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Even in Provence, someone has to do the ironing. The crinkles in the linen, while charming, will not undo themselves irregardless of the Summer humidity. And so I pull the bathrobe off of the folded ironing board, lug it into the living room and get to work.

While I am most certainly a visual person, I have begun to listen to podcasts, occasionally, to focus my ruminating mind while I am in the midst of repetitive tasks. Elise Loehnen’s “Pulling the Thread” has been a recent go-to of choice, perfect for the many, many existential questions that rumble around my brain. I can’t help but wonder at her confidence while she interviews the Jungian analyst, professor and 85 year-old James Hollis. Author of 20 books. But of course it is actually my lacking of self-assuredness that has drawn me to listen to precisely this episode, precisely today.

I put down the iron occasionally to lean over to my notebook; jotting plot-lines for how to live a life. How to go above and beyond the status quo to exercise one’s calling. A purpose. There are many words underlined upon the page and spaces left so as to be filled in at some later, wiser date. I ask myself the same questions all the time. I have been asking them for all of my adult life. Their repetition is like a rollercoaster or as reassuring as a heartbeat, depending.

While listening, digging into the exchange of ideas, I lift my face towards a sky that looks like how the iron’s steam feels. I have been “waiting on the light.” That is an expression that I use every year at this time, when there is the most subtle of shifts in the afternoon from scalding blue-white to gold. Although it usually glides like clockwork, this year it is yet to come. The tourists still crowd the Pont d’Avignon. It has been an especially noisy summer, running like a machine, nonstop, even through the dark.

The constant chatter of our current news cycle brays even louder. It has more than rattled me. It has silenced me. I am overwhelmed with feeling for the pain shot through our world. Watching genocide. Like an infant, I don’t really know what to do with it, other than cry, scream. Or retreat into silent watching, waiting for a sign.

James Hollis seems to find me as I fold my t-shirts, press, then fold again. He is saying that to be grown up has little to do with the outward signs that we have traditionally assigned, especially in gender roles, but rather that it is to be found in holding yourself accountable. To the true expression of yourself, your soul, and the journey that your story tells. Not to be prisoner of it. And this even goes so far as to not only doing the work on your “shadow self” (this is Jung, after all), but to be accountable for your part in relieving the shadows of the collective. The paradigm, as Hollis offers, is “to find what supports us when nothing supports us.”

At this, I unplug the iron, perch on the couch, my thumbnail resting between my teeth.

I know what they mean by this. For it is important to how I have (largely) lived, whether purposely or not, as my career permitted or did not. If the presenter of the podcast, tenacious in her questioning, holds an inner confidence, I can remember mine: that I care deeply about my fellow living creatures and the wild beauty of this maddening world and sometimes I have the ability to communicate something (underlined, with spaces left to fill in) about what we are living through together. Be it through a word or a detail of an old building captured on my phone. There is some purpose within that.

I need to stop waiting on the light. I can be child-like, that’s fine in its way, but I can remember…what we all know, if we inquire with enough patience…that I can be the adult in my room. And I can try, despite the ruling circus of fear, to bring forth tiny bursts of change. And that…is light.

* It has been quite some time since I have posted here but I never forget. I hope that everyone who sees this is doing as well as possible.

As always, with love from Provence,

Heather *

I bought the world.
We were late to arrive at the déballage. The antique dealers were already starting to pack up as the heat was intense. I sent L in to ask the price of the globe, then flashed two raised palms in response behind the seller’s back. Sold, to me, for ten euros.
I paused before clicking the switch once we were home, but believe it or not, it works.
The world still lights up.
It lights me up despite its faults. It is outdated, this world, with countries holding names like kingdoms, drawn disproportionately so that one might guess that the mapmaker was from Africa in general or a Madagascar as long as China, in particular.
It is an explorer’s map, with grand-sailed vessels dusting the seas and portraits of Cook and Vasco de Gama here and there, their faces stern.
I was an adventurer, too.
With a sparkly fingernail, I can point and trace the many places where I have been. Just the act of doing so makes me smile. It is a private joke, for I don’t speak of those travels now. No one would believe me.
But I bought the world… to remember.
Even as the tectonic plates are shifting – and like the globe, that former life is now a misnomer – it remains, the world, a very big place.
When I am frustrated or feel blocked, I like to say so to myself, quietly.
At night in the dark of my apartment, the globe, turned on, glows surprisingly red.
“It is like Life,” I think.
“It is like my heart.”

I took the garbage out just now. On the corner, there is a giant old house with a walled-in garden. Sometimes there are birds singing and that was the case today. So I stood really still, tilting my head upwards, craning my neck to look past the waves of bamboo and into a new-leafed tree. “Magpie?” I wondered. But I don’t really know their calls and could see nothing so I simply stayed and listened to the melody. It was insistent. A refrain repeated over and over that could have been titled, “Joy” but for all I know that winged one was just complaining to his neighbors. I realised that the sun was touching my skin, that it was warm, that I was just fine without a coat or woollen anything. It felt good and I was lifted, me, just there, in the middle of the street.

The wind has been busy and the rain overfloweth to the point that the Rhône threatened to come into town. The fête foraine, or amusement park, set up just on the other side of the rampart wall from where I live, decided to leave early because of it, much to my relief. I prefer birdsong to adolescent screams, no matter how filled with wonder they might be. My box of an apartment is quiet again while the world is breaking into being outside, over and over and over. What difference this is from the covid lockdowns where silence was everywhere and a warning. One that left its imprint on me. I am different now than I was before in more ways than I can count, fingers and toes included. 

Yesterday, I finally rolled out the red antique carpet that my ex had dropped off a few years ago; practically the last that I have heard from him. It’s funny how fifteen years can be so easily swept underneath. He left me the carpet and a coffee table from Rajasthan, perhaps because they reminded him of me, of the life we had together, for that was where we ate for the first three years of living together. The rug is heavy and worn. I dragged it into place and was not prepared for the scent of my dogs that arose, both now deceased, their golden hair still stuck in places along with a dried up cockroach who had come along for the ride. I told myself that it was ok to cry if I wanted to, but I couldn’t. My tears would have been like the river and swept me off to sea. I got out the vacuum and opened the transom above the door instead, uncertain as always.

My current companions apartment down the way is tiny but it has a tub to sink in, plus views to wish upon and a small yard. In French we would call it un jardin, a garden, although nothing is really cultivated in it beyond new memories. I have just gotten back from some time there, time suspended as in parentheses, as if the world was on hold again. The last evening, my sweetheart encouraged me to get out and go for a walk. I grabbed my phone to have a camera that would make me look at the light. The light and growing things, things that are new. This person stepping gently so as not to crush the weeds and wildflowers was me but she was who? I don’t really know or at least am not as certain as I once was. So very, very much has happened I must be not the same, but different, musn’t I? 

I am not sure if I will keep the carpet. If I can just make it only memories about my sweet pups Ben and Kipling and not the representative weight of an elegant past, then maybe. I can admire the deep ruby color, like the wine I no longer drink and walk upon it barefoot, imprinting anew. For here or in my boyfriends garden, there is love as well. That word stops everything in its tracks, doesn’t it? Things may well get worse before they get better on our planet blue but happily, luckily, that one word is still here – never the same but different – and it sings like the Magpie, true. 

All that I have
done:
I danced on bars
and climbed the
Pyramids at sunset,
Have kissed movie stars
and refused their further
advances,
Drank next to Keith
Richards and walked
past Mick Jagger
in the park, under snow.
I have cried deep
with relief from
finding
a twenty on the pavement,
knowing then I could
eat, but fed a homeless
man and his dogs during
the Covid lockdowns
because I had lost a home too,
a big one, and not
only
in my heart.
I went on expeditions
up the Niger River
and down the Amazon
as if it were normal
because that is how
everyone around me behaved.
I kept so many tears
and plentiful awe close
to hand, to write;
Because the Taj Mahal
is really something, at sunrise.

Love and love and
love.

I have died
while playing the role
of Cleopatra and shed
the veils of Salomé on
a New York City stage.
So I can put myself
in your shoes
or combat boots
for I have survived
treason and
bankruptcy, moral and
monetarily held.
There is nothing,
not a dime, coming in
for my retirement.

So I rub my eyes
red, dry from too
much drifting,
this breath of in-between.
A January seeming
says “look back” with
an encouragement that
leads me to books.
Look what I have
done and ready
my stretched limbs for
coming Spring.
One not for youth,
a tender time of
petals pushing,
hoping for the surprise
of blossoms, yet
expecting none.

All that I have
tried, and what I know
only I have done.

***

Wishing you all a Happy 2024,

With much love,

Heather

Just down the street from where I live, there is a hole in the ancient fortified walls that opens on to a tunnel, the Passage Oratoire. If you cross it, a wobbly cobble stone path leads you to the heart of Avignon, even to the Pope’s Palace, le Palais des Pâpes.

There must be hundreds of people who take that route most days, on their way to work or Les Halles or shopping. It is a locals thoroughfare. And yet, how few would acknowledge the seated thin man with legs tightly crossed, over one another, his head nearly always tucked deeply into a time-browned paperback. Perhaps this laissez-faire was due to the two massive Rottweiler mixes perched on each side of him, despite their rubber muzzles. His own personal gargoyles. A folded baseball cap turned on its belly was hap-hazardly left as far away from the dogs as possible, the less to intimidate and there was often a few shiny coins within it.

And yet this man, although often completely drawn into his thoughts (or perhaps because of it), had a regular relationship with quite a few of the passer-by. That was easy to see. Eventually, I too became one of his “regulars,” overcoming initial shyness to ask how he was doing, what his book was about. I would offer my hand for his dogs to sniff and soon they would see me coming before he did, their stubby tails thumping. More than once, I was left with deep scratches on my wrists from their jumping hello’s but that is ok. It was up to me to pay attention to their weighty affections, not them.

The man’s name is Cyril.

I understood and respected that he didn’t want to tell me too much of his story. That he was on the streets because his dogs were his life and they are not welcome in the shelters. Also that he was here, far removed from the many panhandlers on the main street of la Rue de la République because he didn’t want any trouble for the three of them. I never saw him in a state where he appeared drunk or high and he finally gave me the hint that what would be really helpful was food rather than money so that he didn’t have to go to the stores and risk leaving his dogs alone outside. He showed me frightening wounds from dog fights when things didn’t go well but would wave fingers in front of his face as if chasing a fly, “Oh, I will be fine, I have had worse,” followed by a toothy grin. Once opened up, he would show a confident, if chortled, laugh.

And then the COVID lockdowns started. At their most extreme, we were limited to a one-hour walk per day within a one-kilometre radius of our residence with signed “attestation de l’honneur” in pocket always. The Passage de l’Oratoire was empty.

However, at this point I had already started bringing him cans of ravioli or lentils and sausage, usually at around a cost of one euro each plus ten for the dogfood when he needed it (and he would say, “No, I am good,” when he did not). I wasn’t the only one. Someone else had given him a portable stove which he kept at his camp, just over the wall. I remember how proud he was the first time that he showed me his temporary home: “I have fresh city water that comes out of a tap from the parking garage and bushes for privacy. This is public land but the cops won’t bother me here.”

Cyril prepared me for how to visit. “Give me a shout, call my name before you come so I can hold back the dogs.” And I can tell you, the first time that he decided to let them run up to me freely without muzzles, I sucked in my breath and hoped for the best. He would come ambling down the incline towards me, barefoot and those few minutes of chat made me feel human, so much less alone. Our banter was simple but real. As it got colder, sometimes he would just stick a tousled head out from his tent and I would leave the sack for him to retrieve when he could. Always a thank you or at least a wave of appreciation was given.

The temperatures dropped as they always do right before Christmas. So I went to H&M and bought him the thickest fleece jacket that I could afford. Along with the usual offerings, I had put together tupperware boxes to share of what I had made for myself for that night, the 24th. I was so excited that I was practically bouncing as I made the walk to his camp.

Immediately, however, I knew that something was different, something was very wrong, so much so that the air crackled not with cold but as if it had been torn open. Cyril saw me staring, my bags at my sides and started to scream at me. “No, no, no. No more!” I couldn’t tell if he was pacing or stamping the ground but the dogs were growling at me from a distance and I started to be afraid. “But it is Christmas! I have…” I gestured…”I will just leave these…” but I could not finish my phrase. He was again, yelling in a high pitched voice, “NO! I don’t want ever again! Go!” The dogs were starting to make a slow slink towards me.”Gooooooooooooo!” He was howling, his face twisted. I realised that I was in danger and backed away.

I cried when I locked the door behind me at home. This was a mental breakdown that I had witnessed. I knew that I could not call for the paramedics because of his dogs or the risk that they would be taken away from him if he was hospitalised. I cried when I returned the jacket and the cashier asked no questions. I still have some of the cans in the back of my kitchen cupboard. The rest I have given away.

He was gone once the lockdowns were lifted, his camp cleared out several months later. I have only seen him once since then and again it was the dogs who recognised me first from quite a distance. I changed my path, respecting his wishes.

We can never know what others are going through or how they (or we) might behave given a change of circumstances. I am still so grateful for the exchanges that we had. Brief as they were, they were filled with resilience and light. Livelihood and shared concern.

For Cyril, I hope that he is well wherever he may be and that his dogs continue to give him much love and hope.
There is a part of me that feels certain that this is true.
Somehow.

It took me many months to tell this tale.

If you would like, you can hear me reading this post here:

A video that I posted on Instagram from that period:

*****

if a light
burns
i
will find it
stumbling
foot forward
nose to the
air
billowing
below
my blindfold.

my many
floundering. ways
but
ceaseless days
of
searching
have kept
my senses
sharp

a mother
yet not
with child
i lean
on
the connecting strings
another life of
listening
for
that giving
harp

****

If you would like to hear my reading of this poem, you may do so here:

I miss you all. I miss writing and sharing all that I love. Such an incredible community you are. These are strange times, still, for so many of us. All the more reason to be grateful for what is real.

With much Love,

Heather