Letter from Bali
An ode to summer, beauty, growth, and Taylor Swift.
Dear friends,
I write these open letters without expecting a response, though sometimes I like to think that I am corresponding with penpals. It gives me a higher sense of accountability to write my next reply in prompt time. That said, it feels like I have started a conversation thread and left your last letter unopened with the way I’ve disappeared since the beginning of summer. When Taylor Swift said “August slipped away like a moment in time”, she was right.
It’s been a tumultuous summer and this August, definitely a befitting ending. The summer started off with an abrupt trip to Malaysia, the day right after my final presentation to celebrate. My first time there – touristy and a bit giddy, but I missed out on precious moments due to a freelance work deadline. I regretted it deeply, but I spent the June holed up doing the same – in Malang this time. A 14-hour night train ride is endearing in its own way, and nothing else seems to matter in the world when I’m holding my baby nephew, just starting to eat solid food at the time. Glassy curious eyes and perpetually grabby fingers. Inconceivably pretty view driving up past the mountains Arjuna and Welirang up to a small tourist city called Batu. Horrified to remember that I was on my laptop half the time there. My birthday came and gone whilst in Malang. Tiramisus, quiches, thai food and more. Someone gave me the Razer gaming mouse I always wanted and someone built me a JovinaGPT trained on Murakami, Van Gogh, and all my favorite media. It feels weird to be celebrated when I feel like - for lack of better word – a flop.
My nervous system on fire. I felt like I wasn’t living out of actuality but merely a floating mass of potential making miniscule progress. Constantly plagued by a longing that I have yet to understand, I persecute myself with questions of where it comes from and where it was leading. My girlhood slipping away like a fever dream. Wanting nothing more than to be transformed but to sit idle and wait for a coccooning? Impossible.
I knew I was overthinking in every sense of the word. Being intentionally unemployed feels like watching the moon traverse the sky through the car window and wondering why we are moving forward but never catching up. I have always prided myself in my skills of self reflection, but when it spirals into rumination - I deflate. “Was it a wrong decision? Am I flopping so bad right now?” North Jakarta and the pink evening sky, eating pecel with a friend by the Balai Samudra jogging track, laughing at the unpredictability of life.
But being 21 feels good sometimes too. I’m much more comfortable in my own skin these days. I’m surrounded by smart and ambitious people who endlessly inspire me. Parents don’t ask me that much questions anymore. They don’t question me when I choose to starve to buy tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. They let me go when I decide to prolong my Bali trip to 12 days, even when I told them I would be spending most of those days myself. I felt guilty, of course. It was expensive and I was jobless. August rolled around, bringingforth with it the end of summer and anxiously, I flew to Bali for the occasion of a friend’s wedding. How exciting for this funemployed 21 year old. My first friend wedding. My first ‘solo’ trip as well. What’s funny is that when I think of being weathered, I remember I’m still experiencing and have yet to experience many “firsts”. I’m hit then with the feeling that my life is only just beginning.
On my first day I heeded a 20km bike ride to and along Sanur beach. We passed by the main road and it was risky and entirely unsafe, but 4 years of driving in Jakarta and you get used to the feeling of never knowing what to expect when it came to Indonesian roads. The days that followed were antithetically more peaceful in comparison. I woke up early, had my morning coffee, and would catch a gojek to the nearby beach, dip my feet and ponder. Lunch was a rotation of signature local pork dishes. I wonder how many people before me have come to Bali and pondered the same questions to the same beaches – Who am I? Who do I want to become? These questions plague us all. Only in turns.
I took this time to document into language my feelings and experiences. Taking pictures, making silly vlogs noone will watch, writing these letters. To me, documenting means to be present with my experiences and pen them as original - my own. It is also my greatest curse, because words can never do the sight I’m seeing right now justice.
Right now, I’m writing in the great calm of a small rice field hidden in Canggu, Bali’s busiest area. It’s been 6 years or so since I’ve last been to Bali and many things have changed. Gentrification perches itself to the top of the list of factors, apparent through the sporadic growth of trendy croissant shops and mexican themed eateries. El Niño is returning and it’s supposed to be hot and humid, with the government warning signs of a drought. However, it’s a rather wet dry season for Bali, personally speaking, and some nights I spend shivering and holding dear to TolakAngin.
Here, in these green expanses where even light feels of a different vivider hue, where winds blow in from all directions and people charter from everywhere, here it feels as though I am operating on a different level of consciousness than usual. I sip my long black as if it’s the most important task in the world. I dip my feet in the water of every beach I come by because it would be a travesty not to. I read Rilke – cover to cover – for the third time this trip alone, slowly and minutely, mulling my tongue over the taste of each combination of words, letting the sentences simmer and sit with my heart. Presence is all I have here. It’s a lesson I learn everyday, but where has it been all these years?
Here are crumbs of things I’ve come to realize lately:
How wonderful it is to be decided. The ability to articulate what I want with certainty exemplifies grace and commitment to growth, being vague with desires and areas of focus frees us from accountability and ultimately lands as avoidance. It’s hard and infinitely beautiful and rare to be decided. To be rigid is not the same.
How to approach a great work of art: Love it. We may live in it for however long we need to, learn from it what we can, but to love a great work of art is the only thing that can do it some form of justice.
The same goes on how to create any work of art: we must love it enough to see it come to life. The act of creation itself is sacred.
To love God is to love myself. To love myself is to love God. Brought up religious all my life, taught to tithe and give before I am taught to count what I own myself. I have embraced religion and chased after faith, but it was a wake up call to realize that I have been an obstacle to my own spiritual life because of my lack of self love.
“what we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. It is only because so many people have not absorbed and transformed their fates while they were living in them that they have not realized what was emerging from them; it was so alien to them that they have not realized what was emerging from them; it was so alien to them that, in their confusion and fear, they thought it must have entered them at the very moment they became aware of it, for they swore they had never before found anything like that inside them.” - Rilke
It’s my responsibility to you, my readers, to explain with clarity that I did not come across all these discoveries within the past 12 days in Bali. Like Rilke said, revelations never come to us externally but arise out of us organically. It steps out from ourselves and into others. In fact, my very first mistake was hoping (quite melodramatically) for answers in Bali, but alas life does not lend itself to the plot of Eat, Pray, Love. This tiny island with its infinitely blue waters and dazedly clear skies is not any more beautiful than anywhere else. Temples of stone set on wooded hills, in city centres and sacred cliffs. Even when wave breaks here are named like legends by men and limestone ocean floors are carved and lifted for all to see by the grace of tectonic subduction. No, this place is not heavenly and offers no less beauty than wherever we are planted right now. Because beauty and meaning is everywhere if we just look for it. This is the part where I can pat myself in the back a little, for allowing myself to breathe again, for allowing a different, subtler kind of growth than the one I’d known before.
Growth, unlike time, is never linear. Like the rings of an old tree, growth exists like the concentric circles that coat over each layer after layer. We never grow past our old selves or leave them behind, instead we consummate the person we were, absorb them for all their shortcomings and weave them into the threads of our new beings. Every experience, past disappointments and joys, exists to nourish us and enrich our beings.
With the melangé of my summer meandering coming to a close, I pack up the memories as I traverse into a new journey yet again. A search for a bit of routine this time rather than adventure. Rest rather than recreation. But always growth. Always more stories. Always without regrets. What a comfort, to know that life has got me, to know that I am always in flux, that I am a river, heading towards the ocean yet again, gently surprised by my own unfolding. I hope the same goes for you.
Your friend,
Jovina
i love this so much