Holy days

This past week we celebrated two holy days; Saraswati and Pagarwasi. Saraswati is the Goddess of Knowledge. Let's start with saraswati, which was celebrated on Saturday and Sunday this year, (a Balinese year is 6 months). The holiday Is a combination of giving thanks to the goddess who blesses us with wisdom and knowledge and also an opportunity to pray for cleverness and that we will always have the right answer when faced with a question. It began with preparing special decorative offerings that have a different design to the cut palm leaf basket that holds the flowers in the offering. In the morning, all of the school notebooks and books are placed in a pile on a table in the house and the offering is placed on top of them, along with a stick of incense, and a blessing is given. In our household where there is a clinic and the father is a doctor, there was also an offering and blessing placed there, since he is always improving his knowledge in healing and health. Also in my room the offering was placed on the spiritual books that I read. (hmm…not sure what they would do with a kindle!). The usual daily offerings placed at dusk were already placed in the morning in honor of the holiday also. The children went to school but did not study, since all of their books were being blessed at their homes. The general idea is that we can make an effort and do our best, which is 50%  and the other 50% comes from the Goddess blessing us with knowledge and wisdom.

A custom in the grandparents village includes preparing a big bowl of water with scented flowers and incense. Then, the following day, everyone rises before dawn, puts on their temple "sash" (which means "we are serious") and walks to the sea, or nearest river, with a flower offering and incense stick, and says a prayer and then enters into the water. The water is meant to wash away any impurities in our thinking and to cleanse our thoughts so they will be pure. Upon returning home after the dawn douche we take a bath and then bless the flower water and pour some on our clean body, symbolizing a new beginning. This year, it fell on Sunday, which is the local day off of work and school for everyone, so no one went to school, but otherwise the children would have then gone to school (already go at 6:30 a.m.) and would have begun their studies with a new beginning of hopes and intentions of knowledge and wisdom.

Todays ceremony, Pagarwasi, is the renewing of the metal wall. All homes and buildings in Bali have walls that surround them. Since there are evil spirits as well as good spirits, there needs to be a wall that protects them from the evil coming in. When a house is built, first the cement wall is built around the grounds so that no negative energy will enter during the building of the house.  Each day the evil spirits are "fed" and blessed along with the food and blessings of gratitude that are given to Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva (the 3 aspects of God; creating, preserving and transforming). The Balinese Hindus desire balance between the good and the evil and believe that they are both part of us and God and need to work together. It is symbolic of the metal wall that we must all build inside us to keep the evil out. In other words, our ego, greediness, jealousy, anger, etc. are all evil that can overtake us and cause us to act out. But if instead of identifying with them we can master them, transform them, not react to them, then they can serve us in our creativity, our efforts, our initiative.

This ceremony comes 2 weeks before the Balinese Hindu New Year which is called Nyepi and is celebrated by a day of fasting, silence, non-action, no fire (electricity). So the "wall is renewed" and then the day before Nyepi all the giant size devils that have been prepared by the local teenagers from paper mache are paraded around each village, with great excitement and enthusiasm, and then burned. They have been given recognition, attention, acknowledgement, but also clearly been told where they can enter and where they are not invited in!