When the Self Falls Away
FIELD NOTE NO. 02
Sidemen, Bali — 2026
Last weekend, my partner and I went away for a night to Sidemen, a quiet rural area in East Bali surrounded by rice terraces and jungle-covered hills, with Mount Agung rising above the valley.
I already knew some of the views from our previous trip, and they had stayed with me. But this time I found a new viewpoint, and I was not prepared for the perspective it gave me over the valley.
The moment I saw it, it almost felt as if my body was shrinking. I became very small and almost insignificant in comparison with the vastness in front of me: the lush hills rising in the distance, the rice fields below, the river moving through the valley.
For a few moments, I just stayed there. The usual sense of being at the center of experience seemed to drop away. There was less of me looking at the landscape and more simply landscape.
There was hardly any thinking. Just stillness, and this immense presence of nature.
Standing there, I remembered something my art history teacher had introduced me to years ago when we were looking at Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. In the painting, a solitary man stands on a rocky summit with his back to the viewer, looking out over a vast landscape disappearing into mist.
It captures something the Romantic painters were deeply interested in: the sublime. That strange feeling that can arise when we are confronted with something so immense that our usual sense of scale begins to fall away. Something too vast to fully take in.
And these moments often come by surprise. We do not plan them. They just happen.
I can understand why painters such as Friedrich became so fascinated by this experience and spent their lives trying to depict it.
For many of us, these may be some of the rare moments when the constant preoccupation with ourselves becomes quiet. For a moment, there is no problem to solve, nothing to improve, nothing to become. There is simply this.
And there is something strangely relieving about becoming small in this way.
Perhaps this is part of why the sublime feels so powerful. For a moment, the world becomes vast enough that we forget to make ourselves the center of it.
And in that forgetting, something else opens.
