Which happened, again, because of a magazine assignment. Just when I was feeling
particularly sorry for myself for being broke and lonely and caged up in Divorce
Internment Camp, an editor from a women's magazine asked if she could pay to send me
to Bali to write a story about Yoga vacations. In return I asked her a series of questions,
mostly along the line of Is a bean green? and Does James Brown get down? When I got
to Bali (which is, to be brief, a very nice place) the teacher who was running the Yoga
retreat asked us, "While you're all here, is there anybody who would like to go visit a
ninth-generation Balinese medicine man?" (another question too obvious to even answer),
and so we all went over to his house one night.
The medicine man, as it turned out, was a small, merry-eyed, russet-colored old guy with
a mostly toothless mouth, whose resemblance in every way to the Star Wars character
Yoda cannot be exaggerated. His name was Ketut Liyer. He spoke a scattered and
thoroughly entertaining kind of English, but there was a translator available for when he
got stuck on a word.
Our Yoga teacher had told us in advance that we could each bring one question or
problem to the medicine man, and he would try to help us with our troubles. I'd been
thinking for days of what to ask him. My initial ideas were so lame. Will you make my
husband give me a divorce? Will you make David be sexually attracted to me again? I
was rightly ashamed of myself for these thoughts: who travels all the way around the
world to meet an ancient medicine man in Indonesia, only to ask him to intercede in boy
trouble?
So when the old man asked me in person what I really wanted, I found other, truer words.
"I want to have a lasting experience of God," I told him. "Sometimes I feel like I
understand the divinity of this world, but then I lose it because I get distracted by my
petty desires and fears. I want to be with God all the time. But I don't want to be a monk,
or totally give up worldly pleasures. I guess what I want to learn is how to live in this
world and enjoy its delights, but also devote myself to God."
Ketut said he could answer my question with a picture. He showed me a sketch he'd
drawn once during meditation. It was an androgynous human figure, standing up, hands
clasped in prayer. But this figure had four legs, and no head. Where the head should have
been, there was only a wild foliage of ferns and flowers. There was a small, smiling face
drawn over the heart.
"To find the balance you want," Ketut spoke through his translator, "this is what you
must become. You must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth that it's like you
have four legs, instead of two. That way, you can stay in the world. But you must stop
looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead. That
way, you will know God."
Then he asked if he could read my palm. I gave him my left hand and he proceeded to putme together like a three-piece puzzle.
"You're a world traveler," he began.
Which I thought was maybe a little obvious, given that I was in Indonesia at the moment,
but I didn't force the point . . .
"You have more good luck than anyone I've ever met. You will live a long time, have
many friends, many experiences. You will see the whole world. You only have one
problem in your life. You worry too much. Always you get too emotional, too nervous. If
I promise you that you will never have any reason in your life to ever worry about
anything, will you believe me?"
Nervously I nodded, not believing him.
"For work, you do something creative, maybe like an artist, and you get paid good money
for it. Always you will get paid good money for this thing you do. You are generous with
money, maybe too generous. Also one problem. You will lose all your money once in
your life. I think maybe it will happen soon."
"I think maybe it will happen in the next six to ten months," I said, thinking about my
divorce.
Ketut nodded as if to say, Yeah, that sounds about right. "But don't worry," he said.
"After you lose all your money, you will get it all right back again. Right away you'll be
fine. You will have two marriages in your life. One short, one long. And you will have
two children . . ."
I waited for him to say, "one short, one long," but he was suddenly silent, frowning at my
palm. Then he said, "Strange . . . ," which is something you never want to hear from
either your palm-reader or your dentist. He asked me to move directly under the hanging
lightbulb so he could take a better look.
"I am wrong," he announced. "You will only have only one child. Late in life, a daughter.
Maybe. If you decide . . . but there is something else." He frowned, then looked up,
suddenly absolutely confident: "Someday soon you will come back here to Bali. You
must. You will stay here in Bali for three, maybe four months. You will be my friend.
Maybe you will live here with my family. I can practice English with you. I never had
anybody to practice English with. I think you are good with words. I think this creative
work you do is something about words, yes?"
"Yes!" I said. "I'm a writer. I'm a book writer!"
"You are a book writer from New York," he said, in agreement, in confirmation. "So you
will come back here to Bali and live here and teach me English. And I will teach you
everything I know."
Then he stood up and brushed off his hands, like: That's settled.
I said, "If you're serious, mister, I'm serious."
He beamed at me toothlessly and said, "See you later, alligator."
9 9 9 9Now, I'm the kind of person who, when a ninth-generation Indonesian medicine man tells
you that you're destined to move to Bali and live with him for four months, thinks you
should make every effort to do that. And this, finally, was how my whole idea about this
year of traveling began to gel. I absolutely needed to get myself back to Indonesia
somehow, on my own dime this time. This was evident. Though I couldn't yet imagine
how to do it, given my chaotic and disturbed life. (Not only did I still have a pricey
divorce to settle, and David-troubles, I still had a magazine job that prevented me from
going anywhere for three or four months at a time.) But I had to get back there. Didn't I?
Hadn't he foretold it? Problem was, I also wanted to go to India, to visit my Guru's
Ashram, and going to India is an expensive and time-consuming affair, also. To make
matters even more confusing, I'd also been dying lately to get over to Italy, so I could
practice speaking Italian in context, but also because I was drawn to the idea of living for
a while in a culture where pleasure and beauty are revered.
All these desires seemed to be at odds with one another. Especially the Italy/India
conflict. What was more important? The part of me that wanted to eat veal in Venice? Or
the part of me that wanted to be waking up long before dawn in the austerity of an
Ashram to begin a long day of meditation and prayer? The great Sufi poet and
philosopher Rumi once advised his students to write down the three things they most
wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are
destined for unhappiness. Better to live a life of single-pointed focus, he taught. But what
about the benefits of living harmoniously amid extremes? What if you could somehow
create an expansive enough life that you could synchronize seemingly incongruous
opposites into a worldview that excludes nothing? My truth was exactly what I'd said to
the medicine man in Bali--I wanted to experience both. I wanted worldly enjoyment and
divine transcendence--the dual glories of a human life. I wanted what the Greeks called
kalos kai agathos, the singular balance of the good and the beautiful. I'd been missing
both during these last hard years, because both pleasure and devotion require a stress-free
space in which to flourish and I'd been living in a giant trash compactor of nonstop
anxiety. As for how to balance the urge for pleasure against the longing for devotion . . .
well, surely there was a way to learn that trick. And it seemed to me, just from my short
stay in Bali, that I maybe could learn this from the Balinese. Maybe even from the
medicine man himself.
Four feet on the ground, a head full of foliage, looking at the world through the heart . . .
So I stopped trying to choose--Italy? India? or Indonesia?--and eventually just admitted
that I wanted to travel to all of them. Four months in each place. A year in total. Of
course this was a slightly more ambitious dream than "I want to buy myself a new pencil
box." But this is what I wanted. And I knew that I wanted to write about it. It wasn't so
much that I wanted to thoroughly explore the countries themselves; this has been done. It
was more that I wanted to thoroughly explore one aspect of myself set against the
backdrop of each country, in a place that has traditionally done that one thing very well. I
wanted to explore the art of pleasure in Italy, the art of devotion in India and, inIndonesia, the art of balancing the two. It was only later, after admitting this dream, that I
noticed the happy coincidence that all these countries begin with the letter I. A fairly
auspicious sign, it seemed, on a voyage of self-discovery.
Imagine now, if you will, all the opportunities for mockery this idea unleashed in my
wise-ass friends. I wanted to go to the Three I's, did I? Then why not spend the year in
Iran, Ivory Coast and Iceland? Or even better--why not go on pilgrimage to the Great
Tri-State "I" Triumvirate of Islip, I-95 and Ikea? My friend Susan suggested that perhaps
I should establish a not-for-profit relief organization called "Divorcees Without Borders."
But all this joking was moot because "I" wasn't free to go anywhere yet. That
divorce--long after I'd walked out of my marriage--was still not happening. I'd started
having to put legal pressure on my husband, doing dreadful things out of my worst
divorce nightmares, like serving papers and writing damning legal accusations (required
by New York State law) of his alleged mental cruelty--documents that left no room for
subtlety, no way in which to say to the judge: "Hey, listen, it was a really complicated
relationship, and I made huge mistakes, too, and I'm very sorry about that, but all I want
is to be allowed to leave."
(Here, I pause to offer a prayer for my gentle reader: May you never, ever, have to get a
divorce in New York.)
The spring of 2003 brought things to a boiling point. A year and a half after I'd left, my
husband was finally ready to discuss terms of a settlement. Yes, he wanted cash and the
house and the lease on the Manhattan apartment--everything I'd been offering the whole
while. But he was also asking for things I'd never even considered (a stake in the royalties
of books I'd written during the marriage, a cut of possible future movie rights to my work,
a share of my retirement accounts, etc.) and here I had to voice my protest at last. Months
of negotiations ensued between our lawyers, a compromise of sorts inched its way toward
the table and it was starting to look like my husband might actually accept a modified
deal. It would cost me dearly, but a fight in the courts would be infinitely more expensive
and time-consuming, not to mention soul-corroding. If he signed the agreement, all I had
to do was pay and walk away. Which would be fine with me at this point. Our
relationship now thoroughly ruined, with even civility destroyed between us, all I wanted
anymore was the door.
The question was--would he sign? More weeks passed as he contested more details. If he
didn't agree to this settlement, we'd have to go to trial. A trial would almost certainly
mean that every remaining dime would be lost in legal fees. Worst of all, a trial would
mean another year--at least--of all this mess. So whatever my husband decided (and he
still was my husband, after all), it was going to determine yet another year of my life.
Would I be traveling all alone through Italy, India and Indonesia? Or would I be getting
cross-examined somewhere in a courtroom basement during a deposition hearing?
Every day I called my lawyer fourteen times-- any news?-- and every day she assured me
that she was doing her best, that she would telephone immediately if the deal was signed.
The nervousness I felt during this time was something between waiting to be called into
the principal's office and anticipating the results of a biopsy. I'd love to report that I
stayed calm and Zen, but I didn't. Several nights, in waves of anger, I beat the life out of
my couch with a softball bat. Most of the time I was just achingly depressed.
Meanwhile, David and I had broken up again. This time, it seemed, for good. Or maybe
not--we couldn't totally let go of it. Often I was still overcome with a desire to sacrificeeverything for the love of him. Other times, I had the quite opposite instinct--to put as
many continents and oceans as possible between me and this guy, in the hope of finding
peace and happiness.
I had lines in my face now, permanent incisions dug between my eyebrows, from crying
and from worry.
And in the middle of all that, a book that I'd written a few years earlier was being
published in paperback and I had to go on a small publicity tour. I took my friend Iva
with me for company. Iva is my age but grew up in Beirut, Lebanon. Which means that,
while I was playing sports and auditioning for musicals in a Connecticut middle school,
she was cowering in a bomb shelter five nights out of seven, trying not to die. I'm not
sure how all this early exposure to violence created somebody who's so steady now, but
Iva is one of the calmest souls I know. Moreover, she's got what I call "The Bat Phone to
the Universe," some kind of Iva-only, open-round-the-clock special channel to the divine.
