I am in Bali - the island of the Gods. A short break before I go to America and Canada and Europe on a promotional tour for my book. I have come to Bali to re-charge my batteries - to re-connect with the ‘spiritual center’ and to get a tattoo ! Here there is a man (Leon) who is a Master artist - one whom I trust to put marks on my body that will be there until the day I die. On my chest, beside my heart, Leon will create for me a beautiful Buddha - whenever I look into a mirror the Buddha will be looking at me and will serve to remind me of the ‘refuge’ which is his sublime teaching.
On my second evening on the island I am invited to a dinner party by a charming woman with whom I became friends on Facebook ! I try to buy a bottle of wine but the wine is of poor quality and wildly over-priced, so instead I buy my host a bottle of Stolychnya Vodka. I arrive at a beautiful Balinese house and meet an eclectic and interesting group of people. It is amazing how we are all strangers and yet we all have mutual friends and acquaintances that stretch down the years and cover virtually every corner of the planet !
One of the guests is a lovely German woman, a follower of Bhagwhan Shree Rajneesh, (my Guru in the seventies!) and we have a splendid conversation about old times in Poona. The years roll away and I am transported to those sometimes manic Tantric groups in the basement of the Ashram where we laughed and cried together and connected our sexualities in ways which re-affirmed our humanity and our essential connectedness with our fellow human beings. She makes my heart sparkle and my eyes brim with happy tears this woman, like so many have done over the years.
Another guest lives in Costa Rica and is here on holiday, and invites me to go to a bar where he wants me to meet some of his friends. He loves the Grateful Dead and wants me to meet other people who carry the band’s music in their hearts. We exchange telephone numbers. A man is telling amazing tales of tunnels beneath the earth which stretch from Antartica to Europe and which are known (he tells us) to the top brass in the Pentagon ! A stunningly attractive woman tells me emotional tales of when she and Mick were lovers so many years ago, when Jagger would come to the island and no-one would give a toss who he was. Here (for a short period of time) he was able to take his holidays and get away from the full time job which is being Mick Jagger. She speaks of her lover from long ago with the slightest hint of a tear but without rancor or malice and in a voice soft enough to delight the most reluctant lothario. Her words of love lost long ago make me feel sad and I remember those whom I too have loved who are no more.
My gracious hostess and I talk of old times. Of her friend Chris Stamp who managed The Who, a man that partly shared the journey with me and experienced the rocky trail which was the music business in the sixties. We talk of his brother who (like so many of us) made the ‘pilgrimage to Poona’ and of lives devoted to both the spiritual path and the necessity of somehow making our way through the trials and vicissitudes of the world. As the evening grows late I make my excuses and wander away and walk down the edge of the rice paddy with the frogs croaking and strange noises emanating from the darkness in an enchanting chorus. The Balinese night is heavy with clouds, the Gods are busy which is their wont, and I feel wonderfully receptive to the lush fecundity of my surroundings. Here is a locale where the soul can be serenely nurtured should it so desire.
The following evening I am at dinner with another group of people. Some of them are friends and some are new to me. A woman is at the dinner party with her young and strikingly handsome son. His father is Javanese, she is English. The children of such unions have the most beautiful features and wonderful skins. We strike up a conversation and the son tells me that he is studying Sanskrit at university in Australia. As we talk I discover to my amusement and delight that his Professor is an acquaintance from many years ago when he was a post graduate student in England. We speak of Kharoshti manuscripts that were found in Afghanistan - the oldest birch-bark manuscripts ever discovered, and how his professor is working on their decipherment.
The circularity of acquaintances never ceases to amaze - those six degrees of separation with which we are all connected. I love meeting new people, hearing their stories, and am amused and delighted that I should have had a conversation with a young man whose Professor I knew back in the eighties. The young student is stunned that an old rock and roller like me should know of his eminent professor and is reduced to silence - that he could sit at a table in a Balinese restaurant and hear a man dressed in black and covered in tattoos talk about indo-sanskritic language roots and the manuscripts recently uncovered in the caves of the Silk Road leaves him happily bemused. I must admit to a certain mischievous delight in not conforming to conventional stereo-type when it comes to those who enjoyed getting wasted through years of sex and drugs and rock and roll ! The student will never take “old rockers” for granted again ! We’re not all Ozzie Osborne !!!
I make my way to a small bar (Warang Sanje) which advertises “authentic Indonesian food” and as I walk up the steps the sound system is playing Grateful Dead music ! In Ubud in the center of Bali, they are playing the Grateful Dead ! Several ex-pats are sitting around drinking beer and soon I am immersed in conversation about arcane questions to do with The Dead’s music. Was I in Hartford Connecticut in 1974 ? (yes) was I at the first Portchester gig? (yes)” why did Jerry change the lyrics to Wharf Rat?” and so on. I am bombarded with question of encyclopedic intensity and lo and behold (sure enough) some of us had been at the same concerts long ago - concerts which I had organized ! Such happy coincidences leave us bemused and delighted and chuckling merrily at the connectedness of everything.
I wander, once again, off into the night to make my way home to bed. Most of the island is fast asleep but in the fields and rice paddies everything is as busy as a Wall Street broker’s office. Frogs are croaking orders to one another and yelling “I’m over here, you want it, come and get it!” and the sound of running water is punctuated with the distinctive plop of a frog making his move to ferociously procreate. A Balinese rice paddy at night is a veritable orgy of frog lust ! I stand beneath the clouds enjoying the silken caress of the finest Balinese mist. What a glorious ‘safety zone’ in which to find oneself. How fortunate I am to be alive ! How grateful I am to have been involved in sharing the music of the Grateful Dead ! And my mind wanders to long ago, and a small shabby house which served as the band’s office in San Rafael California. Alan Trist and I were talking about the liner-notes for a Grateful Dead album and all the fans of the Grateful Dead who called themselves Dead Heads. We wanted to let them have a place with which they could communicate with the band - this was in the days before the internet became a commonality. In a sarcastic dig at the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto (“Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains”) I wrote the words which were to appear on the album. “Dead Heads of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your brains!” The rest (as they say) is history.
And here in Bali, all those disparate and seemingly unconnected strands of my life intersect and re-emerge in a wonderful synthesis of community and communication. The people of the island ensure in their daily lives that the Gods are given their due - peace and harmony are constantly re-enforced through devotion and prayer. Strangers come into their midst and the Balinese smile, and slowly but surely the secret magics of existence come to inform the lives of their guests. Life, which had hitherto somehow appeared disconnected and separate, becomes re-integrated with experience and something to be shared with one and all. I am reminded of how stunningly beautiful it all can seem for those with the soul to see and hear and the good fortune to have been blessed by the Gods. With the ‘gift’ of Bali in my heart I am infinitely enriched by the experience of being in this place. That is why I give thanks and constantly remind myself that this world IS a beautiful hotel.
