Category: Everyday Magic

The Professor said something to me yesterday that I still haven’t been able to shake, we were texting back and forth after I spent the whole day with Ring and his family, and I’d sent him a photo from the backseat of Ring’s car where Ring’s two kids had climbed over the seats to inspect me up close, which honestly felt entirely appropriate — imagine being two or three years old and your dad just casually announces that today you’re bringing home this strange gray-haired American woman with questionable tattoos and an alarming enthusiasm for coffee, and they were completely unfazed by the whole arrangement, didn’t even blink.

The Professor looked at that photo for about three seconds before he wrote back, “you look different.” Now this is a man who has spent the better part of fifteen years watching my face, he knows every version of me, Festival Jen, Burning Man Jen, Migraine Jen, Grief Jen, the “I’ve had four hours of sleep and somehow we’re still driving with the dogs to Santa Cruz!” Jen — so when he tells me I look different I tend to pay attention. At first I figured he meant happier, or more rested, maybe Bali had finally succeeded where every overpriced moisturizer on earth has failed. Nope. It took me almost a full day to understand what he was actually seeing, which is that I’m breathing. Not metaphorically, not in the inspirational-Instagram-quote way where somebody writes just breathe over a photo of a mountain they’ve never once climbed.  I mean my body has quietly started doing something it stopped doing years ago. I am breathing all the way down into my diaphragm, which is a sentence so absurd I barely believe it myself except my therapist has been trying to convince me of this for years, my friends have been telling me for years, and if I’m being completely honest with you, I don’t really breathe in Utah. 

That’s maybe the truest sentence I’ve written in a while. I don’t breathe in Utah, I hold my breath there. I hold my breath at the Coffee Garden, which is probably the safest place I’ve ever known — think about how wild that is, Alan and Dieter built this beautiful little sanctuary full of artists and misfits and queer kids and old professors and everybody who’s ever felt like they don’t quite fit anywhere else, and even there, some ancient part of my nervous system remained unconvinced we were safe enough to fully exhale.

Trauma is such an exacting little bitch. It doesn’t just build memories, it builds posture, it rearranges your shoulders, it decides where you’re going to carry your jaw, it teaches your lungs to negotiate with oxygen like there’s a shortage. It whispers don’t get too comfortable, don’t relax completely, stay ready, something is coming — and the infuriating part is that after enough years you stop even noticing you’re doing it, holding your breath just starts to feel like breathing, you adapt, because human beings are spectacular adapters, we can normalize almost anything if you give us enough time. Apparently we can normalize living on tiny little sips of oxygen. Who knew?!  Not me. Not until Bali.

Every morning here I wake up before the sun, and I genuinely could not tell you where the sun comes up from on this particular corner of the island because islands are wonderfully confusing that way, ocean over there, jungle over there, temples everywhere, my internal compass has basically shrugged and said good luck. I pull on my Converse and my yoga pants and head out before most of Ubud has even opened its eyes, though the birds have not only opened theirs, they’ve apparently called for a full choir practice, there is so much birdsong here it you wonder if you should start learning the tunes. As daylight begins to break through, the women carrying canang sari, those tiny woven offerings made out of palm leaves and flowers and gratitude and intention appear like apparitions and then the sweeping begins — god, the sweeping, I have become completely enchanted by the sweeping. Every single morning somebody is quietly taking care of something, a doorstep, a temple, a sidewalk, a family shrine, and nobody is doing it for applause, nobody’s particularly interested in documenting it, it’s just what you do before the day starts, you prepare your little corner of the world for whoever might pass through it. I keep wondering what America would feel like if we spent less time yelling at each other online and more time sweeping.

Yesterday Ring picked me up. Actually — that’s not even true. Yesterday Ring and his family made room for me. Those are two completely different sentences. His wife was there, his two beautiful kids were there, and we drove from Ubud to Sanur for the kite festival and an afternoon at the beach, which is only twenty-seven kilometers away and somehow took three glorious, ridiculous, completely unhurried hours, and if you’ve never been to Bali that probably sounds impossible and if you have been here you’re already laughing. The traffic is legendary, scooters flowing around cars like schools of fish, entire families balanced on one bike in a way that, honestly, makes you HOLD YOUR BREATH, temple ceremonies just appearing out of nowhere, trucks stopping, dogs wandering across the road like they own the place, which, honestly, they absolutely do. Nobody seemed particularly bothered by any of it, least of all Ring, he just drove, and we talked, and the kids climbed over the seats to tell me very important things I only understood about half of, though I’m fairly sure I agreed to several imaginary adventures and possibly promised to play the important role of a superhero at some point.

The thing that really got me wasn’t even the kite festival, though the kite festival was magnificent, giant creatures sailing across an impossibly blue sky while whole families gathered on the beach cheering them on, joyful in that deeply communal way that feels rarer and rarer these days. But that wasn’t the point. The point happened in the car, somewhere between the villages and the rice paddies and the scooters and the little roadside temples draped in black and white cloth, when it hit me that Ring wasn’t giving me a tour, he was giving me his entire Thursday, his family, his kids, six hours of a life that already belonged to people he loves. He wasn’t spending time on me, he was sharing it with me, and there is a difference so enormous I still don’t quite have the language for it. I’ve spent so much of my life being the one who takes care of everybody else that I almost didn’t recognize what was happening — I’ve been the Fluffer, the doula, the organizer, the woman carrying snacks in her backpack because somebody’s inevitably going to need almonds, the one who remembers birthdays and medications and spare phone chargers and where everybody parked the damn car. I know how to be that person, it’s one of my love languages. What I apparently don’t know how to do is be cared for without feeling like I owe somebody an apology for the inconvenience of it.

This is exactly what Bali keeps insisting on. Sit down. We’ve got you for a while. Drink your espresso. Walk your ridge. Ride with our family. Breathe. We’ll sweep, we’ll make the offerings, we’ll show you where the ocean is, you just be here. Maybe that’s why I look different in that photo, not because Bali changed me but because for the first time in a very long time my nervous system believes someone else is standing watch, and it doesn’t have to, not today, not for these few precious weeks.

Maybe that’s what hospitality actually is. It’s not luxury, it’s not five-star hotels or infinity pools or welcome drinks with orchids floating on top, it’s someone quietly convincing your body that it’s finally allowed to exhale. This is what we’ve always done for each other at our very best, long before social media, long before airplanes, long before passports and guidebooks and algorithms and all this noise we’ve built around ourselves — we made room. Around a fire. Around a table. In the backseat of a little car driving across Bali with two curious kids and a man named Ring who probably has no idea he just handed a tired American woman something she couldn’t have found in any guidebook on earth.

He gave her back her breath.  He let her exhale. 

Now that… that feels like a story worth carrying home.