wearing a huge grin, generally just being so totally peppy she should've been spinning a baton.
'Turmeric juice, for keep clean the kidneys!' she announced.
'Seaweed, for calcium!'
'Tomato salad, for vitamin D!'
'Mixed herbs, for not get malaria!'
I finally said, 'Tutti, where did you learn to speak such good English?'
'From a book!' she proclaimed.
'I think you are a very clever girl,' I informed her.
'Thank you!' she said, and did a spontaneous little happy dance. 'You are a very clever girl, too!'
Balinese kids aren't normally like this, by the way. They're usually all quiet and polite, hiding behind their mother's skirts. Not Tutti. She was all show-biz. She was all show and tell.
'I will see you my books!' Tutti sang, and hurtled up the stairs to get them.
'She wants to be an animal doctor,' Wayan told me. 'What is the word in English?'
'Veterinarian?'
'Yes. Veterinarian. But she has many questions about animals, I don't know how to answer. She says, 'Mommy, if somebody brings me a sick tiger, do I bandage its teeth first, so it doesn't bite me? If a snake gets sick and needs medicine, where is the opening?' I don't know where she gets these ideas. I hope she can go to university.'
Tutti careened down the stairs, arms full of books, and zinged herself into her mother's lap. Wayan laughed and kissed her daughter, all the sadness about the divorce suddenly gone from her face. I watched them, thinking that little girls who make their mothers live grow up to be such powerful women. Already, in the space of one afternoon, I was so in love with this kid. I sent up a spontaneous prayer to God: May Tutti Nuriyasih someday bandage the teeth of a thousand white tigers!
I loved Tutti's mother, too. But I'd been in their shop now for hours and felt I should leave. Some other tourists had wandered into the place, and were hoping to be served lunch. One of the tourists, a brassy older broad from Australia, was loudly asking if Wayan could please help cure her 'godawful constipation.' I was thinking, Sing it a little louder, honey, and we can all dance to it…
'I will come back tomorrow,' I promised Wayan, 'and I'll order the multivitamin lunch special again.'
'Your knee is better now,' Wayan said. 'Quickly better. No infection anymore.'
She wiped the last of the green herbal goo off my leg, then sort of jiggled my kneecap around a bit, feeling for something. Then she felt the other knee, closing her eyes. She opened her eyes, grinned and said, 'I can tell by your knees that you don't have much sex lately.'
I said, 'Why? Because they're so close together?'
She laughed. 'No-it's the cartilage. Very dry. Hormones from sex lubricate the joints. How long since sex for you?'
'About a year and a half.'
'You need a good man. I will find one for you. I will pray at the temple for a good man for you, because now you are my sister. Also, if you come back tomorrow, I will clean your kidneys for you.'
'A good man and clean kidneys, too? That sounds like a great deal.'
'I never tell anybody these things before about my divorce,' she told me. 'But my life is heavy, too much sad, too much hard. I don't understand why life is so hard.'
Then I did a strange thing. I took both the healer's hands in mine and I said with the most powerful conviction, 'The hardest part of your life is behind you now, Wayan.'
I left the shop, then, trembling unaccountably, all jammed up with some potent intuition or impulse that I could not yet identify or release.
87
Now my days are divided into natural thirds. I spend my mornings with Wayan at her shop, laughing and eating. I spend my afternoons with Ketut the medicine man, talking and drinking coffee. I spend my evenings in my lovely garden, either hanging out by myself and reading a book, or sometimes talking with Yudhi, who comes over to play his guitar. Every morning, I meditate while the sun comes up over the rice fields, and before bedtime I speak to my four spirit brothers and ask them to watch over me while I sleep.
I've been here only a few weeks and I feel a rather mission-accomplished sensation already. The task in Indonesia was to search for balance, but I don't feel like I'm searching for anything anymore because the balance has somehow naturally come into place. It's not that I'm becoming Balinese (no more than I ever became Italian or Indian) but only this-I can feel my own peace, and I love the swing of my days between easeful devotional practices and the pleasures of beautiful landscape, dear friends and good food. I've been praying a lot lately, comfortably and frequently. Most of the time, I find that I want to pray when I'm on my bicycle, riding home from Ketut's house through the monkey forest and the rice terraces in the dusky late afternoons. I pray, of course, not to be hit by another bus, or jumped by a monkey or bit by a dog, but that's just superfluous; most of my prayers are expressions of sheer gratitude for the fullness of my contentment. I have never felt less burdened by myself or by the world.
I keep remembering one of my Guru's teachings about happiness. She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you're fortunate enough. But that's not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don't, you will leak away your innate contentment. It's easy enough to pray when you're in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments.
Recalling these teachings as I ride my bike so freely in the sunset through Bali, I keep making prayers that are really vows, presenting my state of harmony to God and saying, 'This is what I would like to hold on to. Please help me memorize this feeling of contentment and help me always support it.' I'm putting this happiness in a bank somewhere, not merely FDIC protected but guarded by my four spirit brothers, held there as insurance against future trials in life. This is a practice I've come to call 'Diligent Joy.' As I focus on Diligent Joy, I also keep remembering a simple idea my friend Darcey told me once-that all the sorrow and trouble of this world is caused by unhappy people. Not only in the big global Hitler-'n'-Stalin picture, but also on the smallest personal level. Even in my own life, I can see exactly where my episodes of unhappiness have brought suffering or distress or (at the very least) inconvenience to those around me. The search for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self- preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.
At the moment, the person I'm enjoying the most is Ketut. The old man-truly one of the happiest humans I've ever encountered-is giving me his full access, the freedom to ask any lingering questions about divinity, about human nature. I like the meditations he has taught me, the comic simplicity of 'smile in your liver' and the reassuring presence of the four spirit brothers. The other day the medicine man told me that he knows sixteen different meditation techniques, and many mantras for all different purposes. Some of them are to bring peace or happiness, some of them are for health, but some of them are purely mystical-to transport him into other realms of consciousness. For instance, he said, he knows one meditation that takes him 'to up.'
'To up?' I asked. 'What is to up?'
'To seven levels up,' he said. 'To heaven.'
Hearing the familiar idea of 'seven levels,' I asked him if he meant that his meditation took him up through the seven sacred chakras of the body, which are discussed in Yoga.
