8
In the meantime, though, I had to go on this trip to Indonesia.
Which happened, again, because of a magazine assignment. Just when I was feeling par-
ticularly sorry for myself for being broke and lonely and caged up in Divorce Internment
Camp, an editor from a women’s magazine asked if she could pay to send me to Bali to write
a story about Yoga vacations. In return I asked her a series of questions, mostly along the line
of Is a bean green? and Does James Brown get down? When I got to Bali (which is, to be
brief, a very nice place) the teacher who was running the Yoga retreat asked us, “While you’re
all here, is there anybody who would like to go visit a ninth-generation Balinese medicine
man?” (another question too obvious to even answer), and so we all went over to his house
one night.
The medicine man, as it turned out, was a small, merry-eyed, russet-colored old guy with
a mostly toothless mouth, whose resemblance in every way to the Star Wars character Yoda
cannot be exaggerated. His name was Ketut Liyer. He spoke a scattered and thoroughly en-
tertaining kind of English, but there was a translator available for when he got stuck on a
word.
Our Yoga teacher had told us in advance that we could each bring one question or prob-
lem to the medicine man, and he would try to help us with our troubles. I’d been thinking for
days of what to ask him. My initial ideas were so lame. Will you make my husband give me a
divorce? Will you make David be sexually attracted to me again? I was rightly ashamed of
myself for these thoughts: who travels all the way around the world to meet an ancient medi-
cine man in Indonesia, only to ask him to intercede in boy trouble?
So when the old man asked me in person what I really wanted, I found other, truer words.
“I want to have a lasting experience of God,” I told him. “Sometimes I feel like I understand
the divinity of this world, but then I lose it because I get distracted by my petty desires and
fears. I want to be with God all the time. But I don’t want to be a monk, or totally give up
worldly pleasures. I guess what I want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its de-
lights, but also devote myself to God.”