In Bali for 18 days

Note:   Murray and I arrived in Bali on September 18, 2011.  I wrote this for my newsletter, and I thought it would be good background material for this blog. Murray and I have been in Bali for 2-1/2 weeks now, and things are settling down as we settle in. We go to bed with the frogs and crickets, and wake up with the chickens. One wall of our house borders a local path and we hear the Balinese villagers as they chat and laugh going along the path. Our little house is a sort of duplex, and our neighbors are from Spain. We don’t know much about them yet, but we can hear them talking as our bedrooms share a common wall. Their unit is air-conditioned, so the bedroom is closed to the outside sounds. Our unit is not air-conditioned, so we get to hear the sounds of the village in the rice fields at night. We hear an occasional motor scooter, but mostly the more gentle sounds of village life. We have a housemate in the form of a gecko.  He patrols the beam in the center of our bedroom and, you may not know this, geckos poop.  Their poop is brown and our wood floor is brown, so I am practicing stepping over the section of the floor under the beam. Murray is on gecko poop detail, so the next time someone asks us what we do in Bali, I have an answer: avoid gecko poop. The article this week goes into detail about some of the aspects of settling in to a Third World country. I’m not sure this is going to be of much interest to anyone, but I’m going to go ahead and print it this week, hoping to hear back from you. I can continue to let you inside the process that we are going through as we follow our yes to Bali, or I could write more general articles about what I’m learning from this journey. I’m listening for the answer, and I would appreciate anything you have to say on the matter. Murray and I have established 3 agreements as we follow Yes: # 1 We agreed to tell ourselves and each other the truth about how we feel, what we are thinking, and what we want.  We have to keep an honest flow going, even if we feel we “should” not be feeling or thinking or wanting something. # 2 We agree to allow each other the space to have all of our feelings, all of our thoughts, and all of our wants without judgment. We have a tendency to shut down each  others feelings and desires because of our own insecurities.  Normally, this is not a problem for us, but this move is a stressful situation even though we have chosen it, and we are surrounded by great beauty, both earthly and human. # 3. We agreed to center our lives daily in lovingkindness, gratitude, and a healthy sense of humor.  The Balinese laugh easily and begin each day with an offering.  I want to be worthy of being a guest in their country, on their island, and in this sweet little village. I intend to make a movie to show you where we are living.  Completing it may have to wait until after the Ubud Writer’s Festival that starts on Wednesday the 5th of October. We will be pretty busy then.  We are committed to going with the flow, loving ourselves well, and picking the “shoulds” off our souls like the leeches those thoughts are. We want to be present in the moment, present to ourselves, present to each other, and open to whatever Yes wants to do. Yahoo! Blessings, Vicki