Fairytales in Ubud, Bali

On a Warm Bali Morning

Sitting at a wooden table on a shady verandah in Ubud, Bali, hot buttery sunshine ducks under the tile-roof to slather our naked feet in cozy warmth. The sliding glass door to the bedroom behind is just ajar. Inside, a tumbled bed is rained down on by gauzy white netting and cool air-conditioning spills out to melt with the morning air.

Breakfast has arrived — scrambled eggs, pieces of toast, cinnamon rolls, a fruit salad in martini glasses, stout pots of tea and coffee. Almost everything is locally grown — rice instead of wheat would have been more sustainable. Apparently wheat is what sustains tourism here.

In the narrow, manicured garden that runs the length between the villas and the paddy fields, there are rakishly limbed frangipani, with long beautiful leaves and flowers the colour of rich cream; jackfruit trees a couple of years old are already bearing studded fruit. Tiny shrubs, purple leaved, fringed with green, and plants in deep beetroot-red, cluster at the base of the trees. Lemongrass bushes waver gently and newly planted banana palms stand a couple of feet tall, their thick leaves showing skeletons of perfectly balanced lines in the sunlight. Medicinal plants used to flourish here once, that’s how Ubud got it’s name — I wonder if they still do. “Progress” often replaces old wisdom with convenient pills and production that pays money.

Worlds Hide Somewhere Between Shadow and Light

My dark Balinese coffee steams in a cup like some sort of spell; through it, the vista of green rice fields expands beyond the tiny garden and the sunlit porch. Coconut palms and thatched huts punctuate horizons, and above, a blue cloudless sky expands in the warm air. Slanting sunlight illuminates the tips of the foot-high crop. There are glittering morning dewdrops on every blade of wispy rice-grass. I wonder how many hidden cockerels are running around the fields eating caterpillars and other bugs… the chorus of crowing like some sort of hide-n-seek cry is part chaos, part hunt.

Dewy Orbs and Sparkling Light

Between twittering birds and the chirping of hidden cicadas, between bites of toast with orange marmalade, a silvery cobweb flutters in the gentle breeze –geometric lines form strangely when they catch the sun, disappearing a second later, like some magical invisibility cloak hiding a hidden world that only dreamers can see.

Maybe if you believed in gnomes and fairies, you’d imagine a land of magical creatures — pixies riding roosters along hidden paths, running through forests of green grass, collecting crystallized sunlight from watery orbs of dew. The fireflies at night would be their wish-lamp dreams, gently drifting over the paddy fields, rising towards the stars.

On dreamy mornings like these, worlds are conjured. Cloaked in sunlit spiderweb cloth, they drift just above ours, slightly unattainable, slightly bizarre, but wholly desirable. Fairytales are what we feed our children. They give us hope when we need it the most. They build worlds — both seen and unseen. They’re feel-good, feel-young elixirs, the kind you’d get from crystallized sunlight before your morning coffee kicks in. I wish the world would dream a little more.

Fairytale