Jam Karet: October 2019
Life is learning. I don’t know what proportion of my day is dedicated to better understanding some aspect of our project, but it’s a lot. And at the end of some days I sometimes feel like I’ve only chipped a tiny shard of ice off the old proverbial tip of the iceberg. Daily experiences or texts that I read provide a lot of inspiration. In turn, this ignites ideas or gives further shape to our concepts, or confirms our values. It’s a luxury to be easily inspired by the world around you, the challenge is to maintain focus, inspirations can pull you from pillar to post. We are team of three and we must take care to not bite off more than we can chew, but enough to keep us moving forward in the bigger picture.
Some of my daily learning is through listening to audiobooks, podcasts, and sometimes watching documentaries and talks. The topics vary, although I only choose topics that bear relation to the project, from farming to fermentation to entrepreneurship to social business models to trends in wellness and wellbeing to current economic and social trends in the world. I make notes or otherwise document the good stuff I learn. I recently came across an essay by Charles Eisenstein that resonates strongly with my values, with my views of the world, including certain observations of the community that I now call home. Much of the essay is based on a book that I’m now listening to. In the last couple of months, Margot and I have been thinking about and discussing our most important values. We are in design phases with regard to both the architecture and our brand and so it is imperative that we are crystal clear on our values.
Some of my daily learning is through experience and hanging out with people in our village or with people from neighbouring villages. In that sense, every day in the village is a lesson. I learn about language, about cultural practices, about local building practices, about plants (growing, cooking), about the intangible world (called niskala in Bali). Sometimes the single biggest barrier I see in this project is the speed with which I can wrap my head around all that I’m learning and then be able to apply it and turn the information into knowledge. I tell myself, if I can get quick at that, I can make big strides.
There is an observation Margot likes to make about Balinese people that is evident daily in our lives. Balinese people are big on giving. Margot will go as far as to say that there is something of a gift economy where we live. People in our community regularly bring gifts. Often it is food or fruits or vegetables grown on their land or garden. Sometimes a pig is slaughtered and we are shared parts of meat. It is gifted because the belief is that if you have more than you need then you share, the concept being the more for me, the more for you. A wonderful consequence of receiving (their) gifts is that it automatically creates a bond between people. In effect it creates a kind of circle. Our garden yields quite consistently at the moment and so we take some of our yield to our neighbours. And actually, by now, a good number of our neighbours know about our garden, and sometimes they will come and ask to take ingredients for a meal or feed for their pigs (e.g., taro, papaya). Or they are looking for ingredients for “obat”, which means medicine, although they are talking about the herbal kind. I always love hearing about the remedies, what is good for treating what. The other day, Ngurah C.(a neighbour) came around to ask if he could take some worms from the stems of our banana trees. He was going to boil them and then drink them. In addition, he was drinking a tea made from the bark of the bajakah tree. The doctor had diagnosed him with a type of typhus, and those are the two natural “obat” he takes. Before long something will come back to us, either from Ngurah, when we use his source of spring water to fill our drink water dispenser or when he brings around some pig meat. And if we don’t get something directly from him, he will certainly give to someone else and that someone else might give something to us. The finer point here is that somebody else’s abundance becomes my abundance as well. And we are not in competition, and it is not a monetary transaction, and it is not some self-sacrificing act either. Ayu is Ngurah’s five-year old daughter and sometimes there isn’t anyone to mind her and so we look after her. Not every local resource is a product (fruit, vegetable, meat) and not every relationship is a service (neighbour child care). This is how things (still) work over here. Perhaps this kind of gifting is less than it was 50 or a 100 years ago, I don’t know. It’s lovely to experience it and I keep wondering if and how something like this would work on a scale larger than a village.
These observations make for a glaring juxtaposition. The more touristy south of Bali is highly monetised, almost everything there is converted into money. The pace of development in these parts is sometimes mind boggling. Not surprisingly, land in certain parts of the south of Bali is among the most expensive per are (10 meters by 10 meters) in all of Indonesia. A bit over a year ago we still lived in those parts and I dare say I remember fewer bonds with the community. I also remember more rice fields where there are now shops or restaurants. Bali is certainly not unique in this, I could’ve taken any number of places I know around the world as an example. And I understand that at some level I’m describing an outcome of a money-based system of economy. And I know many people benefit financially from this system but I’m not sure it benefits all that many people and I also wonder about (exponential) growth in a world of finite resources, not to mention the reality that we always need to create more money. On the one hand I am constantly seeking to better understand what it means to be an entrepreneur in the mould of capitalism. On the other hand I believe strongly that capitalism is a force that increasingly separates us from ourselves (e.g., connected to a device for most of our waking hours), us from other people (e.g., not needing to share anything with your community), and us from nature (e.g., conquest and control nature in the name of making a product). For our project we strive to create a place of union instead of separation. Conceptually, that is the bottom line.
I’ll shift from waxing philosophical and share with you something more concrete. And share images of course, lest I forget the efficiency of looking at images or pictures in this fast and complex world where attention real estate comes at extraordinary premiums.
The architecture of the building that houses the restaurant and program spaces is inspired by a candi bentar, a type of split gateway found in Javanese and Balinese Hindu architecture. Each side of the split gateway acts as a pillar from which the roof is suspended. The roof and the building are therefore also split. We feel we have a good sense of the shape, form, and size of the restaurant and program spaces. Soon we will get into the look and feel through materials, colour, and textures.
The mood collection for the accommodation is something along the lines of “the ruins of an abandoned Bali Aga village that has been reclaimed by the surrounding nature and what remains of the dwellings is now revamped to become liveable again”. Or something to that effect. At any rate, the design calculates for the inevitable encroachment of nature, in a way that gives life and represents the ongoing relationship between architecture and local ecology.
Finally, I’m told that our principal development permit will be issued in the month of October. While this is not the only permit we need, it is the most important one to be able to commence construction. It is a major piece in the process of permitting and I’ll be glad to have a break from dealing with the authorities. At some point during construction another major permit will need to be applied for, but a little while will pass before we are at that juncture.
As always, feel free to check in with selected snaps of our life or our inspiration board at any time. Ideas, thoughts, reactions, suggestions are welcome.
