I began in a beach hut at, you guessed it, Paradise Cove. Now I’m well set up in another little “garden cottage” down the endless white-sand beach, at Matriki’s, still a coconut’s throw from the mesmerizing aqua-and-turqoise lagoon. With nine days here, I have time on my hands to walk, bike, swim, snorkel, write, compose, read. Oddly enough, the last few things that have come my way to read here have presented me with quite the opposite picture to the paradise outside my window.
When I checked in here, my host, Riki, suggested a book in the travelers’ collection she keeps in a dresser drawer on the porch. Left to Tell is a harrowing account by Immaculee Ilibagiza of her survival of the Rwandan massacres of the nineties, by hiding for months with seven women in a closet-sized bathroom in a pastor’s house. With the soothing background of distant surf crashing past the silent lagoon, I was compelled to immerse myself in that other reality of madness and butchery, for two days and nights.
Of course I had heard about the situation in Rwanda by scattered reports, from afar, when they were happening - or more likely, after the fact. To begin with, I wasn’t plugged into the news back then, as I was immersed in another sort of paradise in backwoods British Columbia. And anyway the news coverage at the time was limited, as the West by and large turned a blind eye to the usual rumors of “bad stuff happening somewhere in Africa ... again.”
Once reading a firsthand account of such atrocities, though, they hit home. The people become more than just numbers (a million murdered). Considered “cockroaches” by their killers, and nameless “casualties” by the Western governments and media, the victims and survivors become intimately real and human in the narrative. The tragedy, word by word, becomes a part of who I am, a larger concept and feeling of shared humanity. Maybe it’s not really a matter of contrast to this ultra-peaceful scene I inhabit here - but more a matter of the peacefulness here being so full as to invite and include and gently absorb the reality of violence and hatred. Immaculee’s transformative forgiveness was possible in just such a way, as her confinement forced her into deep and peaceful communion with her God, full and deep enough to accept even the murder of her family and tribe.
Dragon of the Mangroves is another gruesome tale I was given to read while here, by a Japanese author who sent me the book as a .pdf file. Yasuyuki Kasai has researched and written with accurate detail the account of an evacuation by Japanese soldiers of a coastal area of Burma near the end of World War II. As if the constant threat of approaching British military forces was not enough of a nightmare for the weary stragglers of the Empire of the Sun, they had finally to escape to freedom across a crocodile-infested river.
As if these two large doses of death and destruction were not enough to complement the otherwise overbearing sweetness of Aitutaki, I picked up a second book from the dresser drawer, John Grisham’s recent nonfiction title The Innocent Man. Again it’s an account of a murder, or more accurately, a murder trial representing a gross miscarriage of justice in Oklahoma. The spark of interest for me began with the victim of this legalistic crime, Ron Williamson, who was drafted as a major league baseball player before his life started winding downhill.
What Grisham’s book shares with the other two, in this idyllic setting, is that it too serves to overturn standard misconceptions and cultural blindness. Who are the good guys and the bad guys? Who are “they” and who are “we”? As the “we” expands to include the “they,” paradise becomes not lost but found.
Maybe it was all worth it - the genocide, the war, the years lost in prison, the giving up of an old way of life - for the grace of forgiveness; for the widening sympathy of our humanity; for the liberation from bias and prejudice.
During the rainy days when Hakka [Taiwan native] men did not do the farm work, singing mountain songs and playing instruments with friends were their major activities. . . . The ideal lifestyle for Hakka people in the early days consisted of farming and studying. Therefore, a famous Hakka phrase which represents Hakka life is "Chiny-geng Yu-du" (in Mandarin). That is, "Do the farm work on the sunny days, and study on the rainy days." 
After a whirlwind tour of New Zealand’s North Island north of Aukland the past two days, I took a drizzly day off today to relax, catch up on laundry and computer work, and enjoy a leisurely stroll to the "Treaty Grounds" where the Maori chiefs (whether they knew it or not) signed away their lands to the British, their imposing 100-foot war canoe notwithstanding.
Yesterday I boarded the Dune Rider to explore the northlands, including a power zoom straight up the sand on Ninety Mile Beach, with sand boarding as the highlight activity, and the exposed point of Cape Reinga the apex of scenic beauty. Throw in a few giant Kauri trees, a quick wade in the surf, and the rest of the trip was largely a blur of sheep pastures. On the way up from Aukland the day before, the highlight was a brief swim near Goat Island ... about the temperature of BC ocean swimming in late summer. A bit of a shock after the tropics ... but hey, it’s March.
Tasmania, where I spent the week before, was quite an interesting blend of familiar wild landscape and friendly, alternative-minded people, and all-different flora and fauna. The family that hosted me for drumming workshops there was extremely hospitable, and added a kayak outing and a couple of excursions into the alpine to a full music schedule: several workshops, plus a rehearsal and final performance for a drum group much like a scaled-down 
To backtrack a bit, the four-hour rehearsal for that set had been a bit of a stretch for me, since it happened afternoon and evening of the day I arrived, following a night flight from Bali on which I had no sleep. On top of flight fatigue I was somewhat sick, quite hungry, and poorly adapted to the cold (looking out over the water, the next land mass over the horizon was Antarctica) ... but these are familiar sacrifices for the gods of music; and afterwards a large sandwich and full night’s sleep in a cozy sleeping bag set me back on the right track.
In the face of a larger reality of "Universal Energy," our response does not have to be shrinking into historical patterns of fearful comfort and conditioned delusion. We also have the choice of identifying with that transcendental and all-pervasive energy, enjoying life as "life force" as shared by all things, beyond the roles we have chosen to live or that have been chosen for us.
In the more central area of Lovina there once was a thriving tourist industry. Charming lanes with guesthouses, restaurants with local character, brick walkways along the shore now are deserted, except for the locals hanging about, waiting for you to appear with your sunglasses and camera and traveler’s wallet. 
Ubud was a lovely attraction, complete with a sacred “Monkey Forest” full of mossy dragon temples and tame macaques, nightly performances of gamelan music and dance, shadow puppet theatre, fire dance, and Kecak “monkey chants” as seen in the film Baraka. All that on top of a wealth of art galleries, music and bookshops, and trendy cafes like Bali Buddha and the Jazz Café (offering nightly live jazz).
I spent just two days in Padang Bai, one each at the two small charming clear-water white-sand beaches, but fell into my usual funk with the “small town” syndrome. Not enough people around to be anonymous and blend into the background (like Kuta or Ubud); and not few enough people to have real solitude (like Lovina). Sort of a limbo in between, where to fit in, you really need to have or make company with the few familiar faces around you. 
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