A drop of love

Une goutte d’amour

This is a vision that came to me not long ago when I was doing longer than usual meditations in the morning. I’d been sitting for maybe 45 minutes when it floated into my head.

C’est une vision qui m’est venue il n’y a pas longtemps, alors que je faisais une méditation plus longue que d’habitude le matin. J’étais assise depuis environ 45 minutes quand elle m’est venue à l’esprit.

In the vision, I am sitting in front of a spring with low circular wall around it. 

Dans cette vision, je suis assise devant une source entourée d’un muret circulaire. 

From my left comes a figure in a white cape and hood. Without saying anything, she seats herself on the opposite side of the spring. I see that she is a very, very old woman. 

De ma gauche arrive une silhouette vêtue d’une cape blanche à capuche. Sans dire un mot, elle s’assoit à l’autre côté de la source. Je vois qu’il s’agit d’une femme très, très âgée.

 We sit together quietly for a while. I close my eyes.

Nous restons assises ensemble en silence pendant un moment. Je ferme les yeux.

When I open them, I see that many women in white have come.

Quand je les rouvre, je vois que de nombreuses femmes vêtues de blanc sont arrivées.

I’m so pleased to be there,  I feel full of joy. I love these women. I love being part of a circle of women sitting around a spring. I feel so blessed.

Je suis tellement heureuse d’être là,  je me sens remplie de joie. J’aime ces femmes. J’aime faire partie d’un cercle de femmes assises autour d’une source. Je me sens tellement bénie.

Then I remember something I had read the night before.

Puis je me souviens de quelque chose que j’avais lu la veille au soir.

It’s something a friend, Robert Sachs, said in a response on Facebook. His exact words don’t come to me, but what I remember is “One drop of love can overcome all the difficulties going on around you.”

C’était quelque chose qu’un ami, Robert Sachs, avait dit en réponse sur Facebook. Je ne me souvenais pas exactement de ses mots, mais ce dont je me souvenais, c’était : « Une goutte d’amour peut surmonter toutes les difficultés qui vous entourent. »

“One drop of love can overcome all the difficulties going on around you.”

« Une goutte d’amour peut surmonter toutes les difficultés qui vous entourent. »

The idea pleases me. It makes me even happier to have remembered it.

Cette idée me plaît. Je suis encore plus heureux de m’en être souvenu.

.While I’m feeling that ebullient love bubbling up inside me, and that deep, deep comfort that being loved brings, I notice a disturbance off to the right.

Alors que je sentais cet amour bouillonnant monter en moi, et ce profond réconfort que procure le fait d’être aimée, j’ai remarqué une agitation sur ma droite.

A man is coming, a man who, for his head, has the tip of a penis.

Un homme s’approchait, un homme dont la tête était remplacée par le bout d’un pénis.

So I look at him, and while I’m looking at him, lots of other guys join him from all directions. As I watch, all of their penis-heads start growing and getting bigger and bigger, and their necks are stretching longer and longer, until one of them hits another one and then suddenly they’re all bashing each other with their penises, with their long penises.

Je le regarde, et pendant que je le regarde, beaucoup d’autres hommes le rejoignent de tous parts. Alors que je les observe, leurs têtes de pénis commencent à grossir et à devenir de plus en plus grosses, et leurs cous s’allongent de plus en plus, jusqu’à ce que l’un d’eux en frappe un autre et qu’ils se mettent soudainement à se frapper les uns les autres avec leurs pénis, leurs longs pénis.

And we women, we‘re just sitting there, around the source, in meditation, in silence, holding that space.

Et nous, les femmes, nous sommes simplement assises là, autour de la source, en méditation, en silence, gardant cet espace.

And that’s the vision.

Et voilà la vision.

When the fog freezes: Cordes in the winter

Once in a while, the fog that rises from the valleys surrounding Cordes-sur-Ciel freezes.

Overnight the dense cloud that made driving so difficult the night before becomes a delicate crystalline web, clinging to the edges of every leaf, every branch.

It’s magic.

This morning we walked to the le Grain de Sel, the chalky outcropping you can see from our street.

It’s a short but steep climb to walk there from our house, but you can drive up past it and take a flat path too.

Wishing you all a year filled with glimmers of hope, fresh insights, many moments of pure joy and raucous laughter, and at least a few of breathtaking awe.

And now for something completely different…Emmaüs in Carmaux

Tiny Worlds: Discovering Secrets in Abandoned Spaces

For years I’ve watching the slow disintegration of the door of an abandoned house on rue de la Bouteillerie. Once in a while I take a picture of it, or of some part of it.

Yesterday I took a few pictures. Here’s the first one:

You can eat that plant with the round leaves. It’s called Le Nombril-de-Vénus (Umbilicus rupestris), Venus’s belly button, in French, or Pennywort in English.

It wasn’t till I got home and took a look at the pictures, though, that I realized that some magic is taking place behind that door.

There’s a tiny world with a staircase inside!

I wonder if very small people use those stairs?

Next time I pass I guess I’ll have to lie down on my stomach to get a better look.

Just when you’re not expecting it…

Three days ago a friend suggested I join a Facebook group I’d never heard of, the Dull Women’s Club, so I could read some of the wonderful stories ordinary women from all over the world have posted. After about half an hour of reading, I dashed off an introduction to myself and my quiet world here in rural France. Who knew that a couple days later that post would have so many likes (12.5k this morning) and that it would lead to having contact with so many remarkable women? What an incredible experience.

I spent most of the next two days responding to the comments. I wanted to respond to every single one—so many of them touched my heart so deeply. What’s amazing about the stories is their ordinariness.

My teacher Alice O. Howell‘s book The Dove in the Stone is subtitled Finding the Sacred in the Commonplace, and that’s been my path ever since I first read it. I even facilitated a long-running discussion group about the book at my dining room table on Thursday mornings. But even though I was exploring the book every week and had a reasonable understanding of it, I can remember the exact moment that its importance sank into my bones.

We had a huge house in California then, very different from the little one we live in now. One or two of our five kids were always in college then, causing a major drain on our finances, so I cleaned the house myself. One day I’d climbed up to dust a high shelf and I was thinking about how to present the next chapter in The Dove and the Stone the next day. I picked up a small vase and was turning it in my hand to get the dust out of the cracks when it struck me.

Our big house

The understanding hit me in the heart like an electric shock and then rippled through my body. This is it. This is what I’m here for, to see the sacred in the commonplace. I had to climb down and make a cup of tea.

Our little house in France

So, when I came across the Facebook group filled with introductions to ordinary women my heart filled with joy. For the second time in my life I felt that I’d truly met my tribe. (The first was when I was 12 and went to an art and music camp for the first time.) But this time the tribe is hundreds of thousands of women.

Suddenly, as a result of the opportunity of meeting so many people through the facebook group, Red Vienna, is selling well, and lots of people are reading my blog.

On top of that, I found an outstanding narrator to for the audiobook version and her first sample arrived in my mailbox this morning.

I cannot express my gratitude. It’s over the top.

Cats on Stools

I’ve recently begun a series of painted footstools featuring cats. This is the first one.
After choosing which stool I want to paint – I have a few on hand, some new, some old – I practice drawing the images I’ll put on it, and I start a search for the right quotation or poem for the bottom.

Then I paint the stool using acrylics. If I’m working on a stool for someone, I try to choose the right colors. Once the color is dry I begin on the design, usually on paper first and then on the stool.

Usually I add folk art designs at the end.

The second one in the series is in spring colors.

And now I’m beginning the sketches for the third one.

I haven’t had this much fun in a while!

Ninety days outside the Schengen area – Ourika and Essaouira in images

OURIKA

Snow in the Atlas Mountains
Man in traditional kaftan
Woman returning home after emptying was water
Women leaving after a gathering in someone’s home
Woman picking herbs at Le Jardin Bio-Aromatique
Tea at Le Jardin Bio-Aromatique
Dump truck
Wild dogs sleeping at a construction site
Men going home after market day
Berber man returning home after the souk

ESSAOUIRA

Place Tara
Friendly cat hoping for some sardines
Medina near our Riad
Pomegranate almond and fig almond pastries
Beach near the medina
Shop in the medina
Sunset at la sqala
Cat who just finished his tea
Camels on the beach near Ocean Vagabond Restaurant
Cafe cat

The loss of story – further reflections on the crumbling of perceptual boundaries

When I consider the lessons of our divestment over the past several years, the house on McCollum Street, the house on Park Street, Mama Ganache, a lifetime of acquisitions – I find I always return to the center: what I am, I take with me.

What I am has nothing to do with the things and stories that surround me. It doesn’t need even one suitcase to contain it, much less two. When nostalgia for what I had begins to fill me, wherever I am, I can go to my heart and feel at home with who I am, and that is enough.

Ceiling tile for sale on a street in Morocco

It’s where I find hope, where I can recover that sense of eager anticipation the Hathors recommend in these times of failing expectations and beliefs, the loss of story, and crumbling perceptual boundaries.

One of the seminal books of my hippie years was a typewritten channeled teaching called Season of Changes. I’ve forgotten the details of the predictions, but I’m sure they’ve been borne out or will be soon enough. It was a dark view of the future, full of cataclysm and apocalypse. Written in question and answer format, the last responses concern how to respond to the changes. As I recall, the advice most forcefully given was to practice meditation.

It’s comforting to imagine that more people than ever are doing that, at least in my own bubble. It’s less comforting to remember how tiny a percentage of the world’s population my bubble contains.

But it’s sound advice. When the now threatening storm of storms is full upon us, when that moment of personal and collective apocalypse that we all feel coming finally arrives, it’s the meditators who will be able to hold the rudder.

Storm coming in at our house in Cordes

Meditation takes you to your center, to the center, the one we all have in common. It takes you out of the chaotic whirl of stories to the place of no story, where energy is conserved instead of fueling the miasma of outer experience.

It takes you beyond imagination, beyond the limits of space and time, and beyond the singular focus of our culture on the physical: on acquisition (growth vs. maintenance), on hierarchy (dominion vs. sharing), beyond your own little bit of the apocryphal elephant.

Letting go of the world as we know it, the world of perception, this particular consensus reality, is necessarily heart-breaking. It’s painful to separate from the things and people and stories we love, and love is, after all, what it’s all about.

The tricky part is to connect love to the universal rather than the particular.

And that’s where meditation can take you.

Ninety days outside the Schengen area – sacred geometry in Morocco

It was in the Nejjarine Museum of Wood Arts in Fès that the thought struck me. The chaos of the crumbling medina, the vibrancy of the souks, the noise, the pollution, the exploding energy of the colors, and the sheer quantity of stuff –

Souk, medina, Marrakech

– is beautifully balanced by prevalence of the purposeful geometry, sacred geometry, everywhere.

That’s why Morocco is so enchanting.

Souk, medina, Fès, Morocco

Doorway, Marrakech Musèe

Wall, Palais el Mokri

Islam takes the prohibition of worshipping graven images seriously, and discourages figurative art. Like all of life, art should be dedicated to God, and God is only describable as essence. Geometry is essence.

Fountain, Palais Glaoui, Fès

Who can resist being centered by such design?

All my years of studying sacred geometry, beginning even before my Ganesh Baba days, and then Dan Winter and most deeply with Alice O. Howell, peaked at that moment in the museum. I stood at the center of a ideally proportioned room surrounded by mandalas, exquisite symmetry, perfect curves, rhythmic repetition, and profoundly satisfying rectangles and squares.

I wanted to take dozens of pictures, but photography was not allowed, so I was forced to confront the serene beauty of that room face on. It was transformative.

Since then I’ve consciously attuned myself to noticing and letting the geometry take me in.

Palais el Mokri

Medina, Marrakech

Palais el Mokri, Fes

Pastry, souk, medina, Fès

Even contemporary Moroccan design uses the elements of sacred geometry to create beautiful calm spaces, as exemplified by our current Airbnb in the new part of Marrakech.

Magical!

Detail, lamp, Marrakech apartment

Detail, lamp, Marrakech apartment

Dining room table and chairs

Dishes

Bedspread

Gate to new apartment building

Light fixture in our Airbnb apartment in Tnine, Ourika

Ninety days outside the Schengen area – the medina, Fès

For several days, Tom and I stayed in the Bird’s Nest, an upper room in Palais el Mokri, which is truly a palace, on a hilltop above the medina in Fès.

The view from our “dining room”

It was a little like staying at Miss Haversham’s place. Built in 1906 for the Pasha of Casablanca, his descendants are now restoring their magnificent inheritance, an enormous project, and renting out rooms on Airbnb. They’ll also cook for you, and bring very decent meals to your rooms.

The place is magnificent. Dilapidated, but magnificent – and worth every penny of the $23/night we spent to stay there!

Our dining room
The windows in our bedroom
Coming up the stairs into the Bird’s Nest
Doors in the Bird’s Nest
Looking out over Fès from our room. See the grass on the roof tiles?

Palais el Mokri is about a ten minute walk from the souks, museums, and restaurants of the medina, or old city, of Fès.

Here’s a peek into what we saw there:

The kitchen at Glaoui Palace
Artist at work
Pieces for sale
The souk in the medina
Snails for sale. Lots of them.
A man who was sitting on the ground shelling peas
A woman begging
Vegetables for sale
Dye pots
Newly dyed clothing
Street musicians
Supplies for making slippers
Cats are everywhere
Carrying a pile of empty sacks
Donkeys are common