When Idanna Pucci undertook the daunting mission of building a house in remote Bali, she quickly realized that she was more than a stranger in a foreign land. “While the rule in one village is often the exception in the next,” she says, “no one tells you what to do. It is up to you to discover and enter into Balinese social law.” Indeed, no one told Pucci and her husband, Terence Ward, what to do when they learned that their land lacked natural spring water. “It was a miracle that the centenarian village priest, who prayed under the full moon in the temple above our land, was rewarded with a sign – now are aqueduct provides water for us and 60 families. People say the Gods have blessed us.”

They certainly have blessed Bali, whose people traditionally consider the verdant island the gods’ favorite earthly abode. An oasis of predominantly Hindu culture (95 percent) within the otherwise Muslim Indonesia, Bali is teeming with tens of thousands of carved lava stone temples and altars to one or more deity. These shrines, which always seem to be invisibly replenished with black-and-white-checked cloths and lavish offerings of fruit and flowers, are permanent reminders that the world is caught up in a perpetual balancing act between good and evil.

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