Nyepi, Day of Silence in Bali

A couple weeks ago, I learned that classes in the Pascasarjana (Post-Graduate School) of Universitas Muhammadiayah, where I am teaching this semester, would not be started.  So I scooted off to Bali for a long weekend and this time went by "Travel," which meant a 13 hour trip east including a long ferry ride to the little island.  On the map it looks close, but these roads make that an illusion.  Once there, I met up with Elisabeth, Regional English Language teacher at Universitas Jember, and a foreign student there, Sabrina, who is from Paris.  The first night was spent in a lovely hotel in Ubud (famous from the "Eat, Pray, Love" phenomenon), and a text message the first morning invited us to visit a professor whose village abutted the north coast of Bali.  As we drove north the next day, we met one after another large handmade figures, one more gruesome than the next.  These were the "ogoh, ogoh," which, we learned from our various guides, represent the low spirits.  How low can you go, I sometimes wondered as I saw grotesquely violent and rapacious beings being constructed on platforms for the processions that would follow that night.  Pak Budasi, our professor friend who hosted us in the village of Menyali, explained that they were not to be killed by fed and appeased, so that they would go to their proper place.  What astute psychology I thought; like Jung, the Balinese have known that the demons can't be destroyed but only quieted and befriended in some way.  By the time we were in the village, preparations were being completed for the ceremony to begin that evening.  We visitors stood in amazement and delight as one after another of these creatures came by carried on bamboo platforms by groups of boys and young men.  The whole event was a combination of Halloween, July 4th, and a religious observance--certainly it was a communal ritual full of good spirit.  After dark, and some combat between a few of the bad spirits, they were carried in procession around the village until they ended up in the cemetery where they were burned. 


  The next day was a total contrast to all that noise (including firecrackers that last into the night).  Nyepi's Day of Silence in Bali means no cars, airplanes, television transmission, no lights, and no fires.  People do not leave their family compounds, and though we had planned a walk with the village head, we stayed put all day, and took the opportunity to visit the family "sangha," a field of 17 shrines to the ancestors that sits on a rise above the rest of the family dwellings.  Up there Pak Budasi guided us in "pranayama" meditation, a form of breath control.  The whole experience of being in the village with such a tight-knit community feeling was comforting.  And the significance of Nyepi, which a brochure from Ubud describes as "a way to begin life anew, with the troubling and dark aspects of the past year put well behind us," was especially timely for me.