A Miracle

A Miracle

There are two images from the past week that I must share with you.

The first is of flowers floating in a jungle. The second is of a body on fire.

Deep in the mountains of Bali, farmers grow big, blue, bursting hydrangeas. They cut them three days before bringing them to market and place them in the river behind a log to learn how to live in water. If they just cut them, they die within three days. But if they stay for three days in the tropical mountain jungle river with its incessant flow of oxygen and nutrients, they will live for over a week.

I came across bunches of hydrangeas floating like this in the river in a clearing on the edge of the forest. They were so buoyant and blue and trembled gently with the river’s current. I was covered in mud at the time from falling down five times and sopping wet from swimming and jumping into cool places. The elegant, man-touched bouquets of hydrangeas floating in the river outside the thick jungle were so improbable, but also so beautiful, like a dream where everyone goes to gym class in tuxedos and ball gowns.

In a village in Bali, just as the flowers are being taken out of the river to be brought on a motor scooter by way of a precariously bumpy road to market, a forty-year old priest is being wrapped in white cloth and placed in a wooden box atop a platform carried by many sweaty men all dressed in white. A white and gold bull made of wood and paper is ahead of him, and both will be moved in circles a holy three times.

There will be masses of crowds in white, moving away from the rice paddies down the hill to the clearing by the river across from the trash dump. Eventually the excited and reverent crowd will grow quiet as the technicalities of what comes next become apparent. Men hack away the inside of the cow statue. They try and place the man wrapped in white cloth inside it, but he is too tall for the enclosure, so they hack away some more.  A female relative collapses, unable to endure the expectation that she will not cry in the face of his undoing, thought to slow down the cremation and the departure of his soul. Another woman drops, a domino effect of emotional and physical release.

The funeral pyre is lit with a blowtorch, and the naked body burns, and it turns black and charred, and it falls diagonally, head towards the ground, but no one can do anything about it because it is on fire. Across the river a trash fire has been burning all day, and will continue to burn even after the pyre is gone. Intermittently, there are loud popping noises, which we guess and later learn for sure to be the organs exploding, the testicles and the brain. It is violent, and awful, and I do not think I will ever buy again that death is beautiful, that the hearts and lungs failing us are beautiful. Even though I am supposed to because this society believes in reincarnation and this cremation is supposed to be joyous.

This is where I crash into my cultural fence in an attempt to jump over:

Bunches of blue flowers floating in the river are beautiful; I cannot see the beauty in this, only in that the former remains possible in a world full of the latter.

And that is a miracle.

ps- It is the same with the air outside my room. It always smells of trash burning or of fresh frangipani flowers that have just fallen from the tree. Never both. Never something in between. Only one at a time.