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On Saturday 26th July 2008 Balinese celebrated a holiday that is called Tumpek Wariga or Tumpek Pengatag. Tumpek Wariga is the day when a blessing ceremony is given to the plants, the ceremony held at every plantation and farm throughout the island. Tumpek Wariga is celebrated every 210 days or 6 months of the Balinese calendar.
No Balinese in his right mind will hold a ceremony without consulting a calendar for an auspicious day for the execution of the ceremony, and the best calendar for determining a good day for ceremony is a Modern Balinese paper calendar. This calendar is an amalgamation of three different calendars, the pawukon calendar, Saka lunar calendar and Gregorian calendar. Modern Balinese calendar contains various information ranges from the date to the date of anniversary of various temples all over Bali, from the occurrence of full moon and new moon to list of auspicious and inauspicious day.
The main section of the calendar consists of columns of the dates, each square of these columns contains a date in the middle of the square and surrounded by the names of the day of this particular date, a red dot if the date coincides with full moon and a black dot if it coincides with new moon. Each date in this calendar may have ten different names as a result of the complexity of Pawukon Calendar.
The ancient Balinese calendar is a complex cycle where many days have specific holy significances. The Balinese community will celebrate Galungan on Wednesday November 29, 2006, which in western terms can be likened to Christmas in the fact that family members gather to pray, eat and socialize together.
Galungan is perhaps the most important Balinese religious holidays for followers of the Hindu faith. The celebrations for Galungan are basically spread across a three-day period where a series of symbolic ceremonies are carried out all over the island. As this is an extraordinarily long public holiday, most Balinese return home to their ancestral villages to prepare for the festivities. Despite the intense workload the mood is invariably jovial.
To truly appreciate the environmental wonders of the island, one needs to understand that Bali’s beauty is not merely the result of faceless natural forces such as the grinding of ocean plates, the rush of volcanic flows, the pull of the tides or the sweep of the sea winds. Bali’s spectacular natural bounty is also very much a product of the intimate relationship the Balinese people have with their environment. To the Balinese, the natural landscape is a divine creation marked by spiritually powerful sites. According to local belief, the environment is not merely a neutral backdrop for human activity, but is a vital, animate force with which one must maintain harmonious relationships.
If you are heading to Bali in search of a land of relaxation where watches, calendars and appointment books are unheard of, you’ll be in for a surprise. While the Balinese are indeed faithful followers of the relaxed island tempo known as “jam karet” or “rubber time,” they are also among the most time conscious people in the world. And no, we don’t mean just the scores of sellers of fake Rolex and Cartier watches who swarm the streets of Kuta. We mean the many Balinese who organize their lives around the traditional Balinese calendar.
In Bali, the calendar determines good days and bad days for virtually every human activity, and many actions are only undertaken after consultation with a ritual calendar specialist or taking a glance at the comprehensive traditional calendar virtually every Balinese family has hanging on their wall. There are auspicious days for planting rice, for holding ceremonies, and for cutting down trees. There are favorable days for digging wells, building fish ponds or house foundations or learning to dance. There are times that are opportune for teaching your buffalo to plow, weaving a fishing net, or getting married. And in traditional Balinese belief, there is a direct relationship between the day of one’s birth and one’s character and potential.
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