Greetings from Bali
Balinese people do things their own way. They live on an island of astonishing beauty, among landscapes they themselves have created, by terracing and irrigating the steep hillsides for their ricefields. It is not a gentle landscape, but its soil is fertile and well-watered, repaying labour with abundant crops. There is work for everyone, but also leisure for all the arts of life : painting, story-telling, sculpture, music and dancing, all centred on Bali.s tradition of Hinduism. This has been so long separated from its Indian origins that it has developed subtle reinterpretations of its own, without ever forgetting the epic tales that teach men and women the ways of the gods.
It is this deep-rooted faith and culture that give the Balinese the confidence to look at the modern world and meet it on its own terms. The same craftsmen and women will prepare decorations for a temple festival one day, getting every tiny detail exactly right, the way it has always been. The next day they will invent some visual joke that will become, for a few months, the basis of thousands of woodcarvings, paintings, or pottery figures, no two of which will be quite the same.
The focus of all Balinese life is the community : the household first, with branches of an extended family living in separate quarters around a walled courtyard; then the village, or the town neighbourhood, with its series of temples and meeting-places. It is a community of time as well as place, with a wonderfully complex system of overlapping calendars that regulate most public and many domestic actions. But there is nothing mechanical or routine in these ritual observances: they bring meaning and colour to life, and help to account for the Balinese air of cheerful self-assurance. If you are making your first visit to Bali, its people will know and understand you much better than you do them . but you will have a great time catching up.
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