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BARRY LOPEZ

In May of 2006, more than five hundred people from forty countries gathered in Ubud, Bali, Indonesia, to participate in “Quest for Global Healing,” a determined effort to address pressing social and economic problems around the world. Among the speakers were Archbishop Desmond Tutu; two other Nobel peace laureates, Betty Williams and Jody Williams; Gus Dur, the leader of Indonesia’s forty-five million Muslims; Fatima Gailani, head of Afghanistan Red Crescent; Thai political activist Chaiwat Thirapantu; Bhutan’s minister of Labour and Human Resources, Lyonpo Ugyen Tshering; and Barry Lopez, who delivered the following as his closing talk.

A few days ago I visited Tirta Empul, a temple just north of here, the site of Bali’s holiest spring. I spent almost an hour gazing into the large rectangular basin of waist-deep water, transparent as a polished windowpane. The water rose from a spring obscured on the sandy bottom by water plants, and flowed away south from the temple’s lower courtyard, south and father south through pools and basins on the temple grounds, then a series of canals, on southward to I don’t know where.

The interior courtyard, late in the day, was nearly empty, quiet as the surface of the moon. The only sound came from the swooping flights of swallows feeding off the surface of the pool—the rush of air over their bodies, the click of ligaments in their wings responding to their swift and acrobatic movements.

I needed this interlude in our stimulating conversations, and have to think others of you have sought out similar nearby spots on the Balinese landscape. Entering these temples—perhaps you felt something similar—I felt a kind of divestiture, a stripping away, an opening and vulnerability in the presence of Hindu spirituality. It made little difference that this was not my chosen faith. This seemed incidental in the face of what was apparent.

We have been in a kind of temple of our own making over the last five days, doing our best to elevate and embrace a protracted conversation. Now, the hours of leave-taking have come—a last look at the limpid holy water, its language shimmering in the ancient stone basin.

Driving back to Ubud through Bali’s handmade landscape, a countryside of supplication and spiritual courtesy, where one sees endless signs of a studious attention to elements of enchantment in the place, it occurred to me that leave-taking at a temple is an undertaking just as important as entering such a place. You enter, aware of the centuries of people who’ve come like yourself—hopeful, scared, humble, desirous. You leave refreshed, rededicated—hopeful, scared, humble, desirous.

We are leaving the temple now, and carrying, each of us, a special kind of determination, a desire to do good beyond the self. And we are carrying along with this the spiritual resonance of Bali, a place some call a kind of Eden.

But Eden, we should be at pains to point out, is not a place. Eden is a conversation. It is the conversation of the human with the Divine. And it is the reverberations of that conversation that create a sense of place. It is not a thing, Eden, but a pattern of relationships, made visible in conversation. To live in Eden is to live in the midst of good relations, of just relations scrupulously attended to, imaginatively maintained through time. Altogether we call this beauty.

We have heard from some remarkable people, people in remarkable service to humanity and place, people pursuing good relations, just relations, reverent relations all over the world. Peru, South Africa, Ireland, California, Thailand. We’ve been urged to join in.

We cannot, of course, save the world, because we do not have authority over its parts. We can serve the world though. That is everyone’s calling, to lead a life that helps.

We have heard a surprising, wise, and inspiring description of the pursuit of happiness, and it has filled our discussions of pursuing virtuous relations in our lives, occupied our conversations as naturally as the water at Tirta Empul fits that basin. Happiness