I used to think I traveled to see beautiful places.
Now I think I travel to understand how beautiful places stay beautiful.
This morning, as I walked to coffee, I noticed that many people on my street were dressed for a funeral.
I’ve participated in a few funerals here now. They are true celebrations of life, and everyone participates. They are not hushed affairs tucked behind closed doors. Children wander through. Scooters slow down. People smile. Life and death somehow occupy the same street without competing for space.
Then I saw the priest.
He was extraordinary. Like central casting had been handed one simple instruction: Give me a Balinese priest.
The most beautiful elderly man, with a flowing white beard and long white hair, dressed in robes so impossibly white they seemed to gather the morning light around them. A smile that lit up the entire street and sky and all of our hearts. A beautifully carved wooden cane covered in intricate engravings. I mean…just…wow.
I didn’t dare take a photograph because it simply did not feel respectful. Later Ring laughed and told me I absolutely could have taken one, but honestly, I was content just to witness him.
At exactly the same moment, literally twenty feet away, these boys were fixing the electricity.
I have become completely fascinated by the infrastructure here.
It isn’t polished or hidden underground where nobody has to think about it. It lives right out in the open where everyone can see it. The electrical wires seem to have a relationship with gravity that is…negotiable. They’re tossed high into the trees. The ladder appeared to be assembled from PVC pipe, duct tape, optimism, and accumulated wisdom. Also, kind of brilliant because it is easily carried from place to place. Sometimes a zip tie seems to be carrying an unreasonable amount of responsibility.
Somehow, it all just works.
I also know there are moments when it doesn’t work and everyone simply waits. Nobody stomps around demanding answers. Nobody immediately starts looking for someone to blame. We wait. Someone fixes it. The lights flicker back on and machines go whiirrrr.
“Yay, electricity!”
I’ve started wondering if what I’m looking at isn’t actually electrical infrastructure at all. I think it is actually human infrastructure. Plain and simple.
For weeks now our neighborhood has been building a small road that connects one road to another. I’ve been watching the whole thing unfold one wheelbarrow at a time. First came the digging so the water would drain properly. Then sand. Then glorious rebar, which anyone who knows me understands is practically a love language. Yesterday, between rainstorms, they poured concrete. Today the entire road is covered with plastic sheeting while it cures beneath a brilliant Balinese sun.
Every day a different group from the neighborhood shows up and every day they all participate together to make this road just a little more road.
If Ring is the heart of this family, Bonny may very well be the engine quietly humming underneath it all.
She designs beautiful clothing. She’s raising children. She’s building an atelier at the front of their compound. And she has her own taro chip business.
Three flavors.
Delicious.
On Monday, after the beach, she asked me to help.
Within about five minutes I found myself transported back to my early Clyde’s Cookies days because once you’ve spent years helping small businesses grow, your brain starts seeing possibility everywhere.
Bonny has managed to get these chips to the point where they are quite popular in her village. People ask for them. They’re served at local events. But after helping her on Monday, I couldn’t stop wondering why they weren’t everywhere.
This afternoon I wandered into one of Ubud’s biggest souvenir markets carrying Bonny’s taro chips and quite innocently asked where I might find more.
They didn’t carry any. Not Bonny’s, but not any at all. That seemed odd because Taro Chips are actually a snack time favorite here. Especially among kids. The local version sold at the Indomart has a silly Monkey on the package that is also, of course, available as a stuffed animal!
The manager and several employees after realizing I was serious about my inquiry were soon opening bags, tasting chips, asking questions, photographing the packaging on their phones while I insisted, perhaps a bit enthusiastically, that they call Bonny directly.
Not next week. Today. Right now. Get these chips while you can, people. Before she makes a deal with Indomart!
I made them write down her phone number. I made them take photos of the packaging because everyone here does everything on their phones. I explained that these didn’t just belong in the souvenir section. They belonged in the chip aisle. Why would you fill your shelves with Lay’s when you could be supporting a woman who lives twenty minutes away?
Here’s the thing I want to whisper into today’s full moon magic: If Bonny sells more chips, she doesn’t simply sell more chips. She hires the aunties in the village who are asking for work. One business becomes several women earning an income. One opportunity becomes many.
That’s infrastructure too.
The kind you can’t see from Google Earth.
I’ve become the Pied Piper of taro chips this week. I’ve handed them to aunties. To children at my coffee shop. To desk managers at resorts. To strangers. I’m fairly certain I’m now conducting an unsolicited international marketing campaign one crispy slice of taro at a time.
But really…
How else is something beautiful ever supposed to travel beyond the edge of the village?
Earlier today I sat drinking my coffee and the wall on the gallery just across the way had these enormous letters painted across the front.
EVERYTHING HAPPENS TO EVERYONE.
I’ve been thinking about that sentence all day.
Everything does happen to everyone.
Death. Broken electrical lines. Roads washed out by rain. Businesses trying to grow. Children needing shoes. People looking for work. Joy. Grief. Opportunity. Everything. No, really. EVERYTHING.
The difference, I think, is the infrastructure.
Not the electrical kind. Or the rebar and steel.
The human kind. The people who quietly keep showing up.
The priest. The boys with the ladder made of PVC and hope. The neighbors carrying buckets of concrete. Bonny. The aunties waiting for work.
The people who keep beautiful places beautiful.
I woke up this morning and also booked a flight from Salt Lake City to Jackson, Mississippi. I’ll barely land in Utah, collapse on top of my professor and Clyde and hug both of them fiercely and then I’ll be back on another airplane.
Different roads. Different people. Different work.
The details will change. The question won’t.
Who is quietly holding this place together?
I’ve started looking for them everywhere.
The full moon was starting to rise as I walked to get my beet juice this evening and I passed the same boys who had fixed the electrical wires and the aunties I’d stood beside this morning at the funeral. They asked where I was from.
“America.”
They erupted into laughter, dancing in the road, chanting, “O Bam Ma! O Bam Ma!” before proudly pointing to themselves. “He’s ours!”
I laughed all the way down the road.
After a day spent thinking about death, infrastructure, and what it means to show up for another human being, it felt like the island had slipped one final gift into my pocket.
My heart could not help but swell.
NAKEDJEN 