Laine Berman: Living in Harmony

Most of us “inherit” our religion or set of values from our families. But others don’t find the belief system that works for them until later in life. Nabiha Shahab reports.

Laine Berman, 53, is an American citizen now based in Yogyakarta. She is married to an Indonesian. She follows the traditional Javanese spiritual practice of kejawen.

I grew up in New York City and London, very much a city girl. I was never brought up in any faith at all: my parents were nonbelievers and hadn’t been brought up with religion themselves. So whatever we found, we basically had to do it on our own.

I came across kejawen in the early 1990s when I came here to do research on the Javanese language. I have been living in Indonesia on and off since my late 20s. After getting my research visa, I had to report to different offices. I remember reporting at this one village office and the chief just automatically assumed that since I was an expat and I spoke Javanese that I must be into gamelan.

I actually did play in the Indonesian Embassy gamelan in Washington DC. I was a pesinden (a female singer with the gamelan orchestra), because it was a great way to learn more Javanese. Then the village chief said that I needed to meet Ibu Lindur, the head pesinden in the palace at the time. She had been a member of the court since she was 12 and a pesinden her entire life.

She wasn’t exactly what I expected. She was probably about 80 years old and very tiny. She ended up becoming my adopted mother for the entire time I was here and she invited me into the palace as one of the pesinden trainees. At first it was an opportunity I jumped at for my research, but then it very much became a way of life. I was very fortunate in that respect.

I did all my interviews in Javanese, because if people realized that I spoke Indonesian, that’s the language they’d use. So I basically told people I couldn’t speak any Indonesian and only spoke Javanese. It worked. Within a couple of months my Javanese was fluent.

My time with Ibu Lindur in the palace was the highlight of my life, and it’s pretty much one of the only periods of my life that I look back on and I really miss. Ibu Lindur was very old at this point, and she didn’t really live in the mundane world anymore. She would talk with spirits in the spirit world.

When I was in the palace, it was early in the reign of the current sultan. There was still a very, very strong sense of belief in the palace, which has now dissipated somewhat.

In those days, with the other people employed in the palace, we would follow all the rituals; they were very much part of our daily life. I use to fast every Monday and Thursday, and on Fridays I would bicycle down to Kotagede and semedhi, and meditate by the grave of Panembahan Senopati with the palace employees. We would go to different places depending on the day of the week.

And I spent at least one night every week sleeping at the cemetery behind the Adisucipto airport.

People usually think members of the court are related to the sultan and they are high class, wealthy people. This is not the case. There were women in the palace who had never owned a pair of shoes. They would get up really early in the morning to finish up whatever they needed to do in the house and then walk to the palace barefoot, and did this pretty much as a ritual for life. These were fabulous people; I learned so much from them.

A lot of the things that I learned from them are things that are related to Javanese philosophy. In essence, going through life being totally open to feelings, thoughts, ideas, patterns, nature – and accepting things for what they are. It’s not helplessness at all, although a lot of people can see it that way.

A lot of people use kejawen as a way to distance themselves from the real world. Maybe it’s because the people I studied under were so poor and so much part of the physical world that I learned to see it as very much a part of being in the world and not out of it. It taught me to care more, to not look at cruelty and ignore it. I ended up really being involved in a lot of social issues in town.

I must admit, though, the whole aspect of kejawen is something that I don’t really follow the way I used to anymore. It used to be very much the central part of my life. I find it’s a lot harder to take part in the classical rituals, like the Jemuah Kliwonan and Pareng Kusumo. I find that all of the so-called sacred sites have been usurped in a way for economic purposes.

Jogja has changed. It’s become such an economic center rather than a cultural center. And I think what’s referred to as culture is also being transformed into just cultural tourism, rather than something that’s authentic. But I still find that when you hang out with poor people, just the wong cilik (ordinary people), there is still that strong sense of spiritualism and authenticity that I really appreciate.

What I learned from kejawen is to respect every single person I meet whether or not they’ve been to school. The thing that I learned from the people at court – most of them from backgrounds as poor farmers – is how they all live a daily life that is very much in harmony with nature. The idea that every living object has a kind of a spirit – plants, the environmental aspects of it – I follow very, very strongly.

I have become a sort of a militant environmentalist. I do my own composting, I recycle all of my rubbish. People turn to look for power in wealth rather than quality of life, they hold on to slogans rather than thoughts, while what I learned from kejawen is pasrah (total acceptance).

I’m proud that I don’t have to go to the market for food, I grow my own food. And how to live by example instead of hypocrisy. How to respect the wind, respect the rain, respect the weather. How to respect the water: I’m not going to waste water because it’s not a renewable resource.

I still meditate on a daily basis; I do yoga in the garden. I’ll get up at sunrise and breathe really deeply, when the air is still so clean and I can just feel the wind embrace me while everything is still so quiet.

Photo by Tarko Sudiarno

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