Terima Kasih Bali!
Settling on a name for this site was an interesting detour into the byways of Indonesia. I don’t speak Malay, or Balinese, and trying to find something in words that expressed my feeling for this place was an exploration. A friend of mine suggested ‘terima bali’ as a translation of gratitude; and ‘thank-you Bali’ seemed to hold the right mixture of veneration and desire. Really it seemed perfect to me.
Of course the Indonesian version of thank-you is not terima but terima kasih. The parts of this phrase speak to a lifestyle different from our own here in the West. Terima kasih is indeed no ordinary phrase. I ran across a short article in the Jakarta Post that spoke about its origins.
The article points out the phrase reflects the law of gratitude. “We do not, or did not, need a movie like The Secret to tell us to “be grateful” for all we receive from the universe.”
Terima Kasih describes a meditation. The healers from bygone days would imagine their patient’s pain, drawing it into themselves, receiving it, or ‘terima’, simply receiving.
Part of a cycle, the second part of this meditation would be to send out their energy of well-being, ‘kasih’, translated as giving. Kasih is also the word for love and the Indonesian version of our thank-you is something akin to ‘accepting love’.
And so, as a gesture of respect and love for this island and its primeval splendor, I came to the simple phrase ‘kasi bali’, a kind of cross between my gratitude for its existence and love of its splendor.