the forest temple

as i was standing along the street with lots of the other villagers awaiting the beginning of the cleansing walk to the temple on the sea, ketut appeared, again, and stood next to me and we spoke. i asked him about a bath house he had mentioned in an earlier conversation...telling him that i found it in the village, but didn't know which side was for the women, because there was not a sign. so he said "just go in one of the sides and if you see men, then go to the other side." i laughed and said i would prefer to go in the right side. so he said that always the mens side is to the east and the womens side is to the west...and i realized it is also like that in all the airports etc...clever...

he then mentioned that behind the spring waters of the bath house there is a temple on the hillside but behind the temple, there is another temple, that you have to climb up a lot of steps until you finally reach it...and that it is said that there are deer living in the forest, but no one has ever seen them, but that if something good or bad is going to happen, they will let out a call, that some can hear....

well...after a preview like that, i decided that the day after the cleansing ceremony and the day before the day of silence for the new year, is a good time to take an afternoon hike and discover the temple in the forest. i packed a bag with my temple clothes (sarong,, sash and brocade blouse...left the girdle at home) and took a towel for the bath house and figured that after a hike up the mountain a cold mountain spring water shower will probably feel good.

i climbed the stairs to the first temple, after having switched to my temple clothes and then i started looking around for the stairs that would take me even higher...but none to be found...what a disappointment. it was hard for me to believe that ketut would call some 20-30 steps a big climb in the forest,,,,but there was nothing else around, other than a birds eye view of the village of tejakula...which it was interesting to see, since i didn't realize that it was actually very big and that the side that i was on is just a small suburb of the town. now i understood what i had seen the morning before when i awoke at 5 to go to the cleansing ceremony at the main temple...i had walked the dark streets for 20 minutes and only saw one other person walking in temple clothes and figured that everyone is still asleep other that the saint eileen who has to be first all the time and not miss anything! and as i entered the gates of the temple after having followed the other man through narrow winding paths in the dense housing compounds, i was surprised!

a huge temple courtyard filled with over a thousand men women and children dressed in white with colored baskets filled with their offerings, and big banners and two gamelon bands were all inside...having already finished praying and were now getting organized for the procession of the altars and the villagers that follow each of the respective suburbs down the road and to the sea. a constant stream of villagers continued to flow through the narrow doorways, and meanwhile they all got organized in the order that they would walk. i waited on the road, with ketut , which is when he told me about the temple...so back to my forest walk...

as i began to leave the temple, disappointed that i couldn't find the steps that ketut had mentioned, just as i took the last steps to the main path, i spotted a few old steps, with no beginning to them, behind a cement wall...and decided to try them out...and sure enough...they were the cleverly hidden steps leading up the mountain.

as i began the hike, i tried to imagine who had carried all these cement blocks up the mountain side to make these steps?! probably women, since they are always the ones to be seen with a towel wound around into a kind of bagel on the top of their heads, carrying huge piles of firewood, or baskets of bricks, or long bamboo poles for men to build with later...

not being a real hiker, i had to stop every 5 steps to breathe, look around, and try and spot the famous hiding deer, and then continue another 5 steps up the steep mountainside, not able to see how tall it actually was and how much further i had to go...grateful that it was an overcast day with a nice afternoon breeze, since parts of the path were just dry mud and if it had been raining i couldn't have done it, as it had rained the previous day.

sadly i knew that others had walked before me the day before, since the candy wrappers and were strewn along this god forsaken path...at one point i was up so high and in among the trees in this steep winding primitive path, i could have a birds eye view of the village, and it put things in proportion...how when i am inside it it is as if the village was created just for me, with so many meaningful and interesting interactions going on as i walk along the road, and up high above it all, it was just a combination of motorbikes and roosters crowing, and kids yelling and chanting from the main temple below...so different...like any other village in the world, with more congested areas, and less congested with trees and the sea...and also all along the path were those that had to leave their initials or names scraped into the rocks...but i was grateful that there was not an admission fee to be paid and a long line of tourists in a bee line up the mountain to see the forest at the top...because then the atmosphere would have been so different. i kept imaging that i was climbing massada.

every now and then the path would disappear, and i had to decide whether to just push through the forest and hopefully find the steps again, which is exactly what happened...(to distract people from actually walking all the way to the top?? if you are not really determined?)

and finally i spotted the tip of the mountain, and saw a small cement bricked wall with palm leaf offering decorations strewn on the ground, remainders of those that had climbed up here the day before for the cleansing ceremony....(and i thought i was the only one that would climb all the way up here!)

and as i entered the small simple barren area there were 2 plain cement altars...no fierce dragon carvings, no colorful ramayana drawings, no elaborate gold doors or 7 tiered entrance...and as i walked up closer to say my prayer of thanks for being able to arrive at this sacred spot on top of the mountain in the forest, and to ask to be cleansed also for the new year...as i walked up closer to the altar to look at the innermost sacred spot of each of the simple box like enclosures to see who is the god i am praying to this time? what i found was...
an empty space! and i thought it was just perfect! my god is inside of me....and when i looked in, all there was was me...and i smiled at how appropriate it was to have climbed all the way up here, to find myself.