scooter musings

There’s a lot of time to think when you’re sitting on the back of a scooter, being chauffeured between the coastline and the interior of Bali. There are frangipani flowers peppering the pavement to be turned into offerings later, deities carved in sandy stone, ornate temples made of black lava rock. Bustling villages bursting at the seams with heart and grit, edged with vast rice fields glowing green in the sunlight, morphing into hills, climbing and plunging, and hinting at jungle.

I’d like to say I was thinking about all that, focused on where I was, during today’s drive. But I wasn’t. Mostly, I was thinking about where I’ve been and how I got here.

More specifically, I was thinking about where my ancestors have been. The distant lands they hail from, and the incomprehensible number of seemingly random decisions, serendipitous moments, and strokes of luck that were necessary for me to be born in the middle of America. What immense challenges and hardships must have been overcome, with just the right combination of people surviving and reproducing, for me to even be alive, and sitting on the back of this scooter in Bali.

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It’s easy to entertain the delusion that I’m floating an island unto myself when I’m zoomed in, as I normally am, on my own life. It’s also quite hard to deny the interconnectedness of my existence when looking at the little bubbles representing my ancestors, expanding exponentially outward into a tree made of family.

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Bali has held me during some of the most challenging years of my life. I love it. But I also often feel like I don’t belong here.

I’m not sure if it’s because I haven’t tried to belong, or if I haven’t tried because I don’t belong. To riddle that out, though, is an exercise in futility, because my daughter does belong in Bali and so does my cat.

My two soul mates.

More than I feel like I don’t belong here, I know that I belong with them. And so, here becomes where I belong by default.

I wonder if that’s how my German ancestors felt when they migrated to Russia and then again to America? Like they didn’t necessarily belong where they were, but they did belong to the people they were there with.