The Water Between Us

No field drinks alone.
The water remembers what we forget.

I began noticing the offerings almost as soon as I arrived in Bali. They were everywhere: in front of temples and shops, on sidewalks, beside doorways, at the edges of rice fields. Small woven palm-leaf baskets filled with flowers, rice, incense, and sometimes fruit or sweets. Some were freshly placed and impossibly beautiful; others had already been stepped on, soaked by rain, or scattered by dogs and birds.

At first they seemed like one more beautiful feature of Bali. Then I took this photograph. At the edge of a pond near a temple, two small offerings had been placed beside the water. Orange and purple flowers rested inside their little woven baskets. Koi moved beneath the surface. Behind them stood a goddess, temple walls, trees, water. Nothing about the offerings was permanent. By evening they might be wilted or washed away; tomorrow there would be new ones. And perhaps that is part of their meaning. I took this photograph at Tirta Empul in Bali, where two small offerings had been placed beside the water at the edge of a temple pond.

They are called canang sari, daily offerings of gratitude. They are not primarily monuments meant to endure, but repeated acknowledgments of a relationship: between human beings and the divine, between people and one another, and between human life and the natural world that sustains it. The Balinese have a name for this threefold harmony: Tri Hita Karana. I had heard the phrase before coming here, but in Bali it began to feel less like philosophy and more like something being practiced all around me.

I grew up Muslim, where prayer is also built into the structure of the day. Five times each day, life is interrupted and, whatever one is doing, there is a return to remembrance. The Arabic word dhikr itself means remembrance. Ideally, prayer is not simply asking God for something; it is remembering one’s relationship to something larger than oneself. Of course, religion can easily become transactional. Prayer becomes a request: give me this, protect me from that, make this happen, prevent that from happening. Perhaps all traditions are vulnerable to this. What begins as remembrance gradually becomes negotiation.

What struck me in Bali was how difficult it was to separate remembrance from ordinary life. The offering was outside the restaurant, beside the cash register, in the field, beside the water. And nowhere is that relationship more interesting than in Bali’s rice fields.

For more than a thousand years, Balinese farmers have organized irrigation through a cooperative system called subak. Water passes from volcanic highlands and springs into rivers, canals, weirs and rice terraces. Farmers sharing the same water coordinate its distribution, along with planting and drainage, while water temples form part of that same network. This is not religion sitting decoratively on top of agriculture. The religion is entangled with the agriculture.

The subak embodies Tri Hita Karana: harmony with the divine, harmony among people, and harmony with nature. Water is not merely a resource moving through plumbing; it is sacred. The farmers who depend upon the same flow of water also participate in the same system of obligations, temples and offerings. Perhaps this sounds quaint until one remembers the problem they are solving. Water flows downhill. An upstream farmer can take more and leave less for someone downstream. One village’s decision about when to flood or drain its fields affects another, and even pest control depends upon coordination between farmers. The fields are separate, yet they cannot really be farmed separately.

The landscape refuses the fiction of independence. In a curious way, so does the religion.

This is partly why Balinese Hinduism fascinated me. It is recognizably Hindu, but it also carries much older Austronesian relationships with ancestors, mountains, fertility, water and place. Hindu and Buddhist ideas did not simply replace those earlier ways of understanding the world; they became intertwined with them. The result is a religion in which sacred geography is not metaphorical. Mountains, springs, temples, canals and rice fields participate in the same order. The water itself connects them.

Coming from the wealthy industrialized world, I found this strangely unsettling. We have vastly more material abundance, yet our water arrives invisibly through pipes, our food appears beneath fluorescent lights in supermarkets, electricity emerges from walls, and waste disappears down drains. We have become extraordinarily good at hiding the relationships that sustain us.

And then we divide what remains:

My property.
My mineral rights.
My water rights.
My land.

There are perfectly good reasons for property rights, of course. Shared resources without rules can be destroyed just as easily as privately owned ones, and the Balinese subak itself is full of rules. But the difference that interested me was not really legal. It was psychological.

In much of the American West, where water can be desperately scarce, elaborate systems determine who has the right to use it. One of the foundational principles is summarized almost poetically: first in time, first in right. During shortage, an older claim may receive water while a newer one does not. The Balinese farmer also lives within a system of rights and obligations. But subak begins with another fact that our language of ownership can obscure: the water connects everyone before anyone divides it.

Upstream and downstream are not separate problems. If the upstream farmer takes everything, the downstream farmer suffers. If planting schedules are badly coordinated, pests can spread. If the watershed fails, ownership offers little consolation. They thrive together, and they can suffer together.

There is something very Zen in this:

The rice field belongs to the farmer,
and the rice field cannot exist by itself.

The water belongs to no field,
yet every field depends upon it.

The flower in the offering will wilt. The rice will be harvested. The rain will fall somewhere else. Water will continue downhill. Perhaps harmony is not the absence of competing interests. Perhaps it is remembering that the interests were never entirely separate in the first place.

That may be what I found most beautiful about Tri Hita Karana. It does not ask human beings to disappear into nature, nor does it deny the individual. It simply refuses to stop the circle at the boundary of the self: human and divine, human and human, human and nature. Three relationships, but perhaps not really three.

Looking again at those little offerings beside the water, I wondered whether gratitude is simply the ritual by which we remember this. We usually think gratitude means being thankful for what we have, but perhaps there is another kind of gratitude: remembering how little of what we have is actually ours.

The water was here before us.
It passes through our hands.
And then it continues downstream.

— Saad

Tirta Empul, Bali, Indonesia
September 2026