Nyepi

a creative goodbye for a peaceful hello

Last night, the Balinese burned their demons.

The night before Nyepi, called Pengerupukan, there is a Balinese ceremony for ridding the community of the negative things taking control of their lives, the behaviors or situations that have been dragging them down all year. Cosmic negativity. Each banjar (neighborhood/community council) creates towering paper maché monsters known as Ogoh-ogoh. Constructed by local youth groups, who spend weeks or even months designing and building them, they are as large and grotesque as the struggles actually feel in their day to day lives. Most are bloody, angry, jealous, scared, and overwhelmed with greed and/or lust. These effigies are depictions of our darkest saboteurs, our addictions and toxicities.

This great Balinese New Year’s Eve Party if you will, albeit much more astrological and spiritually guided, is one of my favorite art shows.

The statues are carrried through town. Thousands of power lines are lifted along the way with long pieces of bamboo. The demons, carried by a mob of men, teens and children, and lit up by the matriarchs with kerosene lanterns, limbo beneath the thick black buzzing lines as they slowly wind through the narrow maze of backstreets. We onlookers ooh and aah.

Once most of the community has gone to sleep, late into the night, the boys who made the extraordinary paper-maché creations will burn them in the street, as a symbolic ritual. Balinese use the burning effigies as a practice that helps them free the demons and rid them before the new year begins, the next morning. It is believed that by stirring up all the excitement with the demon energies and then going still and silent, these energy vampires will fly away from Bali to somewhere else, anywhere else.

Then begins Nyepi.

From 6 a.m. to 6 a.m., this is a day of introspection. It is such a vibe, even the dogs don’t bark. (And yet somehow the roosters never got the memo.) The island feels incredibly calm, peaceful, and unfuckwithable, in a sense. Of all the days I have lived here, this is the day when Bali feels the most like a mind-blowing paradise. It’s a feat, getting everyone to sit down and shut up, as we all love running around chaotically.

In the evening of Nyepi, the Universe puts on the greatest of all shows in the sky. With nearly all the lights in Bali turned off, the stars have this amplified opulent magic. After all the smoke has blown over from the parades, and the demons are burnt, the stars come out to remind us of the beauty always surrounding us. We simply need to slow down and be more still to notice.

In a world of chaos, it’s up to us to see it, deal with it and move into a calmer, more peaceful realm of existence.

I would love to know what your effigies would look like? What would you burn down tonight, hoping it leaves and never looks back starting tomorrow? What chaos needs to be left behind to sit in a peaceful morning thereafter?

These are todays musings, written live, from a silent little creative corner of beautiful Bali during her day of rest.