Our nights in the highlands saw us tottering on the edge of early bedtimes, giving ourselves up to the romantic thrill of celebrating our anniversary in these surroundings, making much of it, and then falling into the deepest sleep beneath mosquito netting that made us feel as if we were on safari and under the signal care of the tribes of geckos that walked upside down on our cottage ceiling, chirping every now and then, as if ordering spiders from some recalcitrant waiter invisible in the dark.
Before too many nights passed, my soul settled down, like a feather floating toward earth in a windless sky. I'd awaken before it was light, sit up in bed and do a 20-minute meditation, and then dress and move out to the balcony in the coolness of the predawn air, listening to the earliest birds and insects warming up for their sunrise performances. Equipped with penlight and book lamp, I'd read and make notes, make notes and read. After a while, the dark would begin to drain away like water from a leaking pool, and there it was again-not a hallucination but a view with all the intensity of a dream-the rice paddies, the tiers of hills, the Java Sea some 30 miles away as the bird flies, at this early hour just catching the first notice that the sun was rising on the other side of the island.
If making love had seemed like the perfect act as the night began, a yoga session in the open-air pavilion seemed right for early morning. Flowing from one pose to another, under the tutelage of the gentle-voiced instructor traveling with us, we felt as though the shifts and reanglings of muscle and bone were somehow attuned to the transitions of light and shade as the full light of the new sun touched a match to the surface of the ocean. As we moved, a priest all in white walked silently on bare feet to the shrine at the edge of the pavilion to lay smoking sticks of incense across flower offerings at its base and on top. Another day, another attempt to ward off low-level spirits of nuisance and harm.
"Going native" is what the 19th-century British keepers of the imperial flame used to call giving oneself over to the local traditions, and it was considered a bit of a disgrace to be caught out in it. But if one of the most sophisticated and, at the same time, simplest arguments on behalf of Christianity is the 17th-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal's wager-that if you believe in God you gain if there is a God, and that if there isn't, you have lost nothing for the effort-then it couldn't hurt a rather skeptical American to return to his cottage each morning after yoga and light a stick of incense as part of his own daily offering.
A week later it certainly seemed like the right thing to do to put on a sarong and temple sash-garments you must wear to gain entry to most of the thousands of temples on the island-and take a bracing dip in the purifying waters of the sacred springs at the Tampaksiring Temple, outside Ubud. On another brilliant, sunlit August morning, hundreds of Hindu pilgrims had come to pray and bathe, but there was no great rush at the pools themselves, where the natural springs gushed out of nine demon-faced spigots, seven of them reserved for the living, two set aside for the purification of the dead.
Barefoot, and feeling somewhat awkward and constricted in the tight-fitting sarong, I eased myself into the cold pool, the water coming up to my chest. I trod lightly over the stony bottom (sacred carp and goldfish scurrying at my approach), pushing aside the flotsam of blossoms and twigs of expired incense, making my way to the first spigot, bowing my head and, as the ice-sharp water spilled over my skull, making the configuration of fingers and hands known as the mudra of completion, which I had learned to use at the end of every yoga session.
If it had only just been my head! I never imagined-why should I have?-how cold life could be beneath a sarong, feeling the liquid swirl around my thighs and genitals, and worrying about how vulnerable I was, as the edge of my garment swirled up around my hips, to nibbles from hungry fish and the fate that awaited me if I did not make enough obeisance to the local powers and those beyond. I moved from spigot to spigot, splashed and bathed, bowed my head and raised my face to the chilly flow, asking the gods of the place to ward off evil spirits great and small, to abate the nastiness of rumor, the jealousy of enemies, and to give me the wisdom to see my life as it needed to be lived, free of dread and angst, and feeling whatever power I might possess radiating from head to toe, from fingertip to fingertip, brain to heart to liver and knees and guts.
That night, we witnessed our first trance dance, the ancient Kecak, or "monkey chant." A hundred men, young to old, bare-chested and wearing stripped-down sarongs, gathered around a bonfire with arms across each others' shoulders to perform a song as hypnotic as Gregorian chant but in its rhythmical complexity sounding so much older and essential as to make plainsong seem only half the music it aspires to be and as bland as a Pat Boone ballad. And the monkey chanters were followed by a wiry old fellow from the Ubud community whose eyes gazed way past the edge of the audience toward some point on the horizon of infinity as he rode a wooden horse into a blazing bonfire-he himself being "ridden" by one of the local gods, which is how the Balinese describe such trances-kicking at the fire, dancing on it, bathing in it, drinking the sparks.
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