Rice Fields

After being in Bangkok and Jakarta for two weeks, I'm appreciating the country. Central Java is beautiful, simple, and relax. I do enjoy the wild, natural insanity of the urban experience (what isn't of nature?), and I appreciate this too. Both different; both the same.

I take long bike rides through the country. I twist, wind, meander and frolic through the Javanese countryside. Villages, rice fields, dirt paths and highways, I roam. I sometimes get lost, but this makes things better. When I ride through the country, villagers and farmers stand from their living work, smile, wave, and yell, "Halo!"

"Halo," back as I ride on.

Those that know me pause and say, "Welcome home, Bapak Kris Nelson."

And I say, "Home, indeed, Ibu (or) Bapak."

"Pagus, pagus, goooood, gooood," they say.

I am, indeed, home. Where does home not exist?

* * *

"I warn the reader not to mock me and my mental daze. It is easy for him and me to decipher now a past destiny; but a destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you have to do is keep an eye on the clues. In my youth I once read a French detective tale where the clues were actually in italics; but that is not McFate's way - even if one does learn to recognize certain obscure indications."

Vladimir Nabakov, Lolita