Can you imagine what our people would say if I told them I was leaving Jonah—funny, kind, age-appropriate Jonah—for a grizzled, taciturn sailor eighteen years older than me? Holy hell, they’d have me committed. Absurd. Impossible. And you know what? This is probably typical. I am a little restless—and, if I’m honest with myself, a little scared.
In just a few months, Jonah and I will move in together in New York, and I’m going to have to let go of the idea of other options, other possibilities. It’ll just be a matter of time till we get married, and so these are my last months of independence. Better to get these dreams and fantasies out of my system now. And how perfect to do that in Bali, where I can’t act on them or fool myself into thinking they’re anything bigger than that, dreams and fantasies. Illusions.
I wonder what Indra would say if I told her about the Sailor? I feel like she already wants me to think about leaving Jonah and being on my own for a while. Even today in class she said something about how you can’t be with another person fully until you are fully with yourself.
I’m with myself now. I’m doing everything Indra told me to do: tapas, svadhyaya, even isvarapranidhana. As Lucinda Williams says, I wanna get right with God. Even if God is just the energy that animates us all.
I’m trying God on.
And, God, if you’re there, please let me dream of Jonah and no one else.
Later
Looking back through this journal, I found some language that makes it look as if I idolize Indra. Saying she’s like a god who once was mortal, that sort of thing. It makes me feel sort of icky. Or creepy, like I’m the sycophantic young assistant in All About Eve. I mean, sure—I admire Indra. I love it that she calls me her plant. I want to learn from her.
But Jessica, now she can be downright worshipful of Indra. She and Lara and Jason talk about how Indra’s probably enlightened, and Lou, too. Which makes me feel funny. It feels a little too much like a fan club. Makes me look for things in Indra that bug me, just to prove that I still have some objectivity.
Here’s one: The night we exorcised her blender, Indra hugged each of us good-bye, and when she did, she said, “Goodnight, Sister Suzanne. Goodnight, Sister Jessica.”
I hugged her back, and, not knowing what else to do, I sort of mumbled, “Night Sisterndra.”
I’ve never been anybody’s groupie, I’ve never had any mentors, I’ve never liked authority figures. So I don’t intend to start worshiping Indra. I just want to be around her a lot.
Jessica and I hung back after class this afternoon because Jessica wanted to get Indra’s advice. It seems that—well … So, Jessica’s pH balance is off in her netherparts and she was wondering if Indra knows of any good home remedies. I believe Jessica’s words were “My yoni is imbalanced.”
I don’t make the news, I just report it.
Jessica asked if we could speak to Indra in private, and honestly? Indra looked a little put out. Maybe she wanted to go to dinner. When Indra is distant like this, the feeling I get reminds me of being a kid, when my mother was distracted. I would get so nervous and upset, as if she would never look at me again or love me again. Like I was out in the cold, all alone and without a sweater.
Indra agreed to walk us home, and she slipped on a pair of sleek red sneakers, the heels smashed down so they were more like mules. As we walked, Jessica told her about her imbalance, and Indra looked straight ahead. When Jessica finished detailing her symptoms, Indra said that the first thing Jess needed to do was to get into the habit of peeing immediately after sexual intercourse.
Jessica turned bright red. “Oh, no, no, nonononono, I’m not having sex,” she said. “I’m basically a virgin.”
And I’ve gotta say, my head about spun around when she said that. Jessica’s a virgin? I can’t help but wonder if she was lying. I mean, she knows we’re supposed to be celibate, so maybe she wants Indra to think she was already being celibate before coming here? Like she’s some kind of perfect yogini who goes around being celibate and drinking pee all the time? And I’m thinking: Apple shiner. And suddenly I wished I had a yoni issue to talk to Indra about, too.
Wait. No. I didn’t just write that. Sweet Jesus, how embarrassing.
Anyway, Indra told Jessica to douche with lime juice in water. So, after Indra dropped us off, we cut up a few limes and squeezed them into a plastic water bottle. Jessica added a few drops of tea-tree oil for good measure and then lay down on her back in the tub with her feet up the wall, and went for it.
This is so typical of yoga camp, I just have to record it. I don’t know if I’ll want to read about Jessica’s douching experience later, but this is what my life is like here. Bodily functions are absolutely fair game for discussion over dinner, in mixed company, with perfect strangers you meet at the Internet café. Jason and I had an intense conversation about intestinal flora with a yogi at another computer just yesterday. In class we do partner exercises in which you end up as drenched in your partner’s sweat as in your own. Jessica’s usually my partner, so it wasn’t a big deal at all for her to douche in front of me. Our bodies are just the same stubborn material as our minds, both of which we’re here to discipline.
That said, my tenure in the douche-room was a short one. After the first go, Jessica’s entire body contorted with pain, and I cringed in sympathy. I imagine it stung something awful. Pretty soon she figured pranayama breathing would help—sort of like yogic Lamaze—and I left her alone to huff and puff and do her yoni thing.
Standing outside the bathroom door, I could hear the crunch of the plastic water bottle as she squeezed it, and then the most awful sound coming from her throat. Awful, like the involuntary sounds a dying animal makes. That, or an air-raid siren: MmmmhhhhaaaaaAAAAAA. Like there was a war raging in her privates.
When she emerged from the bathroom she was more subdued than usual, as if she really had just fought a war and now needed to sleep for a few weeks. Her cheeks were bright red and her eyes sort of glassy. She practically collapsed on the futon, and I came up here to the bedroom to record the latest episode of Your Friends’ Privates.
Later
I had to follow up with Jessica about the whole “practically a virgin” thing. I am terrible at minding my own business, but I don’t think it bothers Jessica. She’s probably the most open and honest person I’ve ever met.
I brought it up over dinner at Casa Luna tonight. Green leaves, tofu. A side of resentment as I watched the waiter deliver a pork chop to the table next to ours. Jessica had made a full recovery from her lime-juice experience and was happily drinking peppermint tea and cutting into a brick of lemongrass tofu.
“So, you’re not really a virgin, right?” I said.
She smiled, forking a big bite of tofu. “Well, I haven’t had sex in five years,” she said. “And then I reclaimed my virginity after I decided no more sex until I found a man who could be a man to my woman.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sure. That makes sense.”
Jessica told me that the way most of us girls lost our virginity was wrong. She said that in the Ancient Days women lost their virginity at the hands of another woman. “So it wasn’t a traumatic experience!” she said.
“Sounds very Red Tent,” I said. I’ve read that book, I know all about the ritual deflowering of Old Testament times. They did it with some sort of ritual deflowering stick. The ritual dildo. Sounds a lot more traumatic to me than my own deflowering, but who am I to judge?
So what does Jessica tell me? She’s been revirginized.
“Like—surgically?” The thought of getting sewn back up made me choke on a green leaf.
There are about four thousand waitstaff at Casa Luna, all beautiful and wearing dark blue or pink batik sarongs, white shirts, and a flower behind one ear. They were hovering nearby, so I leaned in to get the details from Jessica. But she continued to speak at full volume, telling me about the healer she visited in Boulder who helped her reclaim her virginity.
“This woman was just so amazing!
She does all this energy work, and breath work, and massage, and when you’re spiritually, um—”
“Intact?”
“Yes! When you’re spiritually intact, she takes away your new virginity the way it ought to have been done the first time.”
I considered this for a moment. “You mean she—”
Jessica literally cackled. “Yes!”
“With a ritual, um—device?”
“Yes!”
“Wow,” was all I could say. “Jess, you are really hardcore.”
JESSICA HAS TAKEN about a million workshops to help her find love. After dinner we walked all over town just as the sun was setting, and Jessica told me about her favorite classes and teachers. At first it was hard to listen, and not just because some of the things she’s learned, like that “the feminine bends to the masculine,” make me bristle with indignation. No, it’s just that it’s so damn pretty here. Sometimes I’m so struck by the beauty here, it actually physically hurts. My eyes start to ache from the strain of trying to take it all in.
We walked up to the village of Campuhan just as the sky was darkening into streaks of violet, black, and gold, and Jess told me about an exercise in which you learn how to be womanly by mirroring a truly feminine woman, usually the workshop leader. In Campuhan, the ground became sticky with some sort of bloody pulp from the fruit that fell from the low-hanging trees above, and Jessica taught me how to wobble my head like an Ancient Goddess. We wandered around, heads wobbling, until the stars came out, and then we started home, falling into silence.
The stairs from Campuhan to Penestanan are the most brutal part of our daily walks to and from town. There are ninety-six stairs in total. Jason and I counted them last week. We had a bet. I lost. I thought there were at least two hundred. Walking up the stairs is absolute torture, but they are a sight. They are framed on either side by thick green vegetation, from which squirm all kinds of creatures—reptiles, cats, the occasional chicken. A canopy of trees is balanced over our heads, whiplike vines hanging listlessly from their branches. Craggy stones, laid down by the Ancients, make up the wide stairway.
A quarter of the way up we were tired and Jessica started sighing, which usually suggests she wants to talk about something, so we stopped and sat in the middle of the dark stairs. The stone beneath me was hard and lumpy with moss and God knows what else, and the only light source came from a million miles away, or halfway up the stairs, where an ancient-looking lamppost was swarmed with bugs and geckos. In the distance I could hear the faint dissonant tones of the women’s gamelan.
“I know I should be patient,” she said, sitting lightly, her torso stretching up from her seat, “but it’s so hard. I want a man who can say yes.” Her moonstone necklace caught the light and blazed blue for an instant, then folded back into the darkness.
“A man who can say yes,” I said.
“I took this workshop once, gender expression?”
“Okay,” I said. I took a deep breath and exhaled. “And that is different from gender clarity, I assume?”
She nodded vigorously. “Oh, it’s amazing! Basically they help you learn how to express your sexuality and gender to yourself and the opposite sex. So, we were doing this exercise. You stand face to face and take turns.” She stood and pulled me up so that we faced each other, green vines hanging between us. “I was paired with a man I thought was so attractive, oh, Suzanne! He was so big and tall!” Her hands rested on my shoulders.
I laughed. “Go on.”
“So, I would say the word yes to him, having yoked all of my feminine sexual energy and directing it toward him with the one word, right?”
“Okay,” I said in a deep voice. I grabbed Jessica’s arms. “Did you feel that? I just said okay while yoking all my feminine sexual energy—did you catch it?”
“I’m serious, Suzanne. This is very real!”
“Sorry,” I said, straightening up again. I put my hands on her shoulders, repentant. “I’m sorry, please continue.”
“So I would say yes, and then, depending on whether or not he could feel my feminine energy, he would say yes or no.
“So, when it was his turn, he looked into my eyes and said, yes! and he had the most feminine voice I’d ever heard. It was the last thing I expected from him, because he was this large African man, so, so masculine-looking!
“So I said no, and he said yes! again, still in that high-pitched girly voice! I couldn’t believe it.”
“So I said no again, and then!” She breathed in quickly, her hand on her heart. “And then!”
“What did he do?”
“Then, he said”—she lowered her voice to sound deep and throaty, giving herself a double chin in the process—“YES!”
She clapped her hands, squeezed her eyes shut, and jumped up and down. “And oh, Suzanne. Then he sounded like a man!”
“So did you, m’dear,” I said. I turned back to the stairs, leaving one arm around her shoulders. We started walking again, slowly, three feet to a step, four feet to the next, until we reached the top of the stairs.
This is our favorite part of our nightly walk. From the top of the stairs you can see the rice fields and the whole green expanse of the village. Small and large bungalows pop out of the green, lit up like lanterns. The forest holds the village in on all sides, but here only a few trees obscure the view of the sky. So many stars. My God, there must be more stars visible here than anywhere I’ve ever been. Or maybe I’m just looking more closely. Maybe all this turning inward is making it easier to look out at the world and really see.
We stopped without planning to, and I watched Jessica’s face turn rapturous. She looked like I felt. The gamelan floated across the village, expanding the sense that we had ascended into another world. I looked at my new friend and felt charmed. We linked arms and resumed our journey, necks stretched back, shoulders down, eyes on the skies.
March 17
Noadhi, the balian, told me to be careful walking alone at night. This was at Indra and Lou’s. I raised my eyebrows at him. Rapists? Muggers? Nope. Leyaks. Evil wizards. Well—he didn’t exactly call them evil wizards, I just like the way that sounds. No, he said that leyaks are men and women who practice black magic. They appear as monsters, sometimes, or giant birds. He said that if you see a leyak, you could be dead in a week and nobody would know why or how you died. A leyak kills you by spiritual, not physical means.
The most interesting thing Noadhi said was that leyaks aren’t evil, just gifted in the dark arts and so they must practice them. It’s their dharma, I guess. You can tell that a leyak is nearby because your vision darkens, and you might smell a sweet, earthy scent in the air. I thought about telling him that I smell something like that every morning in the wantilan when my yogamates do their first abdominal twists of the day, but I kept my mouth shut.
I call this practicing maturity.
March 18
Noadhi came over today to give Jason a massage, and while he was waiting for Jason he stopped by our veranda and we sat on the steps, chatting. I noticed right away that his eyes were shadowy and a little bloodshot, so I asked him if he was tired.
“Yes,” he said. “Very tired. I’ve been up since early morning.”
He said that his father was very sick with spirits. A year ago he took his father to the ocean to heal him by appeasing the bad spirits, who like to be near the sea, but he said the effect was wearing off. I asked him what his father was doing, exactly, to make Noadhi think he had spirits, and Noadhi basically described a man with dementia or Alzheimer’s, as I understand it. He raves and sees things that aren’t there; he’s himself one minute and a child the next. Gram has dementia and is always having these incredible hallucinations about African priestesses performing healing rituals on her, or hundreds of police officers showing up in her room after she thought she’d accidentally dialed 911. She often thinks her mother is in the room with her, or her grandmother, both of whom are long dead. She tells me about wonderful parties she attends wit
h all her dead relatives, or, on bad days, parties where her dead relatives and friends ignore her.
I told Noadhi my Gram has the same thing, but that in the States we call it dementia. He was very interested in that, and I told him about Alzheimer’s, too. He asked what we do for Gram, and I told him that we mostly let her believe that what she sees is real, unless it’s upsetting, and then we try to calm her down. But if she’s at a great party, we let her enjoy it. There isn’t really much else to do. He nodded. He said his father was violent and that the only thing that helped was getting him to the sea for purification. He rubbed his bald head and gave me a wry smile. He looked very beautiful and sad. “Life,” he said.
March 19
Mornings are a riot of roosters, dogs, birds, all yelling at once. It’s like the WTO out there.
We’re learning all sorts of meditation techniques and breathing exercises, chief among them bastrika, or bellows breath. I am addicted to it. Here’s what you do: You sit in lotus and put your hand on your diaphragm. (You only have to do the hand on the diaphragm until you know how to do it.) Take a full, deep breath in, and then exhale all the air out. Inhale halfway, then exhale forcefully through the nose over and over again. After a minute or two of this you inhale again, exhale fully and then hold the air out, lifting the diaphragm and clenching your privates like you’re trying to keep from going to the bathroom. This is called engaging the bandas.
The bandas are a big thing around here. We’re always turning them on. The mulabanda, especially, which is basically a muscle that’s located between your rectum and sex organs. When I first heard about it all I had to do was translate: he meant the gooch, the chode. What some of my friends call the taint, because it taint your balls and it taint your ass.
Guess what Lou calls the mulabanda? The anal lock. Woof!
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