Are You Creating Your World?

If not, who is? 

When my son was a baby, I had a couple of ideals:

1) As young child he would experience a different cultural paradigm. Even if he spent the rest of his life, living in the west, he’d have been injected with something radically unlike it in his formative years.

2) Children ought to be raised by a community.

I had friends who had lived and traveled all over the world with their child and I asked them where I ought to go.

“Bali,” they said. “Hands down.”

I researched it. I figured that I could start a new business there, and that it would fit the above requirements.

In my readings, I found that the Balinese regard children as near-deitites. Since children are the closest thing to God that exists here, having just come down from the god-worlds, they were revered.

I liked that idea.

Within a year, I sold all of my belongings, bought a Lonely Planet Bali and took off with my 18-month-old.

I didn’t know anyone. I had no plan, other than getting there.

We were adopted by a 30-person-extended-Balinese family within days after we arrived. My son had an additional mother, father, brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents. I was “Mama” and his Balinese mother was “Ibu Tut.”

We lived in a bamboo hut in the rice paddies. I rode a motorcycle. We ate lots of mangoes. He rarely wore clothes.

My son, charming the locals

He was very well-loved not just by me and 30 others, but by the “village” of the entire island.

Here’s an example. We were on our way to Uluwatu, the surf mecca, and were pulled over by the police.

“Where are you going?”

“Surfing!”

Uluwatu

“May I see your international driver’s license?”

“Uh, do I need one? Really?”

The stern officer walks around the motorbike and looks at my son who is wrapped around me with a sarong. He notices that my son is very hot. So hot, in fact, that he has sweat beads on his nose.

“Cassien!” he says, in Indonesian. Which means, ‘immense compassion.’ “Your son is very hot! You must take him to the beach immediately.”

And that was that.

My son grew up speaking Balinese, Indonesian and English. Sometimes all in one sentence.

We spent two years living there and it was one of the smartest things I’ve ever done. We had incredible love, support and lived amongst an island of people who truly devote themselves to family and God as a way of life; not just during political speeches.

I was having a f**k of a time creating “community” in Canada. I decided to find and create my own.

Now we’ve come full circle. We’re getting on the road again, heading south to check out surf and skateboard meccas down the west coast. I’m holding my retreat in Mexico in the fall. We’re going back to Bali in November. Then maybe southern Europe in the spring.

Will keep you posted!

At this stage, I want to travel and feel that openness to life, to adventure and to expose my son at this age, nearly 15 years later, to many more things.

And off we go.

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How closely do your dreams and ideals match your reality?

Who is responsible for bridging that gap?

~K xx