Threshing for Threshold

Bali Threshing

Yay!  We got to Bali last night after about thirty hours of travel (PDX to SFO, SFO to Hong Kong-14 hours-- then Hong Kong to Singapore, and finally a two hour flight over the deep blue clouded sea to Denpasar, Bali.) It was an ordeal made bearable by the kindness and good humor of all the group--ten great women. The rooftop swimming pool in the Singapore airport helped, as did the thunderstorm that blew in just after we started to swim. Wild wind, sideways rain and lightning were joy, life, breath after the intense containment of the plane. By the time we got to our thatched-roof hotel, and were given pineapple and mint smoothies with our room keys, we were zombies.  Frogs in the frangipani trees, water lilies in the pools by our room, stone gods with marigolds in their ears, towels on our beds folded into swans, a welcome note written with silver pen on a leaf--it was beautiful, but possibly a tired dream. This morning it was all still there.  I did stretches on the tiled porch with two new friends and began to be in love.  Rice is growing in water in the field behind my room and everywhere I look someone has left a little offering made of banana leaf and rice and flower petals.  The hotel melts into the rice paddy the way life here seems to melt into worship.

Before I left I wrote that the origin of the word threshold was in the ME word threschen--to thresh. Today we were eating lunch in an open-air restaurant edged by a rice field, and while we were eating a dozen women, outfitted in what looked like beekeeping suits, started to cut the rice with sickles and thresh it, banging the sheaves into a big basket and throwing away the rice straw. I've never in my life seen people threshing by hand--and there they were, in the sweet, heavy humid afternoon, doing what people have done for centuries. One more bit of magic for our trip.

It's about 11at night here; we're fifteen hours ahead of Portland.  I'm typing in the open room under a high thatched roof to the loud accompaniment of frogs. I think everyone else has gone to bed--I took a nap this afternoon while others got massages.  We bought sarongs today for temple visits tomorrow, and walked through crowded, winding streets of Ubud, a craft and painting town, full of way too much stuff. Walked back to hotel through the monkey forest, fending off monkeys. Tonight we did some singing together, and then went into town to see a women' gamelan orchestra and dance troupe. Dissonant, repetitive, compelling music, and dance straight out of some Hindu myth, all elegant fingers and eloquent wide eyes. It's time for bed. Early departure for sacred springs and temple tomorrow morning. The frogs of Bali say goodnight.