Okay, so we got a little petty.
There was one revelation, though. Lara had brought her statue of Indra to show everybody. “Did you notice anything wrong with the woodcarvings Indra sold us?” she asked. She reached into her canvas Ganesha tote bag and pulled out her statue, still partially wrapped in newspaper.
She handed it to me. “Do you see anything wrong with this woodcarving?
I looked at it, turning it over in my hands. It was exactly the same as the one Indra had offered us in the wantilan; a wooden portrait of Indra, her arms outstretched in Warrior Two. “Yeah, it doesn’t look anything like her,” I said.
Lara and Jason started to laugh.
“Look more closely, love,” Jason said. “Pay attention.”
I ran my hands over the rough wood. And then I noticed something. Tiny holes. There were tiny holes all over the carving, as if someone had used a pin-sized drill to puncture every inch of the statue. “Oh,” I said. “Is this—”
“Woodworm!” Jason cried. “Every single statue that woman sold us is infested. This little Indra is being eaten from the inside out by worms.”
Baerbel laughed, tapping her hand on the lip of the table. “By the time we get them home, they will be nothing but inspiring piles of dust.”
“Woodworm, Lord!” Lara said. “I mean, for God’s sake, she should know better.”
“Well, I plan to keep mine,” Baerbel said, leaning back in her chair and folding her hands at her midsection. She was enjoying herself. “I have a wedding to go to next month, and I do not like the bride. So I am going to give it to her and tell her that it would look very nice on her grand piano!” She beamed happily around the table.
“Nice, Baerbel,” I said. “Very enlightened.”
“So, what are we going to do?” Jessica said quietly. She looked around the table at all of us, bewildered. “I just don’t understand what’s happened with Indra. I thought she was enlightened.”
We fell silent. I didn’t know what to say. Jason and Lara exchanged glances. Baerbel shrugged. Marcy started to say something about how maybe we were being sexist to blame Indra for everything when Lou left his wife for her, but by then it didn’t matter; the restaurant was closing, and we had to get home before silent day began.
We were running late. The streets were already empty of people and motorbikes. Streams of multicolored crepe paper floated in the wind, collecting in the gutters and drains on either side of the street. They caught in the vines hanging along Campuhan, as if we had stumbled upon a wild party whose guests had simply dissolved into the air after the last dance. It was so quiet, and the streets were still so festive. We were the last to leave. It wasn’t even our party.
We walked in the middle of the street, a small army of drunken, shit-talking future yoga teachers. We were a mutinous lot, rolling through the streets on a Sambuca buzz, chanting slurred mantras and skipping past collapsing scaffolding that used to cage in the ooga-oogas.
Jason pointed to twelve feet of derelict scaffolding in the pavilion just before the turn to the ninety-six stairs. He whistled at it. “The monsters have been released!” he cried.
NOW I’M SITTING up, listening to the fireworks and the dogs and trying to digest all the food and drink. I feel revolting, like I just ate a drugstore’s worth of junk food. I can’t help but wonder what happened to my retreat, exactly? Is this just an inevitable equal and opposite reaction to a puritanical seven weeks?
All this talk of spirits has got me thinking about the night of the blender exorcism. I keep picturing Indra that night, leaning into Lou. And the story she told me about driving cross-country to get away from her life.
Isn’t that what I’ve done, essentially? I’ve crossed the world to get away from my life. And now my life is hurtling toward me. Seven days. Seven days till we leave.
Was there any point to this retreat? I mean, sure, I’ll end up with a certificate to teach yoga, but I’ve never really given a rat’s ass about certificates. I’d much rather know that the experience meant something than to have a piece of paper assuring me that it did.
April 30
Silent Day
I dreamed a girl I knew was going to kill herself. I stole her poison so she couldn’t do it, but someone had to die, so I drank it myself. Didn’t even give it a second thought, just down the hatch, one fell swoop. Next thing I know, I’m reincarnated. I’m in a different home, and I don’t yet realize that I have a different body. Soon I find out that Jonah, my sister, and the rest of my family are learning that I’ve died. I panic, thinking that maybe I can e-mail Jonah and tell him I’m okay, but I can’t figure out whether I’m a ghost or a new person. I try to call, to write, I try telepathy. I manage to reach my sister by telepathy, and she’s relieved to know I’m alive, but the panic to reach Jonah is overwhelming.
I’m devastated, in the dream, to think of what I’ve done. This horrible mistake I’ve made.
Suddenly I’m in one of my lit classes in college, with the Sailor’s sister, and I see my mother outside the classroom. I follow her up to her bathroom in our old house, the house I grew up in, where she’s pruning a large ficus plant. I try to tell her that I’m me, but she just cries and says she must be going out of her mind. Then I remember I’ve committed suicide. I see myself walking into the ocean, holding two black plastic film containers full of poison, drinking from them as the waves rise around me.
The most important thing for me to do was to find my people and tell them that I didn’t do it because of them. Once they had accepted me in my new body, I wanted everything to go back to normal. I rehearsed this speech over and over in the dream, telling Jonah and my family that everything would be exactly the way it had always been, that I hadn’t changed so much, even if I seemed different. I told Jonah everything I could tell him that only the two of us would know so that he would believe me. I was still his.
And the whole time I kept thinking, My God. What have I done?
I got out of bed just now and looked at my naked body in the mirror on the armoire. I am different. I look sort of thinner, or more sculpted, as if I’ve been subtly remodeled. And I keep thinking, if my body is changed, what about my mind, my heart? What about them?
7. To Keep My Love Alive
Yet in my heart I never will deny her, who suffered death because she chose to turn.
—ANNA AKHMATOVA, “Lot’s Wife”
I’ve always wanted to have an experience like the ones you read about in spiritual memoirs. All spiritual memoirs follow the same path, from I was lost to Now I’m found. Failure leads to soul searching, suffering, and setbacks, but toward the end of the story, something happens: an epiphany, a catharsis, a near-death experience, an encounter with a wise native or homeless person. No matter what the particulars are, spiritual memoirs always suggest that there is a butterfly emerging from the cocoon at the end of the journey, and that was what I wanted. I wanted Saint Augustine’s enlightenment in the garden, I wanted miracles and transformation. My story wasn’t exactly like that.
I left Bali all too aware that I most certainly was not a butterfly. I did not feel transformed or enlightened. I felt exhausted and disillusioned. But eight years later I can see that I was changed. Simply meditating on the promise of transformation changes a person. But of course I wasn’t a butterfly winging it home—I was simply a girl who had planted a few seeds that would sprout in their own time, whether I asked them to or not.
I noticed right away that it was harder for me to go back to mocking organized religion with my atheist friends. I was more willing to accept embarrassing things about myself, like that I might yearn for some sort of God or faith till the day I die, or that maybe I did want to join in the drum circle. (I haven’t yet, don’t worry.) The more I was willing to accept such embarrassing, unsophisticated truths, the easier it became to hear the lies I told myself.
I had wanted to leave Bali basically enlightened, with my whole life figured out. But by the end of the retreat, I was no c
learer, so I opted to do what I thought I should do: Don’t look back, don’t look around, just march forward on the path laid out in front of you. Stick to the plan. I told myself that I would move to New York, and Jonah and I would love each other in a new, healthy, mature way, not like college kids playing at adulthood. I would let my family go, knowing that we loved each other and would see each other at the holidays. I would do what I thought I was supposed to do.
But somewhere in my mind or soul, a seed or two was burgeoning, and soon I began to see that entire scenario as a sweet, sad lie I had told myself for the most honest of reasons: because I didn’t know how to do what my heart secretly wanted.
My story in Bali ended with a wedding, generally considered to be a sign of optimism and faith, a restoring of order. Which makes me think of Jessica.
Seven years after Jessica and I returned from Bali, I traveled an hour south of Seattle to sit in a beautiful garden between a purple Craftsman house and a matching outbuilding remodeled for massage therapy and yoga classes. The garden was Jessica’s, and the event was her wedding. She wore her wedding shoes from Bali, the white beaded sandals. They were pristine.
If you met Jessica’s husband, you would seriously consider engaging in some of the shamanistic rituals Jessica used to attract him. He’s a great dancer, just like Jessica; he’s tall and handsome and smart and … how do I put this? He’s normal. Not even remotely woo-woo. He told me that the first time he tried to take antibiotics around Jessica, she said, “You know, you can’t just take a pill to solve all your problems!”
To which he replied, “Well, can I take two?”
After the ceremony, I found him catching his breath beneath an enormous lilac tree in their backyard.
“Did you notice Jessica’s mark on the ceremony?” he said, which was hilarious considering the ceremony consisted of a group meditation accompanied by Tibetan singing bowls, a gong ritual in which masculine and feminine gongs were played together to symbolize the union of yoni and lingam, an invitation to the four seasons and their attendant animal spirits to bear witness to the ceremony, a feather dusting with love and gratitude incense, a ritual thanking of the stone head Jessica used to bring her love to her (“and it worked!”), and a lot of talk about ecstatic coupling and evanescing and rippling their love outward.
I laughed and told him yes, I had noticed Jessica’s mark on the ceremony. He shrugged happily and said, “I would have done even weirder things to marry Jessica.”
I used to think that sort of sentiment was corny, but isn’t that exactly what we’re all looking for? Someone who loves how weird you are? A lover, a mentor, a God who looks at you with all your peculiarities and contradictions and sees not a design flaw, but a perfectly, uniquely lovable soul?
I was twenty-eight when I finally got it. I began to sense something real and weird in me that wanted to be known and loved. A part of me that wanted to believe in something, to be loved unconditionally, for exactly who I am. The need felt like a weakness. I was a child of the feminist movement, I shouldn’t need anything but my ideals and my ambitions! I shouldn’t need to lean on a man or a guru, and especially not on a God. So why did I want to so badly? I tried to tell Jonah about it, but I was too proud. Jonah thought I was strong. I couldn’t disappoint him. Instead, I flew home to the embrace of family every chance I got, for long weekends and longer holidays, but none of my visits were long enough.
Both of my grandparents died while I lived in New York. I got the call about Gram not long after I moved, and I flew home at once, telling my new employer at a big consulting firm that they’d have to do without me for a while. When I got the call about my grandfather, I did the same. They could have threatened to fire me, and I wouldn’t have cared. I needed to be there to say good-bye. I arrived the same day that Gabe flew in from Lake Tahoe, cutting short his vacation to attend to my Protestant grandfather, who had been a surrogate grandparent to my Catholic cousins. We were all there, flooding the hospital’s waiting rooms and driving the nurses batty if Grandpa had to wait a second too long for his next dose of morphine. We sat with him for hours as his lungs filled with fluid, nursing and telling jokes, and occasionally, in the space between night and day, we would pray.
Gabe arrived at the hospital near dawn. We barely said hello before he began performing the last rites. My brothers and sister and I had waited up for him, and now we held hands around my grandfather’s bed and prayed. I couldn’t have told you who or what I prayed to—my acoustic skull? the thrum in my chest?—but I prayed he wouldn’t be in pain much longer. I had the feeling that he was going to an eternal sleep, that after this he would be no more, and we wouldn’t be seeing each other again. And yet … and yet! I also felt that I could be wrong, that I couldn’t know for sure.
He died while my sister and I were out getting lunch. We rushed back to the hospital, and when we got there my father told us we could still say good-bye, that “we stick around for a little while” after dying. So we hovered over his bed while my aunts placed photographs around his body. Images of him at every stage of life, as a grinning toddler, a newlywed, a father with his four children, a picture taken in the hospital a few days before Gram died, of my red-eyed grandpa holding one of his great-grandchildren. As my aunts decorated his body with pictures of his life, we told him how much we would miss him, how much he had meant to us all. And all at once, my chest corseted with sorrow, I felt myself get back to work, tending an invisible garden.
• • •
Not long after I returned to New York from my grandfather’s funeral, Jonah and I traveled upstate to attend the wedding of two members of our little urban family. The bride had asked me to teach a yoga class the morning of the wedding, and I agreed to do so, though the prospect terrified me.
To this day, it is the only yoga class I’ve ever taught outside of Bali. Technically, I’m not even certified to teach yoga. Those three days I was sick with the Bali Belly meant I was short a few hours for certification. Once I realized I wanted to be a yoga student, not a yoga teacher, I forgot about making them up. (Of course, if you come over and we drink a lot of wine, I might end up teaching a spontaneous yoga class. I’ve even branded this style. It’s called Drunkoffassana. Pranayama, the breathing exercises, consists of my bumming cigarettes from you. You don’t need a certificate to teach it.)
It was a beautiful fall weekend in upstate New York. All of our friends from Seattle and New York were there. Many of them had gotten married recently, and they looked like I wanted to feel. Jonah and I weren’t fighting—we didn’t do that much. We simply weren’t interacting. We moved around each other. I glumly plotted ways to make us better, stronger, happier, but it was hard to reconnect when I kept leaving Jonah in New York to fly home to my family, and now my plans for our transformation only made me feel exhausted.
I held class in an old barn with a river running nearby. Half of the wedding party attended. I got there early to stretch and think about what I would do. I was stiff. I hadn’t been to a yoga class in months, not since I decided the whole practice was a sham. Would I teach the yogaerobics everyone was doing in New York? Or something more peaceful and spiritual, like the class Jessica taught in Bali?
I taught a class Indra or Lou would have taught. I was nervous, but a few minutes in I almost felt as if they were teaching the class for me. Guiding my friends through the poses with Indra’s voice in my ear, I remembered something about yoga that was easy to forget in the world of celebriyogis and sacred schwag. At its best, it nourishes something real in me. Something vulnerable and authentic, where I am most myself. Whether that’s my soul or my nervous system, I don’t know. But I watched it nourish the people in my class. I saw how being in a room in which all were engaged in a ritual designed to improve their hearts—their physical and metaphysical hearts—was, in itself, nourishing. And that was the word—nourish—that stuck with me that fall, as I prepared myself to inflict pain on someone I loved. I was beyond being embarrassed by the softness o
f the word, the self-help of it. It was the correct word, that was all that mattered. It was a word that made pain worthwhile, if at the end of my pain I would be free to look for a life that nourished me.
You see, I didn’t want to waste any more time.
May 2
Today is a day for monkeys. We graduate in two days and this might be my last chance.
I was going to spend the day with my yogamates, but I need to be alone. We had breakfast together at Casa Luna this morning and I joked about ordering a brownie for breakfast. Okay, so maybe I was seriously considering it. But I didn’t, because of something Baerbel said. I told her that I needed the killer brownie because chocolate had become my sex substitute. She said, “No, Suzanne. You are ordering the killer brownie because you have no self-discipline.”
Everybody laughed, including me, but I can’t stop thinking about it. I’m so embarrassed. Here I’ve been dreaming about this transformation, flattering myself that I’ve become someone new, someone bendier and more enlightened, and I haven’t changed a bit. I’m sitting on a bench at the entrance to Monkey Forest, and I am myself, the same slob I’ve always been, just with slightly more upper body strength and an inflamed ego. On my walk here from Casa Luna, I noticed that Ubud didn’t sparkle with exotic people and strange sounds the way it used to. It isn’t a refuge or a getaway; it’s just where I am. Still around people, still walking streets, still in my body; still me, watching me.
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