A few days ago I visited Tirta Empul, a temple just north of here, the site of Bali’s holiest spring. I spent almost an hour gazing into the large rectangular basin of waist-deep water, transparent as a polished windowpane. The water rose from a spring obscured on the sandy bottom by water plants, and flowed away south from the temple’s lower courtyard, south and father south through pools and basins on the temple grounds, then a series of canals, on southward to I don’t know where.
The interior courtyard, late in the day, was nearly empty, quiet as the surface of the moon. The only sound came from the swooping flights of swallows feeding off the surface of the pool—the rush of air over their bodies, the click of ligaments in their wings responding to their swift and acrobatic movements.
I needed this interlude in our stimulating conversations, and have to think others of you have sought out similar nearby spots on the Balinese landscape. Entering these temples—perhaps you felt something similar—I felt a kind of divestiture, a stripping away, an opening and vulnerability in the presence of Hindu spirituality. It made little difference that this was not my chosen faith. This seemed incidental in the face of what was apparent.
We have been in a kind of temple of our own making over the last five days, doing our best to elevate and embrace a protracted conversation. Now, the hours of leave-taking have come—a last look at the limpid holy water, its language shimmering in the ancient stone basin.
Driving back to Ubud through Bali’s handmade landscape, a countryside of supplication and spiritual courtesy, where one sees endless signs of a studious attention to elements of enchantment in the place, it occurred to me that leave-taking at a temple is an undertaking just as important as entering such a place. You enter, aware of the centuries of people who’ve come like yourself—hopeful, scared, humble, desirous. You leave refreshed, rededicated—hopeful, scared, humble, desirous.
We are leaving the temple now, and carrying, each of us, a special kind of determination, a desire to do good beyond the self. And we are carrying along with this the spiritual resonance of Bali, a place some call a kind of Eden.
But Eden, we should be at pains to point out, is not a place. Eden is a conversation. It is the conversation of the human with the Divine. And it is the reverberations of that conversation that create a sense of place. It is not a thing, Eden, but a pattern of relationships, made visible in conversation. To live in Eden is to live in the midst of good relations, of just relations scrupulously attended to, imaginatively maintained through time. Altogether we call this beauty.
We have heard from some remarkable people, people in remarkable service to humanity and place, people pursuing good relations, just relations, reverent relations all over the world. Peru, South Africa, Ireland, California, Thailand. We’ve been urged to join in.
We cannot, of course, save the world, because we do not have authority over its parts. We can serve the world though. That is everyone’s calling, to lead a life that helps.
We have heard a surprising, wise, and inspiring description of the pursuit of happiness, and it has filled our discussions of pursuing virtuous relations in our lives, occupied our conversations as naturally as the water at Tirta Empul fits that basin. Happiness is an awareness of the presence of good relationships, harmonious antiphonies, reciprocities in which you are included, in which your participation is essential, and for which you are glad to be held accountable. Happiness grows out of the practice of virtuous behavior, out of service to the Divine as it becomes apparent to us in humanity, in the Earth and its creatures.
We have spoken thoughtfully of action to heal human damage all over the world, but it is enough, really, to enter into, to craft, beautiful conversation to know that our time in Bali was well spent. If we have understood in our days together the need for good conversation, for generous, attentive, courteous, and respectful exchanges, every strategy for change we can imagine will have a good foundation.
We cannot save things. Things pass away. We can only attend to relationships, to the relationships between things. It is here that we see the most beautiful images we are capable of apprehending or imagining—the relationship between a mother and a child, the racket of sunlight on pooling water, a bird alighting on a limb.
Conversations are efforts toward good relations. They are an elementary form of reciprocity. They are the exercise of our love for each other. They are the enemies of our loneliness, our doubt, our anxiety, our tendencies to abdicate. To continue to be in good conversation over our enormous and terrifying problems is to be calling out to each other in the night. If we attend with imagination and devotion to our conversations, we will find what we need; and someone among us will act—it does not matter whom—and we will survive.
We need to thank our ancestors, who knew trouble was coming and whose prayers have brought each of us to Bali to meet, to draw wisdom and strength and renewal from each other. We need, each according to his or her gifts and by his or her own lights, to be the servants of beauty. We need to prefer being in love to being in power. We need to know that as we have met and now come to a close here in Bali, others with hearts like ours have been gathered—in Islamabad and Chengdu, in Winnipeg and San Miguel de Allende and Santiago, in Sapporo and Irkutsk and Sydney. In the villages of Alaska and India, of Nigeria and Oceania they are embracing, affirming diversity and solidarity, making vows and stepping off like blazing torches into the thousand nights that lie ahead.
Just like us.
Cherish each other. Travel in beauty. Our lives depend on it.
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Contents © 1966 to current, by
Barry Holstun Lopez. All Rights Reserved.
