Pilgrimage 4: Bali, and the Return Home To Portland
Cass had left Bali, in what she thought may have been for good last May, almost a year before we found ourselves together there. Since 2021, she had been living back and forth to Bali during her awakening, where her relationship with the waters became a mirror. Each immersion reflecting deeper layers of truth, emotion, and self-remembrance yet she always felt it was never a place she could fully ground. I had never been but had heard so much about it being “like burning man, but as a full-time community,” so I was intrigued to see it for myself. Riding in tandem to our pilgrimage was our desire to find a seasonal place to live when Portland Oregon gets too cold and rainy for good vibes to thrive and we suspected Bali could well be that second home. I mean, we had a group of amazing ex-pat friends who are already living besides all the amazing ‘spiritual’ adventure seeking Bali has come to represent. Tropical weather, reasonable cost of living, and the beautiful, innocent kindness of the Balinese seemed more than enough to guarantee at least a long stay. But, not long after we got there, I think we were both surprised to discover how much Bali didn’t ‘feel’ like home.
It felt more like a caricature of itself: a place with exaggerated dimensions which we felt more lost in than found. A place where, amidst the real–the earth walkers, spiritually accomplished, grounded, and integrated souls–we found a chaotic energy of the ungrounded, bypassing transcenders seeking to expand the boundaries of their spiritual ego by getting lost in a new name or new earth proposition. A culture which had little veridical, solid philosophical ground in which to build our dreams from. A post-modern, stage green (spiral dynamics) landscape which seemed to compensate for what it lacks in inner substance by making it up through heavily competitive aesthetic beauty. Well, excluding the Balinese of course.
Our last week in Bali was in part enhanced by a Peyote ceremony, in which our Balinese priest friend helped summarize Balinese spiritual culture. He said something like, “Though we are Hindu, the Balinese don’t know the Bhagavad Gita nor the Ramayana. We don’t intellectualize or teach the Hindu ways but if you want to experience our version of the divine, we will be the first by your side, taking you by the hand and walking you through our experience of what it is.” And that really encapsulated something that was always right on the periphery of the beautiful shops of Ubud or the magic of an international retreat center. A people, so humble, so adept at holding space for us Bule (boo-lay aka foreigner), that we can hardly notice the immensity of their kindness. We can take them and their sacred ways for granted as we seek for the next ‘big’ Bali spiritual retreat. We can miss what their ways of life have humbly been trying to point us visitors towards, which is simply building a relationship with the elements: earth, wind, water, fire, and spirit, and with each other as a global community of one. Something we don’t have to consume resources trekking half-way across the world in order to have.
The most magical and important times we had in Bali were connecting with friends and connecting with the spirit of nature as its elements. Something we could have easily done in Portland where we are now living, but perhaps something we would have taken more for granted as just a tree or a pond in the back yard, rather than an invitation into the divine. Something even missed altogether as we stare at our phones and drive away towards distant horizons. Unless that is, we invite ritual into our lives. Something the Balinese do perhaps more consummately than any other culture today. They sit, pray to the waters , weave grasses and leaves, collect flowers and give offerings daily, and otherwise make divinely inspired art from what nature already gives every day. Something we in the West would do well to take inspiration from as we continue to lose the sacred dimension in our lives seemingly more and more each day. And if we do, we miss out on the essence of what classical Tantra has been trying to teach us.
Bali is perhaps the most prolific contemporary expression of classical, Hindu Tantra thriving today. Which, most visiting Westerners wouldn’t even realize as they walk through the streets of Ubud, reading a flier advertising some westerner’s post-modern interpretation of neo-tantric sex and sensuality workshop called “Tantric Relationships” or whatever. If you visit Bali thinking Tantra is something you can learn in a workshop, put the flier down and find a Balinese priest or priestess. Do a Melukat water ceremony with them and experience the truth of Tantra, which has nothing to do with exotic sexuality and everything to do with what you have not to far from where you are right now: elements, an altar, a ritual, and a community to practice with.
In this way, Bali was the perfect place to end this chapter of our pilgrimage together. It showed us exactly what we needed to see:
That to experience an integrated, embodied expansion of consciousness is as simple as getting to know a fellow employee or neighbor.
That a spiritual mecca, though it may be evolved in many ways, isn’t necessarily a more grounded, integrated, or functional culture than the micro-cultures we can build in the West.
That the simple elements and a connection to spirit through ritual practice is all that’s needed to start building a stronger relationship with the divine
Six months on the road have now come full circle.
What we set out to find in distant lands, across oceans and cultures, has gently led us back to where it all began. Not as the same people who left, but as ones who can finally see. We’re now rooted in our small cabin in North Plains, just north of Portland, surrounded by quiet trees, soft rain, and the steady rhythm of a life that asks nothing more from us than presence. And in that simplicity, we’ve found something that once felt elusive: a deep, grounded sense of home.
All the beauty, the medicine, the revelations gathered along the way didn’t point us somewhere else—they pointed us here. To this land. To this pace. To this way of being. To the realization that the sacred was never somewhere we had to arrive to, but something we learn to recognize every day.
Our journey didn’t end in Bali but it completed itself in the returning. And now begins the integration. A life built not on seeking, but on tending. Not on escape, but on devotion. Not on becoming, but on being.
Here, in the stillness, in the trees, in the quiet magic of the everyday, we remember. And for now, this is enough.
With love,
Cory & Cass
Photography: Daniel Sun (@daniel.sun)
