Tonight we’ll cross the Channel, setting foot in the UK bright and early Saturday morning. The rituals of the ferry are ranked high in my list of life’s joys – the quayside queue, the oft-imagined supper, the little cabin, and the ‘sailing the seven seas’ (!) imagination of my busy-port watching boyhood. Oh, but the leaving! Leaving the places we love is always so sad. My olfactory memory-mapping goes into overdrive.
Tomorrow, closing my eyes, I will know again in my nostrils this local salted butter, and the slight mustiness of the basement, and apple juice, and oaks and pines, and the planked floor of this bright bedroom, and the bubbling mud of the riverbed, and the warm breakfast baguette, with melon and strawberries and honey and strong coffee, and the armoire. I’ll tell myself convincingly ‘no leavings, no arrivals.’ And ache a bit.
Often the tranquil beauty of this
riverbank house comes upon one
with abrupt sharp blast of shock –
and never more than time’s chimed
close for us to depart
Turquoise green in late afternoon
the river has turned and hosts
myriad sunlit comets and stars –
accentuation, punctuation within
memoirs of the heart
October with four pairs of French
windows and the house door open
wide to supper preparation and
reading in the slight breeze upon
which pine needles dart
A small passing watercraft leaves
familiar lapping sounds in its wake
holding one’s attention light but
keen much as one might felicitate
upon unsurpassed fine art
For years we’ve
come remembering
your voyaging here
long before us and
we hear the gulls
laughing and admire
the industry of
oystercatchers and
the youth of shiny
new acorns as we
note that the comings
and goings of the
tides across your
venerable oak boughs
are quietly returning
you to the ground of
your origins just as
year by year they are
returning us too and
the serenity here
though poignant
holds us in peace
Another perfect day’s cycle tour today, in the commune of Sarzeau, near the coast of the Atlantic ocean, including a visit to the striking Château de Suscinio, a moated French castle, built in the late Middle Ages, as home to the Dukes of Brittany. It’s still gloriously warm here and hues of golds and reds are enhanced and illuminated by sky as blue as one might expect to find in the height of summer.
Pain au chocolat consumed at a well-placed picnic table, on a village green overlooking the Atlantic, was like something out of a ‘let’s live the good life’ dream. And the effect was doubled when we spotted a beautifully built boite à livres – a little lending library set on posts at the corner of the green – so that one could cheerfully have chosen to stay there for hours, reading and daydreaming in the sunshine.
It’s as well we didn’t get too distracted by the books (an all too frequent pitfall for both of us generally), for in pedalling onwards we accidentally came upon a little creperie where galette au jambon et compotée de tomates was reckoned the discovery of the day.
We’re just back from an annual visit to an old and dear Breton friend. Each and every such occasion is pure celebration of life. Léonie speaks not a word of English, her first language is Breton, French her second, and cheerfully willing as we are, notre français est très limité.
Still, though, a joyful friendship has been maintained for years. By way of Léonie’s patient ear, and our willingness to leap in and have a go, together with shared delight in Brittany, hugs and smiles, laughter and tears, good food and coffee at table – we’re ever reminded that relationships are not made by words only.
It seems we all begin in naiveté and eventually return to a “second naiveté” or simplicity, whether willingly or on our deathbed. This blessed simplicity is calm, knowing, patient, inclusive, and self-forgetful. It helps us move beyond anger, alienation, and ignorance. I believe this is the very goal of mature adulthood and mature religion.
Adapted by and from Richard Rohr Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life
I photographed a large fish in warm, sunlit riverbank shallows this evening. Sheltered there, an inch from and alongside the keel of a boat. I stood close enough to observe stillness, a resting. Meditation, even. Tiny movements caused widening concentric circles, like the walls of a round tower, or the song of a bowl. Protecting.
Tidal turning moved the boat but though the fish tail fluttered it made no attempt to avoid rude collision. Calm and knowing came to mind. And the circles, it turned out, were not merely decorative poetry but the very boundaries earlier implied. Invisible pressure maintained perfect, measured distance between boat and fish.
I thank you, my God, for having in a thousand different ways led my eyes to discover the immense simplicity of things. Little by little, through the irresistible development of those yearnings you implanted in me, as a child, through the influence of gifted friends who entered my life at certain moments to bring light and strength to my mind, and through the awakenings of spirit I owe to the successive initiations, gentle and terrible, which you caused me to undergo: through all these I have been brought to the point where I can no longer see anything, nor any longer breathe, outside that milieu in which all is made one.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Hymn of the Universe
The last day of September. Contented and reflective. Quieter by far than the last few glad days in Paris. Never far from the river, I’ve lost count of the times I watched a leaf or a twig baptised into its flow.
Once connected to one branch and one tree. Now carried, moving onward in a larger universe. Then, a bud, a leaf or a twig, somewhere. Now, elsewhere. Matured and maturing still. Dying and living. Living and dying. Here. On the move. On the river. Higher, broader, deeper, wider.
Yes: as Teilhard before me, I notice ‘the immense simplicity of things’. Leaf and twig will die into that ‘milieu in which all is made one.’ And I recall another quiet moment, another leaf, another river.
Paris pulls most like a strong magnet on the mornings we have to leave. It’s irrational. We visited everywhere you could think of in forty eight hours but there’s always somewhere we desperately need to be right now. Right now, when the taxi’s outside waiting to whisk us back to Montparnasse! What is it about this huge, busy, noisy city that has such a hold on us?
Well: just about everything. Châtelet. The Louvre. Art nouveau Métropolitain. Buskers. The scent of brandy, good strong coffee, and cigarettes. Tiny bistros packed to the walls. Notre Dame. Rue du Rivoli. Apartment dwellers dining elegantly on tiny, chic, wrought iron balconies overlooking roof gardens. Stacked cases of wine – themselves works of dusty fine art. The tower, of course, and the intensity. Accomplished monocyclists, romance, and style. Visionaries and arty plans for the future. Bicyclettes and hundreds and hundreds of scooters.
Again and again though, it’s the most surprising things that are forever planted firmly in my heart and mind. Nowhere but Paris can a single, beautiful, fallen, golden leaf, fluttering gently in the breeze on the cobbles of the quay beside the Seine – nowhere but here could a man hear a leaf whispering ‘come again’.
Vers la gare Montparnasse s’il vous plaît monsieur. Merci beaucoup …
But three and a half hours later, fickle as they come, we’re newly in love, again, with that other, quieter, river.
Had the room only been quieter I might have heard Leonardo chatting with her, yet the throng of visitors from all over the world is something to be celebrated. We’ve come for face to face encounter today with a half-length portrait of a woman, by the Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci, which John Lichfield of The Independent acclaimed in 2005 as “the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied work of art in the world”.
The Mona Lisa, thought to be a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, is in oil on a white Lombardy poplar panel, probably painted between 1503 and 1506. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting to feel when, awestruck by the ornate exterior and the interior galleries of the Louvre itself, (architecture, venerable and modern, spectacularly juxtaposed), and overwhelmed by the sheer number of famous works of art along the way, we joined hundreds in the Salle de La Joconde (as the painting is known to the French) this morning.
I know now. For no mere trifle is Leonardo da Vinci hailed the world over, more than 500 years after executing this work.
A small painting, Mona Lisa fills her huge ‘new’ home. While I have appreciated many great paintings, the works of Rembrandt touching something deep in me especially, and have seen many representations of the work through the years, this – the real one – is something different. Quite extraordinarily for a portrait of a person, rather than the person herself, I felt without a shadow of a doubt that La Joconde has tangible presence; she’s breathing. Leonardo must have been entranced by her beautiful hands. We need both to look and to listen.
Back down to earth, we hired a pair of Vélib’ bikes for another whirlwind tour of the great and beloved sights of the city, and for windinmywheels.
The TGV sped us out of Brittany for Paris this morning, our having first marvelled at the friendliness and service for breakfast at the SNCFGare d’Auray. The contrast between this city and the riverside we’ll return to on Thursday couldn’t be more marked. Quiet enough in the former to hear sparrows’ wings, in 1st Arrondisement Paris there’s a well trained choir of sirens, car horns and bicycle bells. Outdoor supper watching the world passing by on a warm Paris evening is intoxicating.
Now, just before midnight, there’s no sign of a quietening outside the window behind which we’re thankfully installed, exhausted feet wondering what the heck happened today. Ah, but that walk along the Seine, the avenues of autumn coloured trees, the photos outside Notre Dame, and the ultra fab Apple Store at Carrousel du Louvre. I’ll joyfully remember where I downloaded MacOS Sierra! After just a couple of hours in this thrumming city we’ve got the hang of the buzz and the speed of the place again already. And one or two (hundred) photos!
We delighted in our annual Tour de Golfe this afternoon. The Gulf of Morbihan, home to 42 islands, is a sailor’s delight. It’s also a joy for photographers like me, and perfect (windy!) sailing conditions allowed for some spectacular shots of a grand regatta featuring perhaps 50 boats – each with four or five crew – in full sail. Add to that some truly spectacular fluffy cloud formations set in heights of deep cerulean blue, cormorants close-up, the glad familiarity of another returning, the best company, and a baguette picnic made up of ham, paté and smoked cheese, and I reflect that the later colours of the day made for splendid array.
The oystercatcher furtling about in the mudbanks is silent and focused and the butterfly and the lizard make no sound that can be heard above the clank of mast cables and the gentle river flow beside which we’re absorbed in Ouest France and our books into which pine needles twirl – until the urgent tap-tap-tapping of the woodpecker we’d forgotten we met last year raises smiling pairs of eyebrows
Gathering at harbour
towards evening
the heat of the day
still intense
a chattering assembly
clambered up the plank
to the scrubbed deck all
grateful for breeze
at that altitude
even before the little
ship set sail
talk was inconsequential –
of yesterday, today, tomorrow
of weather, wine and water
of this wondrous fleet and
of who, what, why and where and
had I been in an olive grove
instead of aboard I’d
have thought of cicadas
but our homeward reflection
on sunset dolphins leaping
sounded like silently
thankful prayer
