Dark Moon

Our car arrives back in Ubud from Lovina and I am filled with a massive surge of relief. The noise, the scooters, the crazy jammed up streets, the now familiar chaos all feels like a breath of fresh air after the heaviness of the north.

Driving slowly up the road to our previous previous apartment feels comforting, like slipping back into a home/neighbourhood that I hadn't realised I'd rooted down in. Glitzy Christmas decorations hang between palm trees and shrines. Restaurant doorframes are wrapped in tinsel. Signs wishing people Merry Christmas shout with looping gold letters.

"I don't feel Christmasy at all!" Reid tells me.

I laugh. "Me neither. It's kind of hard to feel festive in forty degree heat."

I am acutely aware that back home in England, everything is building toward brightness and noise and a massive Christmas crescendo. It feels loud and jagged and like the hangover will hurt. Meanwhile, I am moving in the opposite direction. I'm drawing inward. Toward quiet.

It's the Dark Moon on Friday and the Northern Hemisphere Winter Solstice two days after. Something in me has always been way more attuned to that threshold on the 21st, more than Christmas and more than New Year.

“Can we go to a temple for the New Moon?” I ask Sally.

She nods immediately. “Yes. I know someone. A priestess. She’ll take us.”

"I don't want to go," pipes up Reid, who is now done with temples, shrines, ghosts and magic.

"You can stay here with the boys and play football," suggests Sally.

Reid's in.

And just like that, Dark Moon is arranged.

That evening, while Reid stays behind with his new Balinese–English family, John and I climb onto the bike and head into the thick, humid dark. We weave through Ubud's crazy roads until the traffic calms and the road narrows. The lights thins and the air, screaming with cicada song and laced with the smell of diesel and humidity, feels acutely alive.

Eventually, we pull off the hot street and into a compound. Here, Sally awaits us. She is talking to to a tiny woman - the priestess - who greets us with a warm smile when we pull up. Once we've disembarked and dressed in our ceremonial attire, the priestess leads us to a long stone staircase disappearing up between two pillars.

“No shoes from here,” she says gently.

I glance at John.

The steps are slick from rain, uneven, half-hidden by moss. I think about the water ceremony earlier in the trip, about slipping rocks and bare feet. I think about those little black caterpillars with orange spots and long feathery hairs that are EVERYWHERE here, then shrugging, take off my flipflops and climb anyway.

At the top, the temple complex opens around us. Before a large shrine, a woman sits in prayer, hair immaculate, lips painted red. A priest chants softly. The air hums.

This temple is dedicated to Durga, the fierce, warrior goddess, the destroyer of illusion.

"She's not gentle or soft," we are told. "Here you walk slowly, respectfully and pray for courage, boundaries and strength."

By some "happy" coincidence, us being at a temple of a raging, PMT ridden goddess is exactly right for a Dark Moon such as this. In Balinese lore, this moon is not soft or reflective, but potent and charged. The kind of dark that precedes change.

Something in me braces myself as we kneel for the first part of the ceremony, make our offerings and meditate beneath the soft whine of dear mosquito friends and the white-noise, roar of cicada.

Once complete, the priestess gestures for us to get up and then leads us across the temple, to another flight of steps - this one winding upwards through banyan roots and tangled branches of the jungle. This isn't a small flight of stairs. It's endless. And really dark. And the rock is slimy and it takes us right into the jungle canopy. It's a slip-and-fall-Durga-snort / laughing-nightmare waiting to happen.

As we ascend, fireflies pulse in the dark. I’m acutely aware of my body. Of each footstep. Of the moment. Occasionally John and I turn back and look down at the lightshow of the temple, of Ubud beyond. Then, silently, we turn back and keep climbing.

Eventually we make it to the top, where we pause and wait as the priestess makes offerings to the spirit of the threshold and we wait silently and respectfully to enter the inner shrine. This place is completely local. There are no westerners here. It's a place of Balinese people, Balinese magic, powerful Balinese gods. We are here because Sally holds the key.

"Okay," whispers the priestess. She beckons us up the final set of steps. We enter the inner, highest part of the temple, higher than the tree tops and sit before a massive stone shrine with its Durga statue, the space around her feet littered with red blossoms and green pandan and ash from a thousand dupa.

We make offerings with canang. Then the priestess begins to chant in the most beautiful voice. I close my eyes. I am acutely aware that I am in a jungle, its a long way down, there's a powerful beast moon somewhere above me and that in two days time, a threshold moment in my life-long inner calendar.

I am also aware that this temple is Sekala (the seen), offers a house for Niskala (the unseen) and its brooding, invisible world of gods and ghosts and demons. I am aware that maybe, away from Western materialism, beyond the veil of the seen world, we are in the presence of the invisibles, the spirits, perhaps even the energy that they refer to as Durga herself.

And then, somewhere amongst the soft, hypnotic chants of the priestess, something in my mind starts to form. I begin to get this very strong sense of the next part of my life journey ... and how this whole balinese experience has been the culmination of an epic chapter; a chapter of turbulence and survival, of the unknown, the uncertainty since my divorce, feeling my way along in the dark. But this is it.

The end.

I find myself thinking of everything I've learnt and gathered here; the systems of thought, practices and philosophy, the way in which these learnings interface with my coaching work, personal practice, Jungian studies and dreamwork ... how everything links, slots, blends and twists, like a swirling, spiraling, perfectly synchronised kaleidoscope jigsaw puzzle that has begun to form a pattern. A new methodology.

Still the priestess chants.

Finally, my mind drifts to a question and wraps itself around it like smoke from the dupa on the shrine. The question is: What would happen if I tested this combined methodology, this formula that I think I've found? I don't mean tested intellectually, but practically, in my lived experience back at home.

What if I committed to the ideas that change is not as something to push toward, but as something that emerges when the right conditions are held and aligned with? What would shift? What would change? In my life, in my art, in my community, in me?

That's it. The idea lands, fully formed, fully shocking and brilliant.

Something loud and solid suddenly rattles the jungle branches to my left.

I jolt.

Open my eyes and look round.

Nothing.

The priestess stop singing abruptly.

I notice she is crying. She begins to talk to Sally in Balinese. Sally, who speaks this language, listens and nods.

There's now the sound of footsteps and turning, I see that the woman with red lipstick and opulent temple-wear is now at the threshold behind us, waiting to come in. The priestess wipes her eyes, gathers herself, then together we leave the high temple and pick our way back down the stairs.

As we walk back down the hundreds of wet, dark steps, I can feel unseen Bali dancing around me, full of fun and mischief and celebration. It makes me smile. This place is SO full of invisible mischief. You can literally feel it prickling on your skin.

As we ride back into vibrant Ubud, I can feel something within me taking shape … this experimental project emerging naturally from the meeting point between the seen and the unseen, east and west, ancient and modern, Northern Hemisphere and Southern ... something practical, accessible and potentially very powerful.

"Do you think Durga turned out to be the crazed witch of the Dark Moon that we thought she'd be?" John shouted to me over his shoulder as we weave through the traffic.

"I think she was just what we need," I reply. "Severing the end of a chapter. Dark Moon before big change." I smile and lean in against his back, absorbing beautiful Ubud as we drive through.

We return to England in just over a week.

What had, earlier today, felt like a strange, grey, intense land to be returning to, suddenly feels exciting, full of potential, the perfect platform to test my idea. I now have eight days to try and pin down all of my thoughts on what this new methodology of living. Eight days to get it clear. Eight days before I arrive home and begin.