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The Welcome Dance
There is a place in my heart...a room in which I keep the door closed...only to let it open small increments at a time. This is where my fears reside. It happens when I jumped out of that airplane...or sometimes it happens when I am practicing a jujitsu through in which I am the one being thrown 5 feet through the air. I was the same for Bali. To go I needed to give up a job that made me much money but also kept me from doing what I loved...which is to create art and talk to people about the world of my transformation. Sometimes I find myself at he door of the airplane or just as my fellow student is grabbing my waist to pivot me into the air...that fear comes up like a wave that might drown me...if only I can remember to breath. Bali did that to me at moments. The heat was so rich with moisture that often I had to sit and do nothing but look around like a fish out of water. I did not know how to speak the language, and I did not know how the people thought of me. Did they like me occasionally became an important question.
I remember I was sitting by the sea and I saw this gate opening to the waves. It was on the second week of my tour of the island. It was a feeling image, which for no explainable reason I sensed that the spirit and the people of Bali liked me. It was as though all the things that I thought of that might go wrong would not go wrong and everything would come out roses. My legong angels perform the dance of welcoming. They dance in front of the sea, a force that the Balinese consider a destroyer. They dance around a reflecting pool balancing out all my fears into excitement, which motivated to want to learn the language and the customs. To learn the hearts of the people. To learn how to love in a foreign land.
It is quietly stunning thing to be initiated into a community as mysterious and magical as Bali.