Nyepi 2023

Silent Day in Bali is rather more entertaining for me this year as Eveline is visiting from Java. This is her first Nyepi experience and she is using it so far to clean the house--sweeping, mopping, dusting😅 Each to his or her own on Nyepi, I guess. They did not turn off the internet this year either, so we have the TV too, as long as we lower the volume. In general, it is not as quiet as usual either, as I can hear people talking up and down the street and walking around outside. Nor have I seen any patrolling Pecalang (traditional cultural police) as yet.

Storage

People pass through the world once. There are no do-overs. There is no time to spare. There is no room for exclusion, for that which is excluded is irretrievably lost. I have seen in my life people who consciously exclude, who actually make the decision to do so. I cannot understand it. How can anything or anyone in existence be determined to so completely lack value? How does it happen that people find their space, their compassion, their very freedom so very limited? And by what? Where is the boundary, how has it come to exist? It is as if life had somehow grown its own box. It is as if life were a hard drive with a certain nonnegotiable capacity for storage. One apparently reaches the limit. One apparently becomes numb. I don't understand it. I think each one of us is more like a sky. Or anyway, I wish we were.

Transition

I have never thrived very well on change. And since change is an essential ingredient in life--terutama jika anda menikah dengan seorang perempuam Indonesia--I have not done a whole lot of thriving. One is inclined to live according to what he has been taught and to what he has observed from the earliest times. Unwittingly, we mimic our fathers and our grandfathers, entering into their unfinished struggles, investing our own livelihood in foregone conclusions. To break the mold is to challenge a longstanding law scarcely divisible from ones own anatomy. Freedom arrives only through unconditional surrender--to this one must become absolutely captive.

Desperado--
this is new--
on the run
from who knows who--
and to think, this girl
with a kitten in her blouse
needed only to get to Eugene--
I figure we may as well start
with bigger things--
This is the secret
to the poem,
the lock of the key--
If travel is what you are wanting,
begin with more exotic lands

Transition

Everything must go. I cannot picture it. Anyone want a keyboard? I think the thing cost $1500. Back in 1995. And an acoustic guitar. The language is leaving me. Which I suppose is just as well. One learns anew, one learns again, one learns what he presently needs to know.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. This is an old saying which most people never really get. We just keep wondering why.

It seems that life's various punitive damages are conspiring more and more to corner me. Everything falls into line with the progress of an increasingly apparent fate. At last it becomes not a matter of choice but of necessity. I wonder if our personal destinies are foregone conclusions from the outset, freedom only an illusion, process pressed upon us, not an invention but a conceit.

Transition

It is easily the biggest change I have made in my life. It bears no resemblance to anything I have done before. I may as well be trading in everything that is known of me. And yet, life goes on, the old empire stands and functions, rocked to persistent slumber by the daily routine. Habit has no knowledge of revolution.

Where have they gone--
so many,
so beloved--
gone to keep council
with the lonelier planets--
and all their secrets
kept henceforth silent--
I will not hear so much as a whisper
again--
My heart is the loneliest
planet of all,
colder yet for my distant sun,
for flicker sharp
yet never warm--
a word devoid of once said love