I am ever in.  You know, some Eckhart Tolle ‘Power of Now’ shit.

The truthful ‘now’ of which I speak:  a mix of the Yoga Barn and Yumi House in Ubud, Bali.  Which is where I actually, physically am right now. 

The truthful interpretation of ‘now’ and the pretend interpretation are very much connected.  I came here to get my Power of Now/Eat Pray Love on.  Oh, and it’s so on…

From the time the plane landed in Jakarta, I was not entirely feeling my travel flow.  I had spent nearly a month on a friendship tour, and my independent state of travel felt strange.  I missed the comfort of the family homes I had crashed in and the ability to not have to explain anything about myself.  I missed the familiarity and the easy companionship. 

This was all to be expected, but what was unexpectedly strange was the lack of the ‘wow effect’.  I was seeing/experiencing things that I found fascinating and having interactions that warmed my heart.  It is almost impossible to be completely out of your cultural context and not have those moments.  But, there is a way in which those moments usually land on my heart.  I’ve been lucky to do a fair amount of travel in my life, and I was finding that my early days in Indonesia were not landing on my heart in a way that I was used to.  I wasn’t getting ‘that feeling’. 

Quite frankly, I was finding the whole travel thing to be an ass pain. 

OK, well, this isn’t entirely true.  I had moments when I got ‘that feeling’.  Like when I was on one of those, “This is Indonesia, Sucker” bus rides and the ticket man assumed that I could speak Indonesia when I called him out for trying to scam me by laying down the correct number in his language.  It was at this point that all the old, smoking men on the bus and all the old women with 87 bags seemed to feel it was their duty to look after the hairless white girl.  AND, then among the 10 other dudes walking up and down the aisle of the bus trying to slang tofu, fruit, not-so-cool drinks, weird stuff on a stick, and perfume, there was a young man with a guitar that serenaded me with “Hey, Jude.”  Or, like when I Mr. Allen took me surfing.  Or, like when we spent all day searching for the holy food cart and it seemed like we spoke to half of the people in Yogyakarta’s informal food and beverage sector and they all thought we were totally hilarious (and fairly ridiculous).  Or, like when the people from the guesthouse fed me dog and then gave me a doggie bag of fried things for that volcano bus ride.   

So, ‘that feeling’ did present itself to my heart now and again, but I could not shake the general nagging sense of ‘this is not what you are supposed to be doing right now, Anna’.  This was quite disconcerting, as I have seven months of travel ahead.  It was also a source of identity crisis – being overseas is what I do best, isn’t it? 

This is all to say that when Mr. Allen left, I felt a bit lost.  I really just felt like staying in one place and thinking and writing and relaxing and enjoying and being.  Yogyakarta wasn’t the place for that.  I was hoping that place would be in Bali, but I felt a traveler’s obligation to go to this big famous volcano that was hard out hyped.  So, I spent about 200 hours on a bus and five minutes at the cool volcano on my way to Bali. 

Then there was Ubud.  And, all was right in the world.

A fellow traveller gave me a recommendation for accommodation in Ubud (the central mountain town in Bali – yep, the Elizabeth Gilbert zone).  Of course, the directions I had were vague at best, but I put a policeman on the case, and soon enough, I was rocking into Yumi House.  And, little nine-year-old Yumi and her family’s home had me at hello.  The moment I walked into the courtyard, I knew this was exactly where I was supposed to be, that I could be totally and completely content if I spent my entire stay in this garden, and that I would not be leaving Ubud until my expired visa forced me out. 

I found this completely relieving and satisfying – scratching that really hard to reach itch on your back.  I wasn’t restless in my two weeks in Java because I fell out of love with travelling but because I needed a new interpretation of travel this time around.  So, here I am in Ubud, reinterpreting.

For me, this reinterpreting means waking up outrageously early.  It means yoga-ing once or twice a day.  It means attending a three day Law of Attraction workshop.  It means chanting in honor of the full moon (and my birthday!).  It means learning about Balinese culture in a slow, natural manner from the beautiful family I have the good fortune of staying with.  It means embracing every cliché that I embody.  It means writing.  Most of all, it means doing whatever I damn well please whenever I damn well please to do it.

While Ubud is rocking my world, I think a lot about whether or not I am rocking Ubud’s world.  This is the sort of place I hate to love.  I am not the only person who has fallen into the warm, charming arms of this town.  It seems the same has happened for a ba-zillion other Western people.  As the ba-zillion of us have shown up, rice paddy after rice paddy has been exchanged for massive hotel and spa after massive hotel and spa.  Along with us, there comes a tsunami of plastic water bottles that I see as symbolic of endless examples of cultural corruption, social injustice, economic inequality, and environmental un-sustainability.  I am walking down Balinese streets that are not at all intended for the Balinese. 

So, here I am in this playground of Western bliss – a theme park of spirituality and healing and indulgence with an affordable price tag.  I can’t help but question what it means for places like Ubud to exist (indeed, Ubud is far from alone in this respect), but I also can’t help but love every last dysfunctional bit of it.  For better or worse, I am really enjoying the ride.  

My princess bed!

My cute little porch!

The garden!

Yumi and her mom, Ibu Desa.  Obsessed.

This photo is not good at all, but it is for the benefit of the Bokuniewicz crew.  There is a Buck symbol next to the door.  I knew this place was meant to be...