I am in Bali. The immediate pace of this place is fairly intense. Over four million people live on this small island of just under 6,000 square kms. Motorbikes, cars and small trucks rush by. Streets are piled with objects and litter. Power poles hold what looks like 100 wires, all tangled but clearly important in delivering electricity to whoever needs it.

I am aware that I am not attuned to the relations around me. Certainly not in the way I am in my own garden and coastal landscape. But how to stop and wonder at a lizard amidst the noise and busyness of this place? How to try and observe relations when I am walking, when it feels like with each step the pavement is trying to trip me up, or swallow me into it’s holes and pits?

I feel like I need to some different methods to adjust to this place, to be-come with it somehow.

I wonder whether I need to move into its flows and rhythms. How do I start to move differently? What do I need to notice or attune to? How do I need to meander and negotiate? Do I need to sense differently? Do I need to trust different things in different ways?

I don’t trust the pavement, but I do trust that the motorbikes will move around me.

Yes. It is moving with the flows and rhythms of this place that I see this is how I can enter relations here. I see them everywhere:

the traffic flows with a certain ease and logic
the water along the paths moves consistently through its channels
the sounds of the insects rise and fall
the movement of rain and storms come with the changes in temperature
the rhythm of my body that slows down in the heat, I eat less and sleep more
the ceremonies are rituals that mark times and events

It feels very much like flows and rhythms are a useful way to enter relations on this chaotic yet peaceful tropical island. The flows and rhythms of life in Australia feel more structured, less flexible. Here in Bali, life feels fluid and kind. Generous. Joyful.

I am amazed as I watch Balinese emerge from a days-long celebration at the Gunung Lebah Temple, stopping traffic as a procession moves through the streets. No one is bothered, it is part of the flow and rhythm of life here. Golden dragon heads, masks, umbrellas, flags all moving like water.

Perhaps the other way to enter into relations is to look at what persists or what is ongoing. Doing so reveals what is sustained. What survives. What thrives. Maybe also what’s clearly decaying, what’s not surviving. The moss and algae survives; the roads decay. It really is like the jungle is trying to eat what humans have created. Life is clearly persisting, ongoing.

I am reminded here that relationality is not necessarily about knowing relations, but perhaps simply participating in them. Not identifying species, or trying to understand how things work, but finding ways to enter into existing relations, and starting to see them from the inside. Just being with relations.

Flows and rhythms

On snake watch