Julia and Anne Marie

When taking a walk with no destination, along paths with no markings, in villages with no boundaries, on mornings with no expectations, there is a chance that you will come back a slightly different person than when you left.

I said I’d be back in 10 minutes.

But Julia and Anne Marie were out there beyond time. So when I came back 45 minutes later, Luca didn’t ask any questions. He knows when a short walk becomes a long walk, that a journey is unfurling a petal.

The forest behind the rice paddies is thick and overgrown, with crevices plunging into dark green water and palm trees rising up at unpoetic angles. But the green of it is so rich, and the rustling of the wind speaks so reassuringly of peace, that what is wild becomes beautiful, and you walk into it wishing that by loving this tangled mess of nature, that you might come closer to self-acceptance.

“Prophetic Healing – Massage”, and a handprint and an arrow. It was so deeply engraved into the rock that I wondered how it could be, how the rock was once so soft; how the healing hand had been so strong.

When taking a walk with no destination, along paths with no markings, there is a chance that you’ll come across a thing placed there by a person who knows that such walks happen. This is a patient person, and one who either believes in chance, or that there is no such thing.

I turned up the stairs.

They were thick and steep, and heavy with cement and the miles of earth and rock and molten core beneath them. The first pathway appeared to the left, and I paused to make my decision. Tilting my head backwards I saw where the stairs peaked, 10 or 15 stones ahead. It is unlike me, it is unlike most people, to stop so close to the top of something. We all have our reasons to go on. We all crave stories, and courage, and for fate to take our hand.

At the top there was nothing. A long house framed in white with windows instead of walls, all of them dark, and firmly closed. There was no one home, or if they were, they weren’t taking visitors.

I paused again, because when you have time, all moments should be given the chance to be remembered.

Descending I arrived at the first path, which was now on my right, and turned slowly but without hesitation. I was walking softly, not wanting to make more noise than the rustling through the trees. I like this intimacy with nature, and struggle to tolerate those who have no admiration for silence.

Gentle voices and a small Balinese house lay immediately ahead. I turned my head around the corner, saw two women and a deck of cards, and quickly withdrew. Perhaps it was a tarot reading, and I should come back another time. But I didn’t move, realizing of course that I would not come back. I stepped out into the clearing.

“Hello… I’m sorry to… “

Julia and Anne Marie have been following unmarked paths for 50 years. Originally from Melbourne, they now are one of the 200 families or so who live in a sub-tropical town outside of Byron Bay, Northern Queensland. Between them they have been a nurse, a midwife, a teacher a public servant, a medical anthropology PHD, a consultant to NGOs in Papua New Guinea, and an naturapath. They say “we” so often that I know they have been loving and supporting each other for a long, long time.

I turned down tea, but drank up their stories.

They have a spa bath in their back yard, and a few times they positioned everything they might need within reaching distance, and stayed in the bath the whole day.

Julia likes to write, and when she moved to Queensland wrote a column reflecting on life’s big questions for the local newsletter.

They love the diversity of their town, and have never encountered homophobia there.

Anne Marie was recently head hunted for her dream apprenticeship in Melbourne, so they got into their car and drove, and now they are house sitting because it is too expensive to rent.

Julia lived in Papua New Guinea for eight years, and now feels more at home in the tropics than in the city. She heard about this little house from some friends of hers who are building a bungalow next door. It is deep in the forest, and surrounded by paddies. ‘You’ll be in the tropics,’ they said.

And we are, sitting on their open porch, hidden from the beaten path below, where only locals make their way from where they are, to where they need to be, and back.

The locals, and today, me.

I ask them if they’d like to have dinner with Luca and I tonight. They can’t. They have been invited to the house of the local Balinese family who does their laundry.

I thank them for inviting me to sit with them.

Julia and Anne Marie laugh easily, and whenever they look at each other, they smile.

“If we don’t see you again, have a beautiful quest, Ilana.”

They must know, now, that they have become one of my stories. I know I have become one of theirs. The girl who appeared in their living room, and emanated all her dreams. And they, the lovers who lived a life they could believe in, and emanated all their love and intelligence everywhere they went.

This morning, when I decided to cede to my urge to go for a walk down that path I had not yet walked, outside my villa, past the restaurant, and to the right, into the rice paddies, into the green, into the shadow curve from where local women carrying water bottles and cement and cardboard boxes on their heads seemed to stream… when I stepped out into the world in this way and felt a tightening in my chest, I knew I was looking for something.

I found it in Julia and Anne Marie. They have fortified me, at least for this day. And in case I start to forget, I am writing this story.

There are reasons to live with compassion, and reasons to wait for love, and reasons to believe in the magic of the world.

There’s no guarantee that when you open your eyes each day, that you won’t close your eyes a slightly different person that very same evening. And when you go for a walk on a quiet, overcast morning in Ubud, you have to be prepared to let the potential for change trickle in.