Ghosts In The North

Lovina isn’t really called Lovina. The place name got sticky-taped on in the 1950s when the first tourist resort opened. It means “Love motherland” or “Love Indonesia.”

When we arrive there, at the most northern point of Bali, Lovina doesn’t feel full of love. It feels dark, tired and guarded.

I climb out of the taxi and look at the hotel: a ramshackle stretch of buildings on a littered strip of beach, half-empty, half-forgotten. It feels like we’ve arrived after the party has long since ended.

I’m immediately irritable.

“It looked good on the internet,” John says awkwardly (he booked the place). “You saw the photos - right? It looked great!”

Before I can reply and assure him that it did, we are greeted by a pirate-looking woman and her tiny husband, one eye milky and unfocused. They both look faintly startled to have guests at all.

I smile and follow them to a desk under a broken rattan awning, but inside feel like I’m spiralling. I am on Day 21 of my menstrual cycle and my inner critic has arrived in full voice. I’m short-tempered, restless, prickly. The familiar low hum of self-judgement is loud in my head. I know this feeling well … the part of my cycle where everything feels heavier, darker, harder to tolerate.

I try to ignore it.

Once the initial registration is complete, we are shown into our bamboo room. It’s hot. Stuffy. The floorboards rattle so much the wardrobe door swings open on its own. Mushrooms are growing out of the skirting boards. The bathroom smells like a sewage pipe is blocked.

My body tightens.

“I don’t like it,” Reid mouths at me.

“It’s fine,” I say quickly. “This is what backpacking is like. Sometimes the hotel is …”

As I fumble for an appropriate adjective, a mosquito buzzes past my ear.

Two minutes later I’m saying to John, “We need to find food. I don’t think I want to eat here.”

We escape the hotel and pick our way along the beach, climbing over roots and rubbish, weaving around stray dogs, until reach another hotel. Slightly better. Still grim. Cockroaches in the bathroom. Grey water leaking into the shower. But it’s still better than the previous place, so we get our luggage and move.

Still, the feeling doesn’t lift.

The next few days pass in a strange haze.

We visit the largest Buddhist monastery in Bali … beautiful, serene, a mandala of stone and flower. We go to a mountain waterfall, stunning and wild, and watch Korean girls in hired ball gowns pose for photos with cocked heads and pursed lips.

All the while, something sits wrong in my chest.

The place feels… heavy. Brooding. Unlike anywhere else we’ve been.

On our second-to-last night in Lovina, John and I sit on the veranda and start researching. I type into my search bar, “why does Lovina feel dark?” And this is what I learn:

Northern Bali was colonised by the Dutch in the mid nineteen hundreds and it was brutal. Entire communities were destroyed. Warriors fought back, but the Dutch were sneaky and brought armies in from the south, over the mountains, attacking from multiple angles.

Then, in the 1960s - similar to Cambodia but with a different political angle - came the mass killings. Political purges wiped out tens of thousands across the island. People disappeared overnight. Families were broken. Whole villages were silenced. Village feuds meant that false accusatory fingers were pointed and no one was safe. The north coast and Lovina were hit hardest

Worse still, many of the dead were never given proper rites.

Ceremonies were forbidden. Gatherings restricted. Fires banned at night. The rituals that allow souls to move on were suppressed through fear. And in a culture where death rites and ceremony and spiritual care is everything, this matters a lot!

Reading the history of Lovina, I feel the ghosts of this place in my bones. I realise why it feels the way it does.

In the same way trauma lodges itself in a human body, it also lodges in land, in families and in the collective memory of communities. When grief has nowhere to go, it doesn’t vanish. It waits. It goes underground …into the psychological shadow.

I’ve felt this before, years ago in Phnom Penh in 1997, not long after the Khmer Rouge regime and civil wars had obliterated the people of Cambodia. I recognised this same sense of people living carefully and guardedly, as if holding something down.

Children shushed. Smiles cautious. Warmth rationed. The unseen … the Niskala … wounded.

This place now makes sense to me. Why people here seem guarded, why the energy feels flat, why joy doesn’t quite rise to the surface. The ghosts haven’t gone anywhere. They’re trapped in a liminal space, bereft of their ceremonies, caught between worlds.

On our final morning in Lovina, we wake early.

The rain has paused. The light is soft. The sea barely moves.

“Ready?” says John.

“Ready,” I say.

We take canang, dupa, and flowers from the garden and walk down to the beach. It’s still strewn with debris … plastic, driftwood, fragments of broken temple stone. Some of the rocks are carved, once sacred, now half-buried.

A fisherman watches us from his boat.

I’m wearing my ceremonial dress … the same one I wore for the water ritual in Ubud.

North, in Western esoteric tradition, is the direction of death and ancestors. The gateway before rebirth. The place of endings. In Balinese culture, north isn’t the compass direction but the highest place towards the sky.

Right now we are facing North, on the most Northern point and we’ve collected water from a waterfall that runs from the mountain.

As we prepare the offerings, I think about the ghosts of this place - the ones who never got to leave properly. And once again, I think about my own. Ghosts that is.

The griefs I’ve been carrying. The old stories. The things that surfaced after Ubud and never quite settled. I think about things that have happened that weigh heavy in my heart, things that crop up in the autumn of my menstrual cycle, the repeating thoughts that hover on the shore of my waking mind and still hold me, even though the cause of them may be years ago.

I decide not to separate them; the Lovina ghosts and my own.

We use the water from the mountain waterfall. Flowers. Incense. The gestures we remember from ceremony, half-remembered but sincere.

“I’m lighting the incense,” I say to John, picking up a stick of dupa (to light a ceremonial flame here is forbidden since the colonisation).

“Even though it breaks the rules?” John replies, striking the flame.

“Because it breaks the rules,” I say.

We stand quietly. We offer what we have. We ask for release - for them, and for us.

The sea is still.

The air feels like it’s listening.

When we’re done, I stub out the incense and place it at the base of the tree. John arranges the offering. I glance toward the fisherman and nod in thanks.

He nods back.

Then, as if on cue, he starts his engine and pulls away.

It is a relief to leave Lovina. As we head off in the taxi, up the volcanic mountains, through the jungle, I think about our ritual and sikala / niskala. I think about the universe and how thankful I am to have been shown the idea that nothing is neutral. Every gesture speaks. Every offering answers something unseen. The world is not inert …it is responsive.

And, let’s face it … our ritual may not have fixed the psychological and energetic wounds of Lovina or even touched the sides, but in that small act we acknowledged them. For all that is worth. And maybe it is worth something.

It has also made me wonder about our personal ghosts; our narratives, stories, traumas and moments of life where we lost a bit of our Self as the result of something bad happening.

How may of us chew these things over? Take them to therapists? Try to verbalise our way out in our western intellectual ways? Brush them under the carpet? Keep calm and carry on?

Yet maybe what our personal ghosts need are death rites and rituals. Some embodied act of acknowledgment, that offers them a sincere ceremony, allowing the grief for the parts of Self we lost through trauma and wounding to be finally released and let go of. So the landscape of the psyche can heal.

I can imagine it might just help.

And I’d like to create a way to help people try it.