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Listening to the Mountain / p.2
The trail, wide and steep, took off straight up the mountain, a bulldozer track to the Pura Pasar Agung, the small temple on the last level ground on the mountain. It materialized out of the fog as the trail made a wide arc and ended abruptly. We stopped there to rest, to eat snacks of fruit and rice cakes, and to make offerings. Budi set out the coconut-leaf basket of flowers he'd brought and, after several attempts in air that held more water than oxygen, lit the incense that would carry his prayers to the God. We sat for a while, benumbed by cold and entranced by silence, before resuming our climb.
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We scrambled up a narrow path through trees and shrubs, a slippery trail laced with tree roots and studded with hunks of volcanic stone. It was more gully than path at times as overhanging branches slapped at our faces in tree-shadowed dark. We heard animal sounds in the distance, and Budi told us there were monkeys nearby. Looking up we could see tree tops silhouetted against the cloudscape as we climbed past the fog. But we needed flashlights to probe the pooled darkness at our feet. Their lights were reflected by a line of clear plastic tubing strung along the bank. "Holy water for the temple," Budi told us. "From the spring up ahead."
At 6,500 feet we came out from the trees and onto a smooth slope of barren rock, the lava flow of the 63 eruption. We'd gained 3,300 feet since we left Sebudi and were almost halfway to the top. I knew I would be turning back soon, but I wanted to get out onto the open flanks of the mountain, high enough up to see this moonwashed world. And I did. We looked out across the trees to rice paddies falling to the sea, where a few lights shone at the water's edge. Padangbai? Candidasa? I wondered, but was too tired to ask. Instead I asked the sensible question, the one I'd been putting off.
I asked Budi to ask our guide how much longer it would take to reach the rim. Four hours at the rate we were going, a couple of hours otherwise. To everyone's relief I decided to head down. Gede and Made had been waiting for me to turn around so they could get back to the house. Heidi, Budi, and Nyoman now were free to push on up the mountain, in the hope of reaching the rim by sunrise.
Made lit our way back to the temple, where we sat and watched the fog lift at dawn. Gede too was content to rest awhile, so Made left us there.
All was still now, still and clothed in morning light. I was tired, past tired to the point where consciousness widens and boundaries blur. So when the mountain spoke to me I was not surprised. "Just let go," said the mountain. "Yes, that's it," I breathed, unclenching cramped toes, the last sign of the spasm that had bound my hip. "Yes." And then began to edit this epiphany, applying a pessimistic gloss to this moment of illumination, "let go of hope, of imagination." I still hadn't got it. The rational voice was still dividing and denying feeling and experience. So I stopped and listened to the mountain again. No voice then, just a presence. But presence itself was enough.
My rational self questioned the interpretation, not the message. I was undivided in my perception that the mountain had spoken. This was only in part because of my physical state. I had been in holy space ever since we came to this temple in the dark on our way up the mountain. This temple marked the boundary. From temple to summit, the mountain was sacred space.
Later, reading Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, this sentence brought me back to the mountain, "Since rituals are events that happen, one can find oneself doing a ritual." Yes. I found myself on a mountain, or a mountain in me—two ways of saying the same thing—while in a ritual space. That it was somebody else's ritual was all to the good, because none of the prickles and rebellions that separated me from my own traditions of the sacred were activated here. In the cathedrals of Europe I'd sensed a faint stench of burning flesh beneath the odors of candle wax and damp stone. I was too familiar with their history. But I was new to Bali's religion. I knew of neither crusades nor conquests, and it had never been used to limit my thoughts or close off my future. So I was able to respond to another people's myth and ritual, and had been doing so while in Bali.
The rest of the way down was through a garden. Camellia trees towered above my head—pale pink camellias. Lantana and pines I recognized, and a graceful, cypress-like tree I didn't. One stretch was laced with the odor of honey. Hosta? I wondered. By now my knees were no longer reliable. My wobbling steps sent a sharp pain along the outer edge of each knee. To this day the smell of eucalyptus recalls that pain.
Gede preceded me down the trail, feet firmly planted in his rubber thongs. My own descent was a skittering, a slithering, an occasional falling. The seat of my pants was stained red with volcanic soil, the heels of my palms rubbed raw by the sharp grit. Gede would turn back, worried, as I picked myself up. "Tidak apa apa," I'd say. "Never mind." And at the end, past the eucalyptus, blue-violet trumpets flared from shrubs along the path. Truly I was all right. I'd not have traded places with any one else in the world that morning.
I looked forward to collapsing when I reached the house, perhaps sleeping in the van. But Gede was so clearly shocked at the thought I might sleep before washing that I gathered sarong, clean shirt, shampoo from the van and carried them to the other side of the water tank behind the house. Now, at the end of the dry season, there was precious little water draining from the roof to replenish it. Gede filled one pan of water for me, indicating that was all I should use, and withdrew.
Standing bare and cold in that back garden, pouring chill water over myself from a tin can, rinsing a light suds of shampoo from hair and body, I washed away pain and fatigue. Our host had cooked more corn, which we washed down with glasses of hot Bali coffee, thick and sweet. Contentment was complete when pulling back a husk I found one white and tender ear among the field corn in the bowl.
At eleven we drove to the end of the road, arriving just as Heidi, Budi, and Nyoman reached the dip at the foot of the trail. Heidi and Budi were limping, but satisfied. Nyoman seemed as fresh as when we set out. Heidi held my camera as if it were a trophy. She had pictures of the summit. And she carried a water bottle filled from the spring, holy water for Nyoman Badri, our hostess on Tebesaya.
"Water from the God," Nyoman Badri called it that night, water clouded with volcanic dust and organic remnants, water that held the mountain's cells in suspension, water whose drifting particles caught and reflected back the light from the single bulb on our verandah.
Two evenings later, my last night on Bali, I told another traveler about the climb. Or I tried to. I didn't tell Winston about the mountain talking. I thought that would be more than this Englishman born middle-aged could take. But I described my sense of well-being at the end and my joy while on the mountain. Inadequately, it seems. I'd cut the heart out of my story. My censorship had made the summit dwarf the mountain, its shadow blotting out my journey. As Winston left my verandah he offered me this comfort, "I'm sorry you didn't reach the top. Maybe next time."
I sat for awhile on the verandah, watching Manis, the homestay cat, lead her followers in a sinuous line from two verandahs down the way across the narrow concrete path then up and along the house temple wall. The cats flow like Bali's water, I thought, connecting sacred and profane, temple and tourist. I sat and listened to the sound of water flowing, the sound of Bali, until it merged with the pulse of heart and blood within me.
I am not a mystic, so breaks in the crust of the everyday are rare—two visions and one prescient dream. But when cancer entered my life I knew how to greet it because of Bali. Bali was the seed that sprouted in the story of my cancer. When Gunung Agung spoke I hadn't known how much I'd need the message. The mountain was the guru, the teacher preparing the way for trials this student had yet to face. The mountain spoke and six months later I understood the meaning of the message.
It's a long way from Gunung Agung to a clinic in Seattle, but the light that shone through the mammogram clipped to the surgeon's wall was the moonlight shining through the clouds that night on Gunung Agung. And my feet were on the mountain once again while the surgeon pointed out the pin pricks of light, calcifications—not stars—clustered in one swirl of light in the shadowed dark that was my right breast.
A long distance to carry a lesson. We learn, and each word, each smell, lingers on within in our bodies. Our most spiritual experiences embed themselves in the arrangement of our molecules. So my flesh carried the mountain's words in one group of cells and breast cancer in another, and when the cancer cells were brought to light they called forth the mountain's words.
"Just let go," said the mountain, its presence more substantial than fear.
"Just let go." Not of hope, not of questions, not of intellect, no. But of the belief that I could control all outcome. The future would part for me, and the waters of my life flow through that opening. I would move forward into uncertainty. It was time to let go.
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© 1996-2001 Cecilie Scott
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