If there is a lesson in travel — and I make the gentle distinction here between Travel, where you open yourself to change, and Tourism, where the scenes and faces pass in front of you in cinematic splendor — if there is a lesson in travel, it is that time is much longer than your pockets-full of days, and earth much larger than the bag of bones and sinew you temporarily call home.

When I left you, father, I wandered
down the citrus hill where the trees sagged
as though each branch were an arm bending
to offer me fruit

and passed Giovanna’s garden, green
as a grocer’s stand before the buyers come
then down to the road and the river beyond
which wound its slow arm around a sea of corn

the dairy trucks were finishing their turns
swallows lit and vanished like twists of wind
the neighbor children buoyed by their dreams 
as first light scaled the trees and filled the yard…

Somewhere the flood of images overtakes the flood of memories, as an ocean tide meets a river at its delta, and muscles its way upstream while those waters fed by gravity make way. Somewhere the New shouts while the Old whispers and, even covering your ears, a different tongue begins to echo in your mind and chest, it is almost suffocating (if you try to breath as you always have) and almost oppressive (if you insist on remaining yesterday’s You, if you refuse to surrender, rather put on that brave mask while behind it walls and certainties crumble into dust).

Some time has passed since I walked the plains of central Java, beneath the slopes of now-grumbling Merapi and near to the southern ocean, where its distinct goddesses and gods demanded their respects. It was before the radicals bombed the Candi Borobodur – they called themselves Muslim, but all violent sects belong to one large group of tortured hearts, and their religion is all one, they share a minor, furious god who will never give them peace, not ever. It was after the General’s son was stopped by bandits and his girlfriend was raped and killed: that was when the military clamped down and it became suddenly very safe for travelers. It was before I traveled to Brazil and before my children were born. It was after America’s Asian wars, and before America’s Middle Eastern wars.

I had traveled to open my eyes. I didn’t realize it, but I knew it. And when I stood at dusk on the plain of the Prambanan temple complex near Yogyakarta – the Candi Prambanan – more personal stone was poised to crumble.

It was near dusk. I can’t recall why we arrived so late, though midday the sun would have been overwhelming in any case. The rubble of the pillaged stones lay around in the grass, surrounded by rice fields. Gods who are ignored are soon beset, like a house without residents, or meat in the sun… wherever there is value, or value perceived, the jackal-people begin to yip and circle.

(As my stream-of-memory writing leans off-track again: I believe that the scavengers of the world have a place. I know they have a place, otherwise they would not exist. I have to accept predation and ignobility, even as I dislike its behaviors, dislike it gnawing on the flesh of my personal values. There is, in the rags and the bone-picker’s cry of a vulture, some facet of my Self; and in the disrespect and anarchy of the thief another facet of my Self, even when not expressed. Chaos wears a horrible beauty, and Kali the Destroyer has been recognized and deified for millennia. Who am I to deny her presence?)

It was near dusk and I can’t imagine what kept me away ’til then, or what drew me out so late. Evening draws slow-moving pedestrians, and livestock, and bejaks and cars and trucks and buses into the narrow roads… to compete there with your reflexes. And as the light wanes the shadows pull a veil over the fine faces and features of the Indonesians. Sometimes it lifts the veil of propriety from the needy, or the twisted or the hurt. Sometimes a woman makes a proposition, because her child has no food; sometimes the trivial property of a Westerner looks like treasure to an empty hand, and treasure it is.

I stepped into the temple complex, drizzled like sandstone from the sky into improbable and otherworldly architectures, whose spires reached up into the darkening sky. The sun lost its equatorial blaze, reddened, and with its change in temperament cast everything in an earthy hue. There was little time for anything: a look around. But while the tourist needs to fill his book with details, with ages and names, with owners and facts that astound while fresh, but quickly fade (wildflowers in a vase that cannot keep their beauty: they’ve been cut, there is no life in a wild flower when not connected to the root…), the traveler quickly learns to trust a moment, to open the senses and let it all pour in. A traveler learns how to drawn, quickly, and in drowning win the ocean.

Hundreds and hundreds of years hung regally in the air. Generation after generation left their footprints on the earth. You couldn’t see it; but you could. You could feel it. You felt it. There was the scent of the Javanese evening. Melati blooms poured sweetness into the night. The padis, filled with frogs, began to fill as well with their night chorus. There was nothing to see. But I saw it all.

Then… one of the outlying temples, as I finished my circuit, presented a doorway. It was pitch against the increasing night: it was as though the rectangular opening, twice as high as a man, were drinking light. Or as though the structure was a spring of silence, that in daylight trickled, but at dusk began to gush and pour out darkness, as though the changing of the hour was not a habit of the turning earth, but instead the product of an ancient stone.

I approached, of course.

The night walked there with me. And as I took the first step on the fractured stairway, the sun touched the horizon, began dipping below it, and the reddish hues of the evening sky gently lit surfaces, but no interiors. I peered into the blackness as I stepped up into the stone.

I entered, and the cold of the space brushed my skin. But then it was the weight of silence which was more present: almost as though hands were being held over my ears, or pressed heavily against my chest. I could see nothing, but I could feel presence. If you have ever walked a few paces on a forest trail, with the eyes bound or closed… you will know what I mean. It felt like that: walking without sight, but all the other senses wide open, and suddenly you are aware, you become oppressively aware, that a huge mass is beside you, a tree. If you have had that experience, you know: your jaw drops. How could I not have noticed the power and the majesty of that life!

Within, my eyes found nothing to catch upon, but my breath did. Or my ears, perhaps the echoes were distorted, the small sounds of my shuffling in the dark, shuffling to protect my steps, inched their way into the chamber and met with resistance? My eyes were grasping in the pitch. Slowly they adjusted to the remaining glow from outside – a glow that my body in the doorway diminished further. I saw… I felt… there was pedestal. I touched it. I withdrew my hand again. On the pedestal, legs reached up above me. Twice the size of me, or three times?, heaving up into a darkness which could have been infinite, the inhuman likeness of Shiva.

It was not frightening, like the nightmarish madness of horror films; still, I had to breath deeply, very deeply, to remain rooted. When you stand in the presence of one of the Old Gods, in their own country, in their own temple, as the sun walks away from your day… you are the visitor. There is power you must acknowledge, despite your ego’s scientific veneer. There is age beyond the oldest thing you have ever seen, and collected energy of countless pilgrims. Countless sunrises. Countless sunsets.

Fifteen minutes of one day, many years ago. Would a photograph have been better? Would datum have kept that place and that time fixed for me this long, had I learned more, had I memorized facts?

When you travel, you walk away from your small self, find a larger one. It takes courage to leave what you know. You will probably never share what you have seen, only rough outlines, in printed silhouette. Travelers seek truths and find solitudes: they seem to explore the globe, but in fact explore the darkness inside, where moments and echoes and scents and sights burn magnesium-bright trails, matches in the wilderness whose phosphorus ignites, blazes steady, consumes its tinder, flickers, then fades out.

And then…. an instant’s sleight-of-hand waves the light back into being! From where? Another lifetime? Memory the magician.

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