At a little past nine on a beautiful August morning, after our breakfast of fresh papaya and astringent lemon ginger tea, a man about ten feet in front of us took a dagger by the hilt with both hands and plunged it into his chest just above his heart.
Except the point didn't puncture his flesh. He tried and tried, worked it and worked it, while I sat squirming, I have to say, nearly writhing in my front-row seat in the small outdoor pavilion. A gamelan orchestra, all 16 players, made its otherworldly music, a skein of pongs and chongs they beat out with fancy hammers on their marimba-like instruments, with a few flutes accompanying and a master gong that set the major intervals with austere, reverberating bongs (which taken together sounded something like the Lionel Hampton Orchestra on LSD). The line of eight kris dancers kept trying to penetrate their chests-to no avail. These men, Hindu priests, bare-chested, barefoot, and wearing the ubiquitous sarong, were lost in a trance, an altered state induced by a series of prayers and offerings to the gods.
And so, in my own way, was I.
The dancers (who are named for their daggers, or kris knives) had emerged onto the stone stage in the village of Batubulan, a 15-minute drive from our hotel in the central Balinese town of Ubud, at the climax of the Barong dance, one of the several so-called trance dances that make up the core of the Balinese religious theatrical repertoire. For me, it seemed like the climax of a long and hypnotic journey across the island that had begun long before we'd actually set foot in the place.
Bali, Bali, Bail. The name had bonged and chimed in many a conversation between my wife and me. A choreographer, dancer, and massage therapist, she had once donned a sari while in college and immediately felt as though she should have been born in one. She had also read and read about Asian dance and seen it performed over the years by visiting companies. But she had never witnessed it in its native habitat. Bali, Bali, Bali, that was where she wanted to go. And so, in the year of our tenth wedding anniversary, she signed up for a small group tour of the island, a "healing arts tour" that was to include visits to local medicine men, temple ceremonies, dances, and also daily yoga practice-with me, token skeptic, tagging along.
Like most people, I had been to numerous religious ceremonies in my lifetime, and, like many others, had also seen my share of dance performances, both classical and modern. And I had traveled a bit around the world. But no amount of time as a child in a synagogue or as an adult on the occasions of weddings and funerals and holidays at various churches-Catholic, Protestant-and temples-Buddhist, Shinto-had prepared me for Bali. At first breath, I knew I had arrived in a special place.
The narcotic air outside our hotel porch steeped in frangipani blossoms and tuberoses; the old temple wall we walked along as soon as we arrived at the airport in the capital, Denpasar; the huge statue at the traffic rotary commemorating a battle from the great Hindu epic the Ramayana; the small temples within the family compounds that we passed on a drive from the beach up into the mountains of northern Bali; the skirts of checkered material-black and white for yin and yang, good and evil-and the offerings, the ubiquitous offerings of flowers and incense in every doorway, on every set of steps, in the ledges of the stone roadside shrines more numerous by hundreds than postboxes along an American street: The little altars everywhere proclaimed that people there, at worst, elevated what we Westerners normally take to be mere superstition to everyday reality and, at best, gave it a good name.
From our first hour onward, I went along with it, thinking that I was merely behaving politely, being a good trouper. When our party arrived on a misty afternoon in Munduk, a small mountain village amid clove and coffee and banana plantations and rice paddies, we immediately received a lesson in the construction of these offerings from the sandalwood-hued woman in white blouse and sarong who attended to them for the cottages on the property where we were staying. Our model was the small, ashtray-size palm-leaf box that holds another small leaf cut in the manner of origami and a number of tiny flowers, with a thumb-size pandan blossom at the heart of the arrangement, this presided over by a smoking stick of incense.
I threw myself into the work and, in my own clumsy way, put one of these together, as did my wife, and we offered them to the local gods on the balcony of our little cottage. And didn't it work! How else to explain what we saw before us when the mountain mist lifted, the incredible multitiered beauty, layer upon layer of light of varying intensity, rice paddies in the foreground, with the constant musical accompaniment of water running in irrigation ditches, leading our eyes across a series of palm-fringed ridges that descended all the way to the distant glistening plain of the Java Sea. Dozens of swifts dipped and swerved above the rice fields on the shimmering air of late afternoon, tallying up their daily fill of insects. Offstage, cocks crowed, and motorbikes, Bali's main mode of transportation, sputtered and growled like small dogs meeting at a crossroads.
Our days in the island's high elevations consisted of treks through the countryside, which, on first, and second, and even third look, resembled something like Eden's own horticulture. Multiple varieties of bananas and papaya growing everywhere, and other fruit both familiar and unfamiliar, and flowers and spices-jackfruit and mangosteen and avocado; monkey fruit; the infamous, foul-smelling (and delicious-tasting) durian; snake fruit; hibiscus flowers and wild poinsettia; taro and cassava and cacao and ginger, betel nut, lemongrass, lemon basil, and nutmeg. Rice paddies rose in terraced layers up every incline, like green wedding cakes waiting to be sliced. Along the narrow roads, spices lay splashed across long mats or on brushed earth, drying in the sun, and the air tasted everywhere of coffee and cloves.
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.
Those sparks were still sputtering in my mind as we drove to Batubulan to see the Barong dance with its kris finale. And though it wasn't the finale of our stay on Bali, it marked the moment when I was forced to admit just how much I had given in to the spirit of the place. Walking backstage with our guide, I had the opportunity to pick up one of the knives the priests had used in the dance, to feel the substantial heft of it and gingerly touch the sharp point to my own chest.
"Some of the dancers do fake it," said our travel leader, himself a dancer and the son of a priest, "and some have died trying it. And some are exactly what you see." I was mulling this over-mull, mull, mull, the whirring of what the Buddhists call the restless monkey mind-at the beginning of another trek a few days later. After a rich morning filled with many marvelous encounters with the sort of gifted local artisans that Bali produces as naturally as cloves and coffee beans, and after a drive to eastern Bali for a delicious lunch of crab cakes and papaya juice in a breezy pavilion at the edge of the Indian Ocean, we drove away from the beaches, taking the narrow roads up into the mountains again, on a little pilgrimage to the so-called Mother Temple at Pura Besakih, midway up the slope leading to Mount Agung, the island's most active volcano and one of its most sacred places.
With the upper part of Agung veiled in fast-moving clouds, I could only guess at its true height. But geography wasn't foremost in my mind as, once again in sarongs and sashes, we walked among hundreds of Balinese worshipers and then sat with them on the hard temple stones, listening to the white-garbed priests chanting prayers in Kawi, the old Javanese tongue, listening to the tinkling of the small bells rung by the priests, breathing in the mix of mountain air and incense, and making our own offerings-the palm leaf holding flowers, the incense burning. A priest walked slowly up and down the many rows of devotees, sprinkling holy water and bestowing blessings.
At last he reached us! A few drops touched my head! And for a moment I understood why we had traveled 10,000 miles to visit this particular place. Turning to catch a glimpse of the fading tapestry of late-afternoon light, I saw rice fields, palm plantations, and, only an hour or so's drive down the winding roads, some of the most beautiful beaches on earth, where thousands of Japanese and Australian and European and American tourists sunbathed and sipped fruit drinks and beer and Champagne while the tropical ocean beckoned beyond them. And then I turned back to gaze up at the sacred volcano as the wind tore the clouds aside to reveal the physical beauty-and hint at the deeper mystery-of the peak, which had been there, though hidden from us, all along.