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REFLECTIONS
The Rhythm of the Sea
At Lombok’s southern coast, life follows the tide — fishermen at first light, waves marking each hour. Among coves and coconut trees, simplicity persists. Here, time moves easily, and beauty rests not in perfection, but in the quiet rhythm of everyday life.
The day begins before the light. In the small fishing village near Ekas Bay, engines sputter to life in the half-dark, and the tide pulls quietly against the sand. The air carries the salt of the sea and the faint smoke of morning fires. Somewhere offshore, a boat’s lantern sways like a lone star on the water.
Heri and his two sons push their wooden boat into the surf. The hull creaks, the oars scrape. They move without words, their gestures practiced. Fishing here is not adventure; it’s repetition — an inherited rhythm of tide, wind, and patience. The ocean, vast and alive, decides how generous the day will be.
By sunrise, the horizon burns gold. From the cliffs above, the sea looks like glass, though Heri knows its moods — the sudden squalls, the shifting currents, the reefs that rise like hidden teeth. His father taught him to read them: the texture of the waves, the angle of clouds, the way seabirds turn when the water changes temperature.
On good days, they return before noon with buckets of tuna, mackerel, and squid. The catch is shared — a portion for the market, a portion for the family, a portion for those whose nets came back empty. The economy here is quiet and moral, built not on contracts but on custom.
When the fish are cleaned and salted, Heri’s wife, Lila, begins to dry them in the courtyard. The smell mingles with the scent of woodsmoke and seaweed. Their youngest daughter, barely five, arranges shells in neat lines along the wall, each one a small trophy from mornings spent at the shore.
Beyond the village, the land has begun to change. Roads once dusty and uneven now lead to new gates — villas with long horizontal lines, muted stone, and terraces that lean toward the sea. Their guests arrive from far away, chasing stillness and light. They walk barefoot along the same beaches where the villagers push their boats, pausing to take photographs of the horizon.
Heri doesn’t mind them. “The sea belongs to everyone,” he says. But he admits the quiet feels different now — thinner somehow, more observed. He wonders what the visitors see when they look out at the water. Do they see work, or only calm?
In the afternoons, when the wind picks up from the east, the boats are pulled ashore and turned upside down. Men gather in the shade to mend their nets, the nylon threads stretching like silver veins across their knees. The conversation drifts from weather to politics to the price of fuel. Laughter comes easily.
A young man walks past, carrying a surfboard under his arm. The locals nod, amused — they have seen this new rhythm too. The waves that once meant risk now mean recreation. The sea, it seems, speaks more than one language.
When the sun dips low, the light falls warm across the bay. Children chase kites made from old plastic bags. Women call from the porches, summoning families to dinner. The air cools, and the sound of the ocean becomes the evening’s metronome.
From a nearby villa, guests watch the scene unfold from their infinity pool. They describe it later as peaceful — and it is — but peace here is built from motion: the cast of nets, the pull of oars, the endless negotiation between land and sea.
As night arrives, Heri sits by his boat, sharpening his knife under a small lamp. The sky fills with stars. Tomorrow he will rise again before dawn, not because he must, but because he always has.
He gestures toward the horizon, where darkness and water become one.
“The sea never stops teaching,” he says. “You just have to listen.”
And in that listening lies the soul of Lombok — patient, unhurried, and awake. A place where silence is not the absence of sound, but the presence of rhythm — ancient, tireless, and entirely its own.
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