The days are becoming ordinary now. That inevitable threshold between the excitement of travelling to somewhere new, and the lethargy of knowing how your day will go. I go to the same café, I walk the same route, I wake up and follow the same routine and see the same view. This could be the point where the magic happens, but so many times I have let myself fall into it. Lifeless, only to rise again with the itch for something new, to go somewhere else. Well, I don’t want to go anywhere new anymore.
I think it was said by Sue Monk Kidd… life is not a line, but a deep dot. If we don’t take the time to go vertical, then we are missing a whole dimension of living. I have a feeling that the best way to do that is to be a little more still than usual, a little quieter. I wanted to sink myself into a moment.
So yesterday, I went for a walk in the forest. The start of the hiking trail from Valbonne to Biot, the entrance of which is completely unremarkable. Two small orange and white poles, rusting over, joined together by a simple chain to act as a barricade to cars I suppose. There is a two-person sized gap to the right, where I was to enter a road that sloped steeply downwards. To the left is a plain wooden pole, sentier de la Brague.
The first time I went there, I was with a man who had taken me out on a date very soon after I arrived in France. We drove there after a day taking a tour around Cannes, Antibes and Nice… playing Manu Chao up loud with the windows down. Drawing any attention to myself at all normally makes me nauseous, but I remember trying to let myself relax at that time. I wanted to learn how to let go of my need to be hidden.
So many memories came back to me as I walked down that road, which turned into a dirt path. I used to walk there when I was frustrated with my life, or when I was lonely. I walked the path to Biot many times and learned many things. It almost felt as if my thoughts were talking out loud during those moments, because I often had no one else to talk to.
I stopped at the river crossing… big blocks of some kind of stone, lined up neatly so you can hop over easily. I decided not to go past that point, and so I sat on one of those blocks instead. It’s always a little colder in Valbonne, so I let the sun rest on my shoulders. I listened to the water running, birds calling out, while I felt heat on my back and coolness on my cheeks.
I looked around at the space I used to call home. The trees in that forest are low. They hunch over, like they’ve been around for a long time and need to lean forward to hear you better. I always used to feel like they were turning towards me, in a welcoming way. They don’t appear to have changed.
But this time instead of listening, the trees were re-telling me my old secrets that I’d shared with them years before. It was unsettling and nice at the same time. Nice, because I knew that I’d grown and unsettling because I didn’t want to go back to who I was. I sat there until I made myself realise that I could remember the past, without forgetting who I am now… and without stopping my steps towards who I wanted to be next.
Taking a few moments to sit in a place where many moments in your life have happened has a special feeling to it. It’s not just an empty space, it’s a place where you’ve been witnessed in many different ways by the silent things that live there. Maybe it’s a street corner with the same walls, maybe it’s the same old park bench, or maybe it’s the trees living in a forest you used to frequent. At these places, I think we feel life in both dimensions… places we can sink into for a little while.
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