Excerpts from Returning to My Mother's House
Bali: Searching for the Wisdom of the Deep Feminine (page 5)
Sitting on the large porch of our bamboo house with the rushing sound of the river gorge below us, we silently followed Made’s instructions as if we were already immersed in prayer. Soon we each held our temple offering. I felt I held all of Bali in that tiny green cradle; the seamless balance of the daily and the sacred, and the elegant synthesis of landscape, art, and spirituality all offered with heartfelt gratitude.
Elegantly wrapped in our sarongs and offerings in hand, we set out for the temple. For miles and miles the narrow dirt roads appeared as bright-colored streamers with each women’s banyar (a village collective) in their particular sarong of turquoise, fuchsia, orange, chartreuse, or gold. Perched above the colors were the pyramid-shaped temple offerings, intricately built out of papayas, mangoes, avocados, eggs, and coconuts, and decorated with bundles of magenta orchids and scarlet hibiscus. Carrying the heavily laden offerings high on their heads, the tiny Balinese women glided along like a procession of vibrantly colored birds. Watching them, I longed to be able to carry my responsibilities with such grace and ease as an offering to spirit.
Arriving at the magnificent mother temple Pura Besakih, Made helped us find a place to sit on the stone floor. The only white faces in the crowd of hundreds of Balinese, the Straub banyar drew lots of attention and friendly smiles. This was the festival of Kuningan, and it was said that all the gods come down to earth on this day. Soon enough we understood why a god would leave heaven for this celebration. We sat mesmerized for about an hour before we would go up to the smaller temple within the temple to leave our offerings. The gamelan orchestras were heating up into a frenzy, reminding me of the untamed improvisational jazz heard in small clubs in New Orleans. Representing different characters from the great Hindu epic, the Ramayana, giant puppets on stilts walked among us. Clove incense was thick in the air, mixed with smell of human sweat and goats being slaughtered for temple offerings. Priests were praying in the complex Indonesian language, babies were crying, and all around people were talking and laughing. If it wasn’t already abundantly clear that art, spirituality, and sensuality were intrinsically connected for the Balinese, then the temple festival proclaimed this one more time.
Later, Made helped us find our way to the inner temple, where we added our offerings dedicated to the sacred feminine to the heaping piles of those who had gone before us. We knew that after the gods have had their fill of the food’s essence, the worshippers then take home the rest to their families. In this intoxicating celebration of life, I feel certain that the Goddess had heard our prayers. If ever there was a perfect opposite to the ordered monotonous Catholic mass of my childhood, it would be the Balinese temple festival. Thoroughly enjoying this orgy of the senses, I couldn’t help but wonder what Mom would be feeling.
In my mountain valley home, on the bluestone fireplace at the very center of my hearth, stands a hand-carved wooden statue of the Balinese rice goddess Sri Dewa. Her body is both soft and fierce, her strong hands full of the earth, her heart open to the world, her face an invitation into the imagination. And her voice speaks a prayer that we may all take back the wisdom of the feminine.
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Copyright ©2008 by Gail Straub. Excerpted with permission from the book, Returning to My Mother's House, by Gail Straub, published by High Point Press, ISBN 978-0-9630327-5-1. Please request permission before duplicating or distributing this material.
