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Entries in Lombok (4)

Tuesday
Apr112023

Lombok

I climbed through the center of Bali

inside magical light

past a sacred volcano at Lake Batur

with a small portable typewriter

a map carved on narwhal bone

a roll of scented four-ply toilet paper

codices or painted books and texts

on bark paper called Amate

and cactus fiber including

palimpsest animal skins and dialogue of Mayan origin.

 

My hair caught fire.

Gathering flames I lit a piece of bark for guidance.

I mixed volcanic ash with water creating a thick paste of red ocher, a cosmetic balm of antioxidants.

I applied this to my skin to gain entry and passage through the spirit world of ancestors.

 

Saturday
Jul072012

dancing weaver

My name is Gratitude. I am a weaver on Lombok. See the mountain hiding in clouds? It's Rinjani.

My village is at the bottom. Walk past the village co-op sellling cloth and sarongs. Turn right and go down the alley. Keep going.

You will pass women working. They wash cotton, hanging it to dry. Others are dying colors.

You will hear the sound of woman singing and looms clacking.  We are a community of women weavers. We do what we love. You can follow me on FACEHAPPY.

 

Saturday
Feb072009

A Warung story

He started this story on a Saturday morning. He was somewhere between dawn and noon. 

He sat on a thick green pillow at a Sasak warung, a small simple eatery. He'd found this place a couple of days earlier and liked it because it was quiet. The entire Air island was quiet. Maybe 1,000 residents. 

It was one of three islands off the coast of Lombok in Indonesia. It was called Gili Air. It was quiet. 

The bamboo pavilion where he enjoyed thick black coffee, hand rolled Drum cigarettes and serenity faced the ocean or maybe it was the sea or perhaps the Straits. Either one it was big and blue. Across the water was the island of Lombok. On this particular day Rinjani, the volcano at 3,500 meters was obscured by low grey and high white clouds.

He read "The Elephant Vanishes," a collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami. 

One of the main reasons he liked sitting here was because it was next to a small cemetery. 

Ten or twelve small plots, a few eroded headstones with scattered grey and coral borders in a grove of small trees. Weeds and small pieces of trash.

He always found cemetaries when he roamed around the planet. Peaceful places where he learned and observed customs, habits, histories. Air. Bursa, Turkey, Grazalema, Spain to remember three.

How the small Spanish village in the Sierras used crypts near the Catholic church. How they were decorated with plastic flowers. How empty crypts held cleaning materials, rags, bricks and trowels.

How the grazing white and grey sheep near the Catholic Cemetario filled rising green fields. There was a beautiful single palm tree in the courtyard. Behind iron gates lay silent white crypts decorated with real and plastic flowers, names, dates and old faded curling black and white photographs of the dead where a procession of men laid a 40-year old friend of theirs to rest last week. 

They slid his wooden casket into a long stone cold cement cavity, blessed themselves and returned to the village for sherry and conversation full of memories speaking about the man who died alone with no wife or children and above the crypts were gray cliffs and peaks in heavily wooded forests and the sky was a watercolor in progress as white, grey, orange and blue colors hurtled on an east wind. Where families of Egyptian vultures expanded their wings on thermals. 

After this vision he returned to Spanish crypts.

He manipulated his camera obscura tool in fast fading light making images of interments with names and flowers, passages of memory in love and sadness, chiseled history and their pueblo connection. He imaged down cavities and shells of carefully constructed rectangular rows of empty passages. 

They were invisible stories waiting to be told. Stories of desire, conflict, ambiguities, metaphors, and silence. Waiting for air to carry them to the listening faithful. They were silent stories, silent night of the pious, silent in their collective breathing. Stories inside stories. 

Metta.

Sunday
Jan112009

Music between notes

Lombok images of weavers and temples.

Every feeling waits upon its gesture. Dawn clouds, east wind. 

Every morning before the tropical sun became to burning, before the skiffs deposited white tourists on white sandy beach so they could snork waving coral and eat lunch in bamboo shaded pavilions and well before the cidimo horse cart tinkling bells and weather frayed faded tassels dancing in the wind echoed through intersecting village trail dust, people opened their yawning mouths to wish each other "Happy Holidays!"

Along one trail leading from the coast in a field of grazing oxen and serrated coconut palms were a group of boys. They chattered in Sasak. One boy left the group and began climbing a palm, shimmering his way up, skinny dark arms wrapped around bark, feet at an angle supporting his weight. Push-pull-push-pull. 

He was young, agile and fast. He reached a cluster of yellow coconuts, selected one, pulled it free and dropped it. It thudded among dusty broken palm leaves and shards of wild bird songs. A boy picked it up, punctured it and drank sweet juice.

The climber selected another one. Cradling it like a newborn he returned to earth.

Metta.