sacred geography

Les Terrasses du Barri

Eve Neuhaus 8 Comments
In French and Occitane

The name of the street on which Tom and I (and Mocha and Henri IV) live is called Rue de l’Acampadou, which we’ve been told means something like “between the fields and the town.” Our neighborhood is called Quartier du Barri. Opposite our house is a low wall and the stairs to our garden.

Below that, almost all the way down to the stream, L’Aurasse, is a wooded hillside.

Our house is blocked by trees in this picture, but you can see Simone’s house with the blue shutters next door.

When we first came to Cordes, we walked along the road below our house and tried to come up the hillside on some overgrown footpaths. Mocha was so covered in burrs and sticky seeds when we came home from that walk that we stuck to better maintained paths for a good year and a half after that.

One day during last spring’s confinement, I discovered that the paths on our hillside had been cleared. I went down a set of formerly bramble-covered stone stairs just up from our house and found that there was a maze of cleared paths zigzagging up and down the hill in broad sloping swaths.

Some of the paths were left narrow. I preferred those to the wide ones at first.

Mocha and I began to explore the maze of paths. I was surprised at how wide most of them were, as wide as roads. Over the summer, you could hear the noise of brush cutters as the village cleared more and more.

It was a dry summer. The cut grass lay on the dusty pathways. I took Mocha along the paths but all I saw was the wildlife cover that was gone. The paths made me sad.

Then fall came and it began to rain, and the paths became beautiful grassy walkways. I read somewhere that they have a name, Les Terrasses du Barri, and I realized that they were indeed terraces, and no doubt very ancient.

Now that we’re in the second confinement, which limits walking for exercise to one kilometer from home, I’m realizing what an extraordinary treasure is across the street from our house.

Mocha enjoys being off leash.
Sunset is our favorite time to go
You can see how they zigzag here. At the top a house on rue de l’Acampadou is peeking through.
There are a few landmarks. This spring is running now.
It’s just off a a small meadow with rock I like to sit on to meditate.
There are a number of very big trees like this ash that I like to lean on and look up.
This structure was part of the Medieval Festival a few years ago. Wood was stored in it and burned in the small building next to it to demonstrate how charcoal was traditionally made.

The woods are full of foods, like these wild plums, and medicinals waiting to be gathered.
Rosehips
Figs
Nettle
And blackberries.
It’s the end of our walk, but Mocha thinks there are still interesting things to see.
Tomorrow, Mocha.

Living in Cordes – Stone walls

Eve Neuhaus 16 Comments

Cordes-sur-Ciel was built as a safe haven for people who lost their homes in the nearby city of Saint Marcel, which was razed during the Albigensian Crusade. Said to be the first of the bastides, it has five walls built in concentric circles.

(More about the history of Cordes-sur-Ciel can be found here.)

A neighbor recently told us that the stone wall across from our home is the unfinished fifth wall. Indeed, our house is just below the Porte de l’Horloge, the eastern entrance to the medieval city, which is in the fourth wall, built between the 14th and 16th century. Our neighborhood, quartier du Barri, is a 17th century suburb of the medieval village.

Cordes sits on a rocky outcropping, and is entirely built of local stone: limestone, sandstone, and dolomite. The houses are stone and the streets in the medieval village are cobbled. Walls surround every garden and line every street.

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There are walls upon walls upon walls.

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Living without a car gives me plenty of time to appreciate stone walls all around. One of the most delightful things about Cordes is its authenticity: it looks like and is a place that has been continually inhabited since the 13th century. The walls reflect its history.

They bring me peace, connectedness, and a sense of stability. They are the keepers of the stories.

I never tire of their variety, their richness, their complexity.

In a village of art, the stone walls are perhaps the greatest art.

 

Om is Home

Eve Neuhaus 8 Comments

Ganesh Baba used to say that. Such a delightful aphorism – so full of broad and deep meaning.

To me, it means wherever you are is exactly the right place for you to be. The central secret is at your center. The treasure is buried in your own garden.

We didn’t move. Tom and I are still living in the same house, and working at the same business, Mama Ganache. The house, in my mind all ready to be someone else’s, wanted to be ours a little longer. Everything seemed to be in place, and I’d done all kinds of symbolic, metaphoric, ritual,  and inner work around letting go—I even led the session called “Letting Go” in a Year-to-Live class I co-teach—but the fates had it that we’re here, at home again.

It’s a fortunate thing, although fraught with difficulties and very hard work. This house is filled with light and beauty. And now it’s clean and repaired! What a gift!

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During the weeks the house was on the market and the first few after, I was tired and depressed and sick. Not all at once. Yeah, all at once.

Still, underneath all that physical, biological and psychological stress, I managed to retain a small, frequently imperceptible, sense that everything was going to be alright. It’s true I was wearing my little ceramic disk that says THIS TOO SHALL PASS, which always helps, but it was the way life itself unfolded that gave me the message most profoundly.

The very moment Tom and I decided that we would stay here, a text arrived from a friend, who had another friend, who was in need of a furnished room or two. Our new housemate moved in an hour later. Best housemate we’ve ever had. It would have been enough.

Events had almost inevitably been turns for the worse over the weeks before that. Things broke down, big things, the water heater, the sewage pump, the washer, all within a short time. The toilet overflowed and needed to be replaced when Airbnb guests were here. Everything took forever and cost too much. Then, in a flash, a helpful, upbeat, mature, and kind housemate moves in.

A week later, Mama Ganache lost both of its weekday shop employees at the same time, and it became clear to me that I should step back into the business. So here I am, Mama Ganache again.

I spent the last month on a new website: mama-ganache.com. I set up a chocolate club and free delivery service to hospitals and nursing homes. Tom and I are hosting two weekly events at the shop, a tea on Sundays, and a conversation on Thursday afternoons. We’re hosting two parties a month, Art after Dark on first Fridays, and the chocolate club pick-up party on second Fridays. I’ve been crazy busy.

In the middle of all that, Eva came on Thursday last week. She and I already have a long relationship with hummingbirds, so I knew the hummingbird who flew into the living room just before Luana dropped her off, had some message for me.

It was another rufous hummingbird, West Coast parallel to the ruby-throated hummingbird. It was trying frantically to fly out of the window above the dog’s bed. Lily Bear thought it was very exciting indeed, but she backed off when I asked her to. Almost immediately the bird fell, stunned, onto the window sill. When I tried to lift it up gently, it awoke and dashed into the upper corner of the window again. In my hand were three tiny hummingbird feathers.

As I stared at them, astonished, the bird fell again, very nearly into my open hands. This time I could lift it and carry it outdoors. I put it in a flower box and went to get a succulent leaf to make a sun shield for it.

When I came back with the leaf, the hummingbird looked at me with one eye and took off, circling around once and then landing high in the oak tree.

The feathers must have slid out of my hand when I put the bird in the flower box.

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I picked them up and put them in a special box. Hummingbird feathers, so tiny, so exquisite. Extraordinary.

These are hard times. The large, slow-moving astrological configuration (Uranus/Pluto) that’s been putting so many obstacles, small and large, in my path, will affect us all in one way or another. But surely something bigger is afoot, or, perhaps I should say, in the air.