Amed Avatar

We leave Ubud under a sky as purple as a bruised pear.

News articles are talking about cyclones in Indonesia, major flooding, roads washed away. There’s a familiar tone to them, anxiety driven, urgent, dramatic … basically designed to make you imagine danger from a safe distance and appreciate the safety of “staying small” and “staying safe”.

And like many things, when you’re actually in it, it doesn’t feel so frightening, but more like an “experience” you’re moving through.

As we set off, the rain starts almost immediately.

Not a polite British drizzle. Here it is warm, heavy and full of drenchy purpose. The road shines, then darkens and before long, it isn’t really a road at all, but a river, flowing downhill, carrying leaves, grit … and us … with it.

We wind our way east through jungle roads, on one side, thick green presses in close and on the other, the land drops away to flashes of ocean; steel-blue, restless, vast. Everything feels saturated, both in rain and in vibrant colour.

By the time we reach Amed, night has folded itself around us. We sit out the evening in a beautiful jungle villa, listening to rain hammer the rattan roof, watching lightning flicker behind the trees, feeling deliciously contained and held and hygge.

The next morning the sky is clear again and we go to the beach. Which sounds better than rain - but actually, isnt my ideal at all!

I struggle immensely with lying still. I don’t mind swimming, but even sculling around in the top of the water has a limited lifespan before I start looking for something else to do.

Turns out that John’s the same. We’re not natural loungers.

Reid, however, loves the beach.

Not only that, he has obligingly followed us through temples, worn sarongs, hung out at shrines, embraced our ceremonies and generally been very good about everything.

He’s been patient. Well-humoured. Curious.

Basically, we owe him the beach.

“You coming snorkelling?” he asks, nasal voice from the mask over his nose.

I look at the sunbed. My writing pad. Then back at the mask he’s offering me.

“Can I give it five minutes?” I wheedle.

He shrugs and heads for the water.

I watch him from the edge of the beach. He floats face down, still as driftwood. Then suddenly he erupts upright and beckons excitedly.

“Mum! Come and look at this!”

He beckons again. So eager.

“You go in,” John grins. “Do a stint, then I’ll go.”

I wade into the sea, pull on the mask, lower myself into the absurdly warm water. Normally if I swim in the sea, it is for the cold water health benefits, but here the sea is like a bath.

I dip beneath the surface, take a breath through the snorkel and in that moment my breath is taken away. This isn’t because the snorkel fails … but because I’ve just crossed from an endlessly, silver surface … and into something else entirely.

It’s like Avatar.

Another planet.

Fish flash past in electric shoals, neon yellows, impossible blues, flashes of pink and green. Corals shaped like brains, fans, lips. Everything moving. Everything alive. Patterns and colours so intricate and so unapologetic they look like they’ve been pulled from a Woolworths Pick N Mix.

Reid and I float there together, pointing, laughing into our masks, suspended in a world that neither of us knew existed five minutes earlier. Eventually I pull myself out, heart racing, skin buzzing, and wade inelegantly out of the sea.

“You need to go in there,” I tell John, “Now.”

He walks in with the air of someone who is “doing it for the kid / his mum”.

He doesn’t come out for an hour.

He’s mesmerised.

Time stops in Avatar world.

His back gets burnt.

“It’s fine,” he says later, as the rain starts and needles his agonising scorched skin. “I’ll take the pain in exchange for that hour.”

We sit and talk about how crazy it is that there’s a whole world beneath the ocean surface that we never see, existing out of human sight, like another dimension of reality. That night, as the rain drums steadily and the air presses close, something bubbles up in my mind.

The Balinese speak of the seen and the unseen. The world we move through, and the world that moves beneath it. They call it Sekala (seen) and Niskala (unseen).

The world that exists within the Niskala / Unseen is not considered symbolism or metaphor … but a concrete fact. It’s a realm of forces, spirits, energies that shape life without announcing themselves … in the same way that in Jungian psychology, the “collective unconscious” is a deep layer of psyche filled with archetypes, instincts, and patterns that influence us whether we acknowledge them or not.

Different language … same mechanics.

In my coaching work, there’s a Sekala-Niskala link too. People try to change their lives by working only with what’s visible, their habits, goals, behaviours, while something deeper continues to steer the course.

It’s at this point what they need to do is take the “mask and snorkel” and risk sinking beneath the surface to find the patterns, stories, blueprints, archetypes, shadow patterns and funky fish that create the skeletal system that REALLY inform their outer lives.

It takes courage.

A leap.

A fascinating exploration.

We can live entirely in the seen/outer world and believe that’s all there is. But just like the ocean, the unseen keeps moving beneath us regardless.

Ignore it? It still shapes the current.

Acknowledge it, work with it and suddenly choice appears.

Over the days that we remain in Amed, this relationship is illuminated again and again. My eyes are exposed to constant reminders that recognises both layers - the visible and the invisible, the conscious and the unconscious, Sekala and Niskala. Both equally real.

And whilst I swim breath-taken in this mesmerising conceptual water, little do I know that it’s not just pretty fish that swim in the deep water of the unseen …

Sharks and hungry ghosts exist there as well.