Nyepi - the day of silence

We woke the morning after the raucous night of Ogoh-ogoh to quiet.  The constant buzz of noise from the cars, buses and scooters passing by our house was missing.   All was quiet and still, but for the occasional barking of dogs.

Nyepi, the Balinese day of reflection and quiet, had arrived.  It would be a day that we would have to ourselves, as we were not supposed to leave the house.

Nyepi is a day for meditation, for preparing for a fresh start to a new year, and for thinking about the wrongs one has done to others.  The day after Nyepi the tradition is to visit family and friends to ask for forgiveness.  To create the conditions for self-reflection, one is not supposed to work, to play games or entertainment, to light a fire or to use electricity, or to leave one's house.  Some also fast.

If this sounds strangely familiar, it did to me as well, as Nyepi seems to be a mash-up of Yom Kippur and the Sabbath.  Odd how these core religious practices are cross-cultural.

Bali takes Nyepi seriously.  It shuts down its sole international airport for Nyepi, the only place in the world to close an international airport for a holiday.

As expats, we weren't expected to observe all the Nyepi practices, but we were not supposed to leave the house or to visibly breach the restrictions, such as leaving lights on at night so that could be seen by others.  Unlike many expat residences, our place wasn't ringed on all sides by a wall, as one side overlooked the river, the rice paddies beyond that, and some residences beyond that, so our use of lights would be obvious from quite a distance away.  Pecalang, neighborhood security, patrolled the streets to ensure that no one was out and about.

We'd heard varying stories about how strictly the rules were enforced on foreigners. One woman said that the Pecalang had come into her house to check whether her food was warm, to see whether she had violated the ban on using fire or electricity.  But more common were the stories, from the Balinese themselves, that most Balinese weren't that observant, closing the curtains and watching TV while their kids played on Playstations.

Aside from observing the external formalities, it was up to us how much we wanted to get into the spirit of Nyepi.  I mostly stayed away from work.  We hung around reading and the girls worked at various arts and crafts projects and played games. They said they enjoyed the quiet day hanging out with the family.  Lynn started packing us up for our move.  For as soon as Nyepi ended we were transferring all our stuff to a new rental house, and then heading to the airport for a spring break trip to Australia.

It felt like a day out of time.  It was strange to think that all over Bali, in every village and in every home, nearly the entire population was also indoors, observing a quiet day.

One of the ways that Bali is so different from the West is in the way that entire communities act as one.  On certain Sundays, the entire neighborhood will be out sweeping and cleaning.  For certain ceremonies, when a visit to a shrine by the ocean is called for, the entire village will pack into cars and trucks and make a day trip to the ocean.

In spite of being a Hindu outpost in a overwhelmingly Muslim country, and in spite of having large numbers of expats and a fair number of residents from Java and the other islands, Bali is remarkably homogeneous.  Balinese culture is reinforced and supported at all levels of society, from the government on down.  So the entire island observed Nyepi, either as a Balinese or as a non-Balinese out of respect and obligation.

We were surprised when in the late afternoon we heard loud voices from the river.  Then a couple of elderly people appeared at the shrine in the rice field using knives to cut back grass and weeds.  The people left after a short while.  We later learned that those without running water were allowed to make use of the river for water if needed.  But we never had an explanation for the appearance of the elderly people by the shrine.

We ate food prepared in advance by Wayan and that we had ordered in before Nyepi from a local cafe.  We made use of the microwave.  As the sun was setting, we ate dinner with the lights on, but after dinner turned off all the lights in the house.

We made our way along the outside path back to our bedrooms using flashlights.  The girls showered and brushed their teeth with the lights out, again using only flashlights.  I popped out the front door briefly to toss our bag of food trash into the trash holder.  I found the security guard from the B&B across the alley trying to unscrew the casing for a light attached to the outside of our wall, that was probably controlled from some unknown switch inside our place, so that he could remove the light bulb and extinguish the light.

From our main room, we looked out at a dark and quiet night, aside from the occasional stray light in the distance.  It felt like we had traveled back in time to a pre-industrial age before the invention of electric lights and mechanical engines.  Enforced though it was, we enjoyed the daylong interlude of calm and quiet.

For a bedtime story, Lynn picked up reading the girls a scary chapter in Harry Potter, but in the pitch black night it was too scary so they quickly chose another story.  We fell asleep and felt a tinge of loss when we woke the next morning to the familiar sounds of road noise, and to another typical hectic, bustling day in Bali.

As the day after Nyepi would be our last day in Sanctuary, we decided at long last to explore the river and the rice paddies that we saw every day from our place but had never visited.  We walked briefly along the busy road to concrete steps leading down to the river.  At this point, the river is more accurately described as a small stream.  It had a narrow concrete bank that the locals used when bathing or washing clothes and dishes.  We waded across the shallow river and up a steep muddy bank on the other side.  A few steps further along the muddy, grassy ground brought us to the rice paddies.  We walked along the earthen berms that bordered the paddies.  Then looked back at our house, swapping our typical vantage point with those of the rice farmers.

We discovered with surprise that the small patch of rice paddies that we could see from our place curved along the river back behind our property and extended for quite a distance.  We had experienced our neighborhood as a busy street lined with stores and homes.  We had no idea that just beyond lay an expanse of rice paddies nearly as far as the eye could see.

View of the river from the previous month (photo credit: Gran)