Visiting the "Stone Temple" of Bali

Miles away (and maybe a hundred highway close calls later), bapak Oka parks the car in a deserted lot. Annie takes my hand and we head down the empty street. The morning sun has just edged up over the mountains, as we descend the hundreds of stairs, the only two people at the temple, past amazing terraced fields, down to the Stone Temples (it is what Annie and Oka call it, I need to find it's other name). Annie looks at me, you are not bleeding menstruation, ya? I shake my head, already passed. Good, she says, you cannot enter the temple if you bleed. It is bad karma, you know, and I not take you. I do not want you have bad karma.

I didn’t know. But I am thankful I got that out of the way before Bali, I reassure her and thank her for the instruction as I do not want bad karma either, and we continue walking down the steep, old, mossy steps.

Cut directly from the stone mountainside and carved with intricate designs, a series of temples sit facing each other, cut in the middle by a rushing stream. The stone temples are amazing and very old. Taller than the palm trees, they ascend to the heavens. To the sides are tiny rooms in the stone, for meditation. With no other people around, this early in the morning, we wander through the sacred grounds and Annie tells me more Indonesian stories, of the single holy man who built the entire stone temple long ago. I ask if she’s serious – how could one man do it. Surely he had help. She looks at me very seriously: Noooo. Holy man alone. Holy man cut temple from stone mountain. Holy man have big powers. How else could one holy man do it?

Through the empty temples, past troughs of holy water that trickles from the mountainside, across old bridges. When we pause for a moment, there is no sound, but that of an old, sacred world languishing. I stop myself again, to just breathe it in. To feel what is around me. There is something about these places they take me to that is more than a tourist park. Not sure what it is, but when I am standing there, contemplating the eons, lives, and offerings that have passed in the making of this temple – and so many others – I am overcome with both awe and peace. Annie dismisses the new part of the temple as maybe only 500 years old. Very new. I laugh. I tell her at home, that would be considered very old. I tell her in Washington, there are not many things that are still around that are that old.

Annie walks off to something else, as I stand for a minute on the most sacred ground just trying to drink it in. It’s then I see a single blood-red hibiscus flower. I smile and kneel to take try to capture it with a camera. Only four years old, growing up in a smog-filled Los Angeles suburb, I always remember picking tea-cup sized blooms from the backyard shrubs. Jewel toned colors, like doll umbrellas, with orange-toothbrush stamens adored by hummingbirds.

Years later, I find them still enchanting, familiar, vibrant, and sweet. Hibiscus is the single thing I am able to paint. I keep one growing in my sunroom at home, when it blooms in the Washington summers, I set it outside for the hummingbirds. Here, a world away, it blooms red between the mossy and white crags of an old stone temple. So brilliant. So beautiful. I recount the various roads it has taken to get here, to stand in this deserted temple plaza in the early morning; the bright days and dark nights endured. I am thankful for all these things: good and challenging. I don’t know that I would appreciate this moment otherwise. Overcome with so many big, new things in the last few days, months, and years: It’s this single flower that holds me captive and speechless. I offer a quiet prayer to my gods: the ones that tumble with me through quietly breaking emerald waves of a secret break, the ones that float through blue sky powder days and bikes through rugged mountains, the one that falls down – gets bloodied—and gets back up to try again, the one that dances, smiles and sings, the one that works and dreams. The one that imbibes the essence of amber ales and salty fries shared with close friends. The one that laughs with all her heart, but can feel sadness sometimes -- her own and the pain of others. The one that loves. The one that knows this is all part of life, part of growth. The one that, I now think, must wear blood-red hibiscus in her sea of long brown hair.

More photos and then we climb up, in the hot morning sunshine, its hundreds of stairs to the top. We stop to sit halfway up to rest, Annie and I giggle at the tourists (in t-shirts with cheap see-through fabric tied loosely around blue jeans, in an attempt at respect) start their noisy descent down.