I stick around long enough until I see the dark side. The plastic garbage in Bali is tragic. This beautiful culture that smiles from person to person in harmony with nature revolves around spiritual ceremonies and offerings to the gods. For centuries the offers have been homemade and biodegradable, like a banana and some dried rice. Now people are getting different types of modern and tourist industry work and they no longer have time to handcraft their offerings to the gods. Someone in town has taken on that role and hand wraps the offerings in plastic. The people carry their baskets of fruit and plastic wrapped rice to the beach and leave it on the shore to express their gratitude for the ocean. It doesn’t occur to them that the plastic needs to be removed.
Plastic fills the gutters and floats in the water. When I’m diving with fish, I’m diving with plastic. On a good day it’s just a piece or two. On a bad day, I’m swimming through a floating landfill, brushing top roman cups, hairbrushes, shoes, potato chip bags, and clear sheets of plastic out of my face. I worry about eye infections when I swim in this grimy water, washing down from the rivers into the bay. When the rain pours, it floods the waterways and down into the bay the plastic and sewage goes. The blue water turns brown. Wet season showed me the worst of this. My first day freediving was in the nastiest water I’ve seen. It’s gotten better at the weather’s turn dry. Garbage stays on land. Sometimes if a strong current comes through the channel between the islands it might bring an island of plastic trash with it. We wait for the current to wash it onwards and we get back to diving. I’m speaking to the locals about this to understand what’s going on.
I take long walks these days through the rice paddies. Sunrise is the perfect time. The sun is hot neon orange. The volcano lights up, the temples wake up, the whole town is filling up.
This week, Amed is the gathering spot for all the world’s freedivers. It’s Deep Week, freediving festival. I’m hiding from the crowded streets. By crowded I mean I have to sit behind a few scooters and a truck in some “traffic” and I don’t have as many options for seats in the cafe. Haha
Every conversation I eavesdrop into is related to freediving. It’s a bit much for me. I’m in solitude mode as I’m writing this novel. Leave me alone with my basic Indonesian, my barista friends who know my drink, and the wind blowing the blades of the rice paddies with traditional music off in the distance.
The bright side is that the stars are brighter tonight than I’ve ever seen them in Bali, brighter than I’ve seen anywhere in a long time. The brightest star of all is this sun that shows up so reliably here. 6am hello. 6pm goodbye. As a woman who is abundant in chaotic feminine energy and constantly in need of masculine structure, my well-being is greatly supported by the regularity of tropical light. I love the late night sunlight of Seattle and Scotland, the way we can stay awake to play on the beach until 10pm in clear daylight. That is a different kind of magic. I cherished that wild magic when my life was more structured as a student and a business woman. I was structured by the 9-5 and after my responsibilities were complete I wanted to play until midnight.
Now I’m free all day, an artistic dancing with nomadic energy. A sun enforced bedtime and rise time gives me something secure and predictable through which my witchy mermaid madness can flow. Turn on at sun up. Turn off at sundown. The sun is the husband of o my moon. It allows me to receive inspiration more easily because I’m not using up energy to make decisions like when to rise and fall and the light isn’t playing games with me, changing all the times. The natural world around me feels consistent which gives me permission to let go into the frontier inside myself. Perfect conditions for writing a book, don’t you agree?
Love & Rainbows,
Cha Wilde
