At a literary event the night before I leave for my trip, a random in the audience gave me the contact info for his friend, a queer guy living in Munduk, a small village in the mountainous north of Bali. A month later at midnight, Qian knocks on my guesthouse door in Ubud (returning from a quick jaunt out of Bali to renew his visa) and climbs into bed wearing only his underwear. In the morning, we wordlessly unroll our yoga mats. Before we hit the road, we have become friends.

Sometimes when you travel, you have control, or the illusion of control — some knowledge of where you are going and what will be there. And sometimes, you are along for the ride, accepting an invitation into the home and life of another, accepting what is offered. I make sure of only two things, boiled drinking water andvegetarian food, the second typical since meat is a luxury.

Qian and I are dropped off on the side of the road near a sign for waterfalls, these the main tourist draws in a town that receives one page in my guidebook. After a 7-minute walk on a dirt path, we approach a clearing where cock-fighting chickens and bred pigeons (apparently birds are decorative) and a well-behaved dog wander. Qian lives on the second level of this humble home in a tree-house like room with glass windows on three sides and a balcony that overlooks the orchard and misty valley.

Qian is here to study, practice, record, and produce gamelan music. As I understand it, gamelan refers to a collection of instruments (loosely reminiscent of xylophones, although some remind me in shape of clay pots used for cooking ) many with bronze keys set above bamboo tubes. The keys are struck with mallets, some round while others look like hammers.

Gamelan is everywhere in Bali. Everywhere. And along with performances and lessons I often see a phrase: “playing gender.” I cannot wait to ask Qian and shout at him, “What does that mean!?” He starts cracking up. The gender (with a hard “G” and an “er” sounding like “air”) wayang is a type of gamelan. With two trans guys, the jokes are endless.

I am excited to meet, Made, the gamelan teacher. He wears bifocals, has an intellectual mien, and everything about him cries musician — he builds and tunes gamelans, as well as teaches, composes, and plays. Having toured in the States, he speaks decent English and eagerly talks to me about his work. In fact, gamelan seems to be the only thing on his mind. During my first day, he sits around smoking, drinking coffee, messing around on the flute, and praying it doesn’t rain so that village gamelan practice will happen.

When it starts to rain at 6pm on my first night, Made turns to me, “Very bad, Nick, very bad,” he says. “God does not like gamelan.”

In the treehouse, Qian and I fall into one of our effortless conversations — about queer San Francisco, artist colonies, art fundraising, touring, or gender (soft “g”). We do not notice the rain has stopped until Made calls up to us. “No, no,” Qian whines.

“This is what I hate,” Qian says to me. “I never know where I’m going, for how long, what will happen, and when I’ll be back.” I get it. I totally get it. I’m along for a brief ride, but this is his  daily life.

Made, Qian, and I put on our headlights, plod through the mud, and reach the road where two helmetless young men on scooters pick us up. It is dark, wet, drizzling, and for 2 kilometers along a very windy, hilly road, I think only of one thing — dying.

About a dozen men — ages fourteen to sixty — arrive slowly, cigarettes gangling from their mouths. The gamelans are aligned in pairs on a long raft of cement protected by a corrugated metal roof. Along the cinder block wall, bamboo flutes (sulings) hang. One coiled light on a string hangs from the ceiling. Water drips off of the leaves and roof, a pitter-patter of drops soon overtaken by the twinkling of keys.

Supposedly they are learning a new piece, but it sounds practiced. Up close, what impresses me the most is the way the musicians strike the keys with the mallets and quickly stop each key with the base of a hand. Their movements are so quick, like a magician’s trick, a sleight of hand that I hadn’t noticed until now.

They practice for a couple hours until coffee is served and the animated conversation eventually dies down. It is midnight before we are back on scooters and making our way home.

We are staying with Made’s daughter and her family (her husband and three kids). None of them speak English, and I am aware that I am communicating wholly with my body language, my face, my walk, and the few Indonesian words I know. My new favorite words are “Makan, Makan” — “Eat, Eat.”

This is shouted up at us constantly for we are fed constantly — fried bananas with palm sugar, chayote, bamboo shoots, greens that the son hands to his mother through the kitchen window, tapioca, cassava roots boiled and fried, cassava greens — and always white rice. We do not eat with the family for reasons I don’t understand; the cooked food remains under a dirt-caked fly protector, and people eat whenever they want.

Everyone in the family sleeps downstairs on a collection of mattresses, some without sheets, that rest on the floor in front of TVs that blare constantly. We all share the bathroom with a real squat toilet, not the kind at tourist spots where you bring your own toilet paper and leave it in the waste basket on your way out. No shoes are allowed inside the bathroom, or the house.

I do very little while here other than go on a short trip to the waterfall. The middle child, the son, silently guides me. This kid is beautiful, all of them are. He is lanky with fuzz over his lip, ears that stick out, and a kindness that makes me believe (mistakenly perhaps) that he will not become an angry, sullen teenager like those in America.

It is always raining, or about to rain, the water occasionally dripping through the roof of the treehouse onto the bed. Mostly, we work. While I write, Qian sits at a stool in front of his computer (using a modem that uses radio waves) engaged in the creative and business aspects of gamelan  — choosing songs for an album, doing the cover art, contacting producers.

I write about Ubud. It takes me such a long time to write the blog post, longer than it should; it always does. In the past couple weeks, I have been rejected (or waitlisted) by the three artist colonies/retreats I applied to for the summer. I have been falling in and out of that rejection spiral — the why bother, “I suck” spin — that every writer experiences.

I look over at Qian with his headphones tuned to his music, and I think of the lunacy of artists, the lunacy of travel, the lunacy of love — the passions that call us, the cultures that steal our hearts, the people who become family. Somehow, isolated in this treehouse on an orchard, high in the mountains of Bali, it all makes sense, for a second, anyways. For this is where the two of us ended up when we let go of the illusion of control.

***

Check out Qian’s blog to hear the gamelan, support his work, and learn a thing or two from the master about this pretty amazing music.

The faint moonlight silhouettes palm trees against a blue-black sky. Inside the open-air Yoga Barn studio, over twenty of us — travelers and ex-pats — gather for the first in a new bi-weekly evening series, Bali Dharma Talks, a lecture and discussion about local life.

A spotlight shines on a pull-down blackboard. “Mula Keto,” our speaker writes. It means, “That’s just the way it is.” It’s something parents say and reminds me of the American version, “Because I said so.” Except that here there is a nuance. It’s based less on about authority and more on faith. It means just do it, but also implies trust it, believe in it. “Mula Keto” is the response when kids question the many offerings, ceremonies, and rituals that define village existence.

Our speaker writes and connects “spirituality,” “humanity,” and “environment” — balanced in harmony. Above this micro-level is the macro-level, one word “Universe.” At the very top, he writes “God.” He explains that this organizational system does not come from a specific book, class, philosophy, or religion, but is the tradition imparted to him growing up. His lecture is a series of digressions, and I collect the pieces that resonate with me, tonight and at other times, creating a patchwork understanding of the culture, or many cultures (for each village is unique) here.

He describes Ubud as a village and shares a bit about his childhood back when the main street was a dirt road and the market a field, before the trees were cleared for the arrival of electricity in the mid-seventies. He is not romanticizing, but bridging, the past to present, and to the future, accepting his responsibility and teaching us about ours as the inevitable growth and change continues all around us.

Ubud is a thriving tourist town and my home base in Bali. On the surface it is similar in many ways to my true home, the Castro — a tourist mecca and a theme park that I call “Gay Disneyland.” Ubud is a Yogi Disneyland, a spiritual theme park. The stores and restaurants pull from Sanskrit and Hinduism — Satya Jewelry, Ahimsa Clothes, Atman Cafe, Lakshmi Books, Saraswati Bungalows, and Durga Burger — Ok fine, I made the last one up.

I absolutely love it here. I pretend the Yoga Barn is Yoga Tree and attend classes in the morning and events in the evening. A Kirtan led by a visiting Ozzie, Kevin James, is one of the highlights, a foot-stomping, hand-clapping, musical extravaganza, a beautiful co-mingling of voice and sound, celebrating community and expressing devotion.

With my ponytail, fisherman pants, and white (albeit tan) skin, I fit in well in this scene and am almost too comfortable. I branch out by trying a chanting night affiliated with a massage center and ashram. A candle flickers in front of a lone frangipani flower in the center of our intimate three-person triangle. A Balinese man, Putu, plays the guitar and leads us in familiar chants with unfamiliar melodies, including one with the twist of a local tongue that substitutes W’s for V’s. From our hearts, we repeat “Om Namah Shiwaya” over and over and over again.

I find it expansive to explore what I was first introduced to in my San Francisco yoga world in here in Bali. I like seeing a much larger form of the Ganesha I have on my home altar guarding the front of many of the temples, guesthouses, and stores, removing obstacles, clearing the entrance. I like seeing a performance of the Ramayana at the palace. Even though I do not take to Legong Dance, when Hanuman and his vanara army enter I excitedly poke the Canadian singer-songwriter I coerced to come along. “Look, Hanuman!” I say. “This is the best part.”

Unlike the rest of Indonesia, much of Bali is Hindu. I’m told that as time marched on, foreigners arrived, and Muslims conquered, Bali was safely isolated due to the coral that thwarted boats. The Hindu that remains is mixed with animism, and as I gather, because I’m always gathering, somewhat specific within each village.

A unifying trait is devotion, expressed in rituals and ceremonies that are so constant, time-consuming, and expensive (especially if a lot of deaths occur in a year) that I begin to wonder if they are excessive. On a long day of temple sightseeing, we pass a shocking number of processions and temple anniversaries. My driver, Apel, attended a cremation the day before. “Do the ceremonies ever get to be too much?” I finally ask him.

“Yes,” he says, laughing like I caught him. But in his laugh, I can also hear, “Mula Keto.”

I spend a big part of the day in the car with Apel, talking the whole time. He is married with a four-year old son, and he recently borrowed a large amount of money to buy a tiny piece of land, 125 sq meters, to build a house. “Every day, I wake up nervous,” he says, gesturing a hand over his heart, pumping it hard against his chest.

His English is terrific, not just the words but the slang and the sentiment. He calls one of his friends a “high-class playboy” with a hint of admiration. “But that is not me,” he says. “I have to be me.” He desperately wants to be a good father and husband, speaks apologetically about occasionally drinking Arak, the local spirit (made from palm leaves) with his friends.

He is so earnest and honest. My skin feels translucent, like it can no longer protect me. I discover we are the same age, a few months a part. He wears a Hurley T-shirt and a pair of blue jeans. I feel a deep kinship with him. He teaches me much, including a new Balinese word, “taksu” — inner beauty, and I understand perfectly because I see it so clearly in him.

At Tanah Lot, I walk across the shallow ocean to the base of this temple; it’s so perfect it looks like it belongs in a snow globe. A couple hours later, I explore Uluwatu, another seaside temple, this built on a cliff so sheer and steep it is as if a sharp knife sliced off this bit of land. The view, the sense of the end of the earth, is the allure of these temples — homages to the ocean. It is a bit bizarre to feel the essence of God, then get in line behind a busload of Singaporeans to capture it in a picture. I enjoy my time in the car with Apel as much, maybe more than the temples.

On my last day in Ubud, I visit Sari Organic, the restaurant in the middle of the rice fields. I am thrilled to be outside the bustle of the town center. On the walk, I pass signs for places to rent by the month, and although I’d once thought I might seek a rental, settle for a bit and write here, I quickly realized that this trip is not for working on a project, but is a respite between projects.

I spend hours at this restaurant, many more than I intend, eating vegetables and chatting with a yogi and an Asia-phile who has been coming to Bali for twenty years. She is a New Yorker (it takes one to know one) but in the seventies, she lived in San Francisco, the Castro. She speaks with nostalgia about this time, a period along with the eighties and early nineties that I have pieced together from documentaries, archival footage, books, and friends.

The “Gay Disneyland” where I have made my home for the past 7 years may be full of tourists paying too much money for ironic underwear and bad dance music, but it is also the neighborhood where early liberation and freedom was experienced, community grew around enormous devastation and loss, and part of the foundation that allows for my queer existence was built. You can see Disneyland, or you can find the hallowed ground underneath.

As I walk back to my guesthouse on none other than Hanuman Street, I pass one of the places I have not visited on this trip, Taksu Yoga. In total, I’ve spent more than two weeks in and around Ubud, but I am only beginning to see behind the words painted on the storefronts, to discover what taksu means.

Perhaps next time I’m here I’ll rent one of those houses in the rice fields…

I am sitting on the veranda of my bungalow in a garden of blossoming flowers with Buddha and Ganesha statues shaded by the canopy of palm leaves. A mother’s foreign lullaby is punctuated by the crows of roosters, bird calls, and scooter engines. I slept for 12 hours last night, 10 hours the few nights before. I am not sure why I am so tired, whether it is the past couple years of busting my ass behind me, the emotional days of goodbyes from folks on my yoga retreat — the end of their vacation and the beginning of my adventure — or if hanging out underwater could possibly be that exhausting.

Scuba diving is the only “activity” I’ve been doing for the past week. And by that I mean watching a turtle levitating to the surface for air, a reef shark swimming amidst a school of barracuda, a sting ray flapping along the sandy bottom, a scorpion fish camouflaging itself into the wreck of a WWII U.S. cargo ship, the flatworms and starfish and clams gripping on to coral as I begin to let go of the grip on my mouthpiece. With each dive, the tiny bits of life become infinitely more interesting, the details of this underwater ecosystem more vivid.

I am in Amed (Jemeluk Beach to be more specific), a strip of villages situated on black sand beaches on the east coast of Bali. There is seemingly not much to do here. And so I wonder, “Why am I here?” This is a question I have been asking myself for weeks, with differing tones of fear and wonder.

It started with a retreat, something that felt like a mix between the Real World: Yoga Edition and yoga camp in a college dorm. Slightly outside the main part of Ubud, our compound was planted in the center of rice fields, a pool its only attraction. On that very first afternoon, a new friend and I, resting on the pool’s ledge, looked out into the jungle and eyed each other with the same trepidation: What the heck would we do all day after the yoga session?

The question was quickly answered by the two kids on the retreat, young girls who jumped into the water and proceeded to engage us both for the next one, two, or was it three hours with games — searching for my lost hairbands under water, catching rocks off the diving platform, racing to touch the bottom.

Time and space — the greatest burden and the greatest luxury.

I didn’t expect my yoga retreat to be full of Hide-and-Seek, Go Fish, I Spy, or that literally the only words I’d read during those ten days would be the book “Should I Share My Ice Cream?” I didn’t expect that my biggest adventure would be a rain-soaked, mud-drenched journey with the kids across the rice field to a temple instead of the day I climbed Mount Batur before the sun rose imperceptibly through dense clouds. That morning I fell asleep on volcanic rock heated by the earth’s core, but it was the heat of two girls sandbagging me on the dorm floor later that afternoon that warmed me the most. It’s been a long time since I’ve had friends under the age of ten. It’s been a long time since I’ve had this much time.

A white flag floats in the middle of the rice field. During yoga practice my gaze, my drishti, settles upon this flag, this symbol of surrender.

There is actually nothing that needs to be done after yoga. This is an event, the main event. Each morning, we dance, laugh, sweat, and chant. During these first few days, Michael Franti plays his acoustic guitar in savasana. There is a richness to these early mornings, as if I’m touching the depths of why I am in Bali, on this trip, on this earth, and it comes not in words but tears.

There’s a reason I’ve been following my yoga teacher around for the past couple of years. When every fiber in my being is resisting joy, the simple sight of her, all that she embodies, makes me smile. And when I’m ready to take on a challenge, but unwilling to step forward, she creates an opening, asks if I want to assist in a yoga class one morning.

This is something I’ve been putting off and would’ve gladly put off until returning home. It would’ve been safer to try it in the candlelit dark of my home studio, where I could clutch the wall, bathing in a stew of my uncertainty, discomfort, and futility. But I offer what I can, what little I can, relishing the moments when I can, and pocketing the “thank you’s” of my new friends as a reminder that a little goes farther than I think, that trying is enough.

Sometimes I feel like a baby, like I’m just learning how to walk and talk — to touch with love, to laugh with kids, to connect with my eyes — to engage with my surroundings, be part of the world.

After the retreat, I sloth around Gili Trawangan for a week with friends. A dirt road skirts the perimeter of this island, and the only transport beside bicycles are tiny horse-drawn carriages. It’s amazing to see the sun rise on one side of the island and see it set from the other. In between, we eat pizza, drink Bin Tang beers, listen only to Bob Marley, and gazebo-hop from one white-sand beach to the next. Occasionally, I take a break from maximizing lethargy for a yoga class or a dive with the batfish, sweetlips, and angelfish in turquoise water so clear it seems unreal.

It isn’t all perfect. The stomach ailments, bizarre rashes, earaches, sunburns, and flip-flop chaffing wounds remind me constantly of the fragility of the body. I have been outside almost all day every day, the elements (and bacteria) are taking their toll. The brown on my feet is either tan or dirt; my hands are peeling from the salt. I need to restock my medical kit.

The goodbyes have been the most challenging — leaving the kids, my teacher, my friends from the retreat. Each one felt like my heart was being extricated via my throat, like a clown pulling endless links of a paper chain from his mouth. Some mornings I wake up with an air bubble of longing behind my solar plexus. In these times, I breathe deeper, smile wider, wrap my loneliness up with all that I can find inside. I take out my yoga mat, my inflatable meditation cushion, and my mala beads — these, and band-aids, are my most prized possessions. They anchor me when I feel lost and afraid, when I spin on where I should go, what I should do?

I decide to stay here in Amed another day even though there are must-see things I’m missing and there is nothing to do here.

In the morning, I watch women leave out their offerings of incense in front of the bungalows and upon the altar in the cafe that doubles as a bird feeder. I read and write and say hello to all the Made’s, Wayan’s, and Ketut’s on the strip, making a note for each in my journal so I can remember the names that many of the men share based on their birth order. In the afternoon, I watch boys of all ages play beach soccer, sliding and falling on the sea glass and plastic bottles and scraps of coral. Men unfurl their fishing nets or cast a line from the shore or take out their boats with peeling paint.

I walk this black sand cove in the early evening to cries of Barack Obama as the locals call Americans, and from the sounds of the languages spoken around me, I’m seemingly the only one here right now. At the end of the cove there are a bunch of large rocks, one that is particularly flat. I sit here, next to a dead crab, and chant loudly as the sun falls behind Mt Agung. I think of the kids from the retreat, and how a laundry bin became a hiding spot, the spiders became personalities with names, the little hut behind the kitchen became a clubhouse — that compound became a wonderland.

On the drive from Amed back to Ubud, I track the white flags in the rice fields. In between our marathon singalong to American stoner classics, reggae hits, and Dido, I ask my driver about these flags, and he tells me they flap in the wind, scaring the birds and keeping them away from the crop. I nod. His answer suffices. But curving around the narrow windy roads, the vista opening to vast flatbeds of water-saturated fields, I find the white flags, my own meaning, why I am here.