Van Gogh walked here

I took one last train trip before leaving Paris – to Auvers-sur-Oise, the tiny town about 20 miles from Paris where Vincent Van Gogh lived and painted a few months before finally shooting himself.  I missed the daily train from Paris, so I took the RER (suburban train) to Pontoise and then a bus from the train station. Arriving on an empty street in front of city hall, I was surprised at how few tourists were there compared to the numbers at Giverny.  I walked in solitude up a hill toward the “tourist information” building and watched alone a little video about Van Gogh’s stay in Auvers.  Then, with the map provided, I followed a winding path through the village to visit some of the scenes Van Gogh painted while he was a resident.  He was a prolific artist wherever he was, and there were a number of sites marked with a print of the painting that represented it, scattered up and down tiny roads and farmland.

"Wheat Field with Crows"

I was alone most of the time, wandering through cobblestone streets and cornfields and past an old church – the painting of which I had seen the week before at the  Musée d’Orsay.  Then I headed up a dirt path to the cemetery where VanGogh is buried next to his brother Theo.

Wheat fields through the graveyard gates

I had expected a scene at the cemetery similar to the one at Père Lachaise in Paris, the tourist-crowded final resting place of a number of other famous people (Chopin, Oscar Wilde, Abelard and Heloise, and Jim Morrison are among those buried there).  Instead, I walked through iron gates and entered a quiet, windy graveyard on top of a hill, and no one was there.  I easily found the Van Gogh plot along the stone fence where the map said it would be.  It was covered with ivy and weathered with time and was so simple. Sitting down on a stump across from it felt like something between hanging out with an old friend and being granted a private audience with one of the most famour people in the world. So beloved now, he lived some desperate last months here in Auvers-sur-Oise. He had sold only one painting during his ten-year art career, yet he was consumed with painting more – borrowing money for supplies, living on coffee and bread in a little room.  He shot himself in one of the cornfields I walked through, too ashamed to ask his brother for money again.

Van Gogh had planned to be a minister before he scandalized the church hierarchy by identifying with and living among the poverty-stricken peasants he ministered to, and then he flunked out of seminary. Later he would write to his brother Theo: “I have a terrible need of – dare I say – religion, so I go outside to paint the stars, to feel the stars in the infinite above clearly. “  As an art student, he originally used somber shades to realistically represent scenes, but he became fascinated – like the Impressionists he studied with – by light. Soon, he was transforming the everyday scenes around him – his bedroom, the church down the road, sunflowers in a field, people on the street – by painting the light that suffused them, and rendering them vibrant and alive on the canvas.   Sitting on the stump next to his grave surrounded by some of the scenes he painted, I am thinking of how beloved those paintings became over the 120 years separating us. Now we crowd around them and buy prints for our homes; our children recognize and delight in them. We can’t get enough of his starry nights and vivid flowers and luminous people.  I found myself hoping that  Van Gogh somehow knows this, that his life and work and self were not the big mistake he thought they were that day he decided to end it, that he knows how those everyday things he rendered magical with his paintbrush touch us way over here in the 21^st century.

I am about to head back to the everyday things of my life, which includes a bunch of broken people – the obviously broken ones who knock on the door in search of a place to sleep or a bit to eat or a pair of clean socks – as well as the not so obviously broken, which includes pretty much everyone else. I am thinking that it is a fine and wondrous thing to be sitting on a stump next to the grave of this famous Dutchman in a beautiful village in France, but that it’s probably time to direct my love and energy again to the people in my own world who are just as desperate to find meaning and usefulness in their own particular lives in the Here and Now. How I would like to see like Vincent did, to work the magic of turning the everyday into shimmering light, to have those eyes capable of beholding the truth behind the motliness.   My last days in Paris I am beginning to really look forward to loving the people in my real life – seeing the Light in them.

Poor bum on the side of the road...

A friend sent this lovely video…

I was dying to take a train trip during my last week in Paris, and one of the two destinations I had in mind was Giverny – home of Claude Monet.

It’s very popular with tourists, and the directions are pretty clear-cut:  Take the Rouen-bound train from Gare St. Lazare to Vernon. Then take a bus, rent a bike, hail a taxi, or walk the four miles to Giverny.   The train situation felt complicated to me only because of my lack of confidence: So many people! So many trains! But I got some (more) practice asking directions and chatting with fellow commuters and somehow got on the right train heading in the right direction.

I decided to take the walking option and set off in the direction toward which the bike rental folks pointed me: down the road, over the bridge, and then along the footpath to the right.  This would be the bridge over the Seine – yet so different than the Seine running through Paris: grassy banks, barge-less waters, no one walking along the bridge but me.

Turning right past the bridge, I found myself on a dirt path running beside a rural highway lined with houses, many of which had vegetable gardens and gardeners out front. I dropped my adopted Parisian reserve and waved bonjour every chance I got.  French gardeners seem to enjoy talking about what they’re growing as much as any other variety, and they happily chatted about their spinach, carrots, and chickens.  As I continued my walk I realized the path was growing narrower and closer to the road, which was getting a lot more traffic from big trucks – and that there were no bikes at all.  I began to get the feeling that, as interesting as this all was, it might not be the path to Giverny.

In French, instead of asking if you are on the “right road”, you ask if it is the “good” road – la bonne route. Backtracking about a mile and a half down the path I had been on, I was directed by one of the gardeners to the abandoned railroad track that runs along a ridge behind the houses I had been walking in front of – access to which was way back down by the bridge.  So back I went, then up, then along the path that gave me another view of the same houses – the clotheslines, the tricycles, the chicken coops and bean teepees.

And then I came upon a small wooden arrow pointing away from the track and up further along the hill through a pasture. Although still no town in sight, a path through a pasture on a hill somewhere near Giverny looked pretty fine to me.

Last part of path to Giverny

It wasn’t long before the path turned into a building-lined road, and after one last, compulsive question about the good road to someone watching me from their window, I saw this hopeful sign.

A good road for sure

And the rest was exactly what I had come to expect – and more – from the guide books. A charming town, a beautiful home, a breath-taking garden, an arched bridge over a lily pond – with sunlight and school children, and other visitors as awe-struck as I was.  I felt like I was inside a Monet painting; and in some ways, that is almost true – in the sense that you get to actually roam around and through the color and light that he created through his gardening instead of with his paintbrush. In his later years, as Monet began to lose his sight, he stayed at home more and more, painting the garden and creating a garden worthy of painting.  Just like his paintings still gracing museum walls, the beauty he created in his garden lives on all these years later.

Downtown Giverny

Monet's Garden Field Trip

Monet's House

Monet's Water Lilies

After a few hours of touring, I ignored the guidebook’s suggestion to take the shuttle or taxi back and set out walking again, confident about the good road this time.  However, my ten miles or so of wandering had made me late for the train I thought I was catching back to Paris and I had about two and a half hours to kill (or enjoy) before the next one.  So I backtracked again, from the train station to a little sandwich-selling bakery and toward those grassy banks of the Seine.  There, I found myself just sitting and staring – the wildflowers on the bank, the quiet waters, my hot feet in the cool clover.

On the banks of the Seine

The first person I had asked about the good road (after I realized I might not be on it), a tiny old woman picking up her mail, had replied kind of philosophically, “But there are several roads to Giverny. .  . ” I could continue on the busy one I was on, or I could head back to the railroad tracks; I could hail a shuttle or taxi -  or I could choose to follow the tracks into town or the arrow through the pasture.  And I still would have eventually found myself in Giverny (the French way of describing location – “to find oneself”), and then Vernon, Paris, and Gainesville again.  For me, the good road included the “wrong” way along which I found the vegetable gardens, and the long one which caused me to miss the train and led to a little nap on the banks of the Seine.

Again, I’m confronted by the concept of the “right” road – the idea of a direct and efficient path to a glorious destination – which I know in my heart to be (excuse me) bullshit, but still feel compelled to look for, and to think I am supposed to be on at times.  I hope I have unraveled that concept for myself for a while, maybe learning to replace more often the “right” with the “good.” There are several paths to Giverny, and I’m glad for the one that set me wandering, asking questions, seeking directions, and – lately – sitting in clover on the banks of the Seine.  In a world where we really can’t be sure what we’re doing here or for how long, being lost (and knowing it) can sometimes be the good road itself.

Pond in the Parc Floral

I started out the week with a return to the Bois de Vincennes – the beautiful and ancient woods that begin only a little over a mile from my apartment. This time I wanted to walk to the far end to the “Parc Floral,” a formal garden I had heard about.  Because I started my walk on a weekend morning, I was virtually alone in the garden.

It was as magical as I have come to expect – lovely flower gardens dotting green hills, a pond (with swans of course), and cool enough for a light jacket.  After scoping out the park’s expanse, I spied a bench up on a hill and walked toward it thinking I might pull out the book I brought with me and read a bit.

But I ended up just sitting.  I thought about what Joe had told me several years ago when he came to France to study abroad in college, how he found it so funny how French people would just sit on park benches and do nothing – no reading, no knitting, no busy-ness of any kind, just sitting.  I had noticed this too.  A photo he took that year is now hanging in my living room – a mystery man on a bench in Nantes looking so contemplative and peaceful.  Today I get it.  For one thing, it’s so beautiful  – the people in the park, the flowers, the gathering clouds, the flowing landscape; sitting and just watching seems so natural.  For another, I’m kind of tired, as I imagine most people here are after walking along crowded streets or climbing up and down stairs in busy metro stations; it feels good to sit.  But I can also sit, undistracted, because I’m happy.  I’m happy to be still.

I realize I’m happy on that bench in a way I haven’t been for a while – not distracted or entertained, but . . . content.  Content with the view from the bench on the hill in the garden in the Bois de Vincennes. But also content with the wide view of my life from here – the big picture.

Spaciousness is a word used in popular American Buddhist writings of the sort I wanted to inhale while Ben was in treatment. It’s the opposite of feeling backed into a corner, or cringing as if the sky is falling in on you. It’s room to take a deep breath and to see possibilities. It also implies a kind of large view, with perspective. You see the truth of things but they do not crowd you or chase you or “haunt” you;  they are simply the truth – the “blessed facts” as Charles Williams (obscure British writer I love) would say.

I think Paris has helped me regain that broad view.  What a long written history this city has!  I have relished having the time to read its story and to walk its streets layered with deeds done and their repercussions, good and bad. The house in which Abelard and Heloise made passionate love in the Middle Ages faces the palace where the Crusaders gathered before embarking on their murderous campaigns and sits around the corner from tiny passageways where the Resistance ducked away from the Nazis, along the Seine where bodies washed up from the massacre of Algerians, near the banks where countless students have strolled and talked philosophy, within a short walk of the silliness of Paris Plage, the dinner boats with their bright lights on the waters at night, the polluted waters now empty of fish. On the plane over, a French man sitting next to me talked about the his people’s tragic sense of story – that they leave, for the most part, the car chases and happy romances for Americans to tell.  Their history is too complicated and they know it too well to write the simple, “feel good” story.  They’re more inclined to write the complicated, messy version. And somehow that usually turns out to be beautiful as well – because it’s so human.

And that’s what I’m thinking of today on my little French bench – how incredibly good it is to have lived my own version of the complicated, messy story of human life.  And to still have the time to work on making it beautiful.  This is partly a function of reaching the middle years, I think – the ability to see your own life spread out below from up on that hill and to see it in the context of the lives of others: the big picture. Like Paris, I am a woman with a history.  And I think I may adopt her motto (from her own middle ages): Fluctuat nec mergitur – “She floats, nor does she sink.”

Paris Plage

One of the joys of being here in Paris has been the anonymity. I know virtually no one here.  At the height of my popularity, when Joe, Mary, and my friend Sylvie were in town, I knew three people – out of two million. I carry identification and the phone numbers of local people who would recognize my name  – Joe’s friends – so if I am run over by a scooter or find myself in other dire straits, help can be located (or family notified). But being unknown is not a problem for me here; I have been basking in the solitude and tranquility of it.

The reserve of Parisians helps.  There was no effort to get to know me by my neighbors – although when needed they have been kind and helpful:  the old woman next door coming to my aid when I was locked out, the young man downstairs sharing his newspaper with me. I have had the feeling that in a pinch I would not be alone. But the overall ways of the people here – avoiding eye contact, passing by silently, the way they don’t move out of the way when one is obviously trying to get by – all contributed to my feeling practically invisible. In a good way.

I wonder how much of it is a result of living in a big city and needing to create “force fields” of solitude around themselves in such a crowded place. Or whether it is connected to language and the fact that French, like many languages, has two forms of “you” – vous for those with whom you have a respectful distance (elders, strangers and acquaintances) and tu for friends and children. Having to consider your relationship before opening your mouth has got to have a psychological impact. As must the mutual decision required to “tutoyer” – to address each other familiarly.

The French apparently find our familiar ways, especially the way we smile at strangers, to be goofy at best, phony at worst. I was a little hurt by this when I first heard it – especially having been described in a French class (we were learning descriptive adjectives) as “the one who is always happy.”  But it doesn’t seem offensive or strange to me now. It feels delicate and precise in a way we often are not. I wonder if our smiliness does reflect, if not a conscious insincerity, a kind of cock-eyed optimism about relationships that isn’t quite honest, a resistance to acknowledging that friendship is a process , the first step of which is “well, what do we have here?”  Which is the sentiment the look Parisians give you expresses, if they look at you at all.

If I were going to generalize about Parisians in return, I would have to say they appear to take things a little too seriously. Ben commented on it when he was here over the winter, that in the most romantic settings couples often wear expressions that look like they are about to break up with each other or are meeting to discuss the next mass protest (a frequent occurrence here; the daily papers print maps to show which roads will be blocked by demonstrators on any given day).  But that would be ignoring all the fun they seem to be having with each other. The aforementioned couple would probably, at the same time, have several limbs intertwined (I have felt myself blush at the degree of “public displays of affection” people engage in here). And there are always groups of friends picnicking in the park, laughing in bistros, and now playing in the sand at “Paris Plage” – a temporary, fake beach created on the banks of the Seine.  They obviously know how to really enjoy one another once the boundary between stranger and friend is crossed – and they find the time to do it.

Playing at Paris Plage - You can't take these folks TOO seriously

More Paris Plage silliness - cooling off in the mist

I am beginning to miss the genuine “tu’s” in my life a lot. I have learned that while I am a person who requires a certain amount of solitude to thrive, I also want the warmth of good, old friends who smile when they see you.  “When I get home,” a phrase I am thinking more and more these last days, I want to make time to enjoy those I really know and love and who know and love me back. I want to do a lot more of the North American equivalent of sipping wine while picnicking (actually illegal where I come from), and playing petanque in the sand. The elusive Balance – c’est possible, non?

Celebrating at the St. Fargeau stage of the Tour de France

Everything I am doing feels like it has an explanation point after it now.  It’s hard to believe I’ll be home this time next week (for one day, before leaving for Colorado to visit my parents).  Very hard to believe I’ve been here for six weeks.

Joe and Mary returned last week from Togo and we were running around doing things Joe wanted to do his last week in Paris (he’s heading to NYC, then Guatemala, then Mexico, then “home” to Tennessee).  Highlights included joining one million other people at the Eiffel Tower to watch the fireworks (I’ve never seen anything like it) and renting a car and driving to St. Fargeau to see the Tour de France cyclists flash by.

Wounded Portugese cyclist slings water bottle to Mary

Now it’s just me and Mary at the apartment till Wednesday when a French student arrives for an overnight  stay, followed by Alex-from-New-Zealand on Thursday. Joe and Mary met him in Togo and he’s looking for an apartment in Paris for the fall. It will be a “l’Auberge Espanol” experience in Paris – for just a couple nights.

Even though it sounds like a lot of rushing, I am still savoring every minute of this experience, noticing every little detail, enjoying it all.  I haven’t fully realized, fortunately, that I may not ever be back. I feel still like I did the first day – just wide-eyed and happy to be here. I am fortunate, too, that Mary seems to enjoy wandering about looking for obscure historical sites. We sought out and finally located the oldest home in Paris last night – an adventure in the wind and rain (and amidst twinkly lights, pretty cafe-goers, old shops and cobblestone streets) and then rewarded ourselves with an ice cream cone from the famous Berthillon glaciers. I tried to explain “flânerie” to Mary, which for me has come to mean also the concept of happily accepting that you may not reach your goal and just enjoying the place in which you are lost.  We’ve got some additional loose plans for today – seeking out a larger expanse of Roman Wall, having a cup of coffee at a sweet shop Sylvie introduced me to, visiting the Bon Marché – Parisian version of the old Macy’s or Gimbel’s in NYC).  Who knows what else… I am hoping to make a couple train trips next week to small, neighboring towns to see the homes of Van Gogh (Auvers-Sur-Oise) and Monet (Giverney) – and there are a couple museums we hope to visit: the Resistence Museum in Montparnasse, a museum of urban art in Montmartre, and more walks in the beautiful Bois de Vincennes… And there are the last of my French classes.

Oldest House in Paris and me

After six weeks, I honestly still feel like a child in a candy store, – bedazzled as ever by all the possibilities of this place I am right now.

Place de la Bastille

It was easy when my children were small to feel like everything held a certain unity, easy to feel that I “willed one thing” as Soren Kierkegaard suggests is crucial to the spiritual life. I wanted to raise my children well. Everything in my day could be understood within that context. What time we woke up, what and how we ate, how we entertained ourselves, what  we did together at home and away  – all were (when things were really clicking) based on the one desire of raising good people who could discover their own gifts and put them to good use in the world they were coming to know.  I loved being so fully engaged in life that way.

If that sounds a little high falutin,’ let me tell you there was a nitty-grittiness to it that made it feel like combat at times. Answering the questions of growing children, explaining  and commenting on the world and its ways amidst dirty laundry and dishes, potty accidents and other messes, drooly naps and wounds that need stitches, and vomit. There seemed to be a lot of vomit in those days among those four beautiful children. But it was engaging like I imagine combat is, all systems on go. And, somehow, it seemed easier then to … pray, if you can call it that.  I tried, for many years, to “wake up before the baby” in order to find a moment of peace to orient myself before the day began. Sitting in the big recliner in the dark each morning, I would try to imagine my day – the opportunities and challenges – and how I would respond, how I would take advantage, how I could be a good mother and human being in the middle of whatever was about to happen.  Strange that now it seems easier then; I would never have imagined that at the time.

That part of my life was always changing: kids went to school, baby was no longer a baby, added work hours away from home, college, leaving home – although there seemed to be an abrupt slamming of a door when Ben (last baby) was diagnosed with cancer at 17, right at the end of his “childhood.” Everything revolved around his recovery for three years, and when we awoke from that nightmare he was an adult. And I was strangely fifty.

This morning, when I woke up in Paris, I had E.B. White’s quote in my head: I wake up in the morning torn between the desire to save the world and to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.

I have, unquestionably, been spending the last many weeks in Paris enjoying the world in a way particularly suited to me: long walks, art and history museums, reading, strolling through gardens, learning a language, writing. This kind of stuff was a foggy dream back in the day when I was dashing through museums keeping track of kids, or hiking at the speed of a toddler.

In ten days I’m heading home to my Real Life. It is a joyful life, but one also filled with responsibility to others, of things that need to be “saved” or otherwise helped. A good life with a husband, a family, a house of hospitality. A challenging life with a father dying in Colorado, the conflicting needs of a large and every-changing household, the twenty-four hour day. The place where, no matter how tired I am at the end of a busy and productive day, I tend to wake up between 4:00 and 4:30am wondering what I am doing.

This is apparently not uncommon. I have witnessed it myself on Facebook when, sleepless and distracted, I occasionally log on to amuse myself in the wee hours.  Often there is someone else, about my age, sharing a link or offering a status report – sometimes as pointed as “Why am I awake at 4:30 in the morning?” -  followed by comments by all the others wondering the same thing.  I read someplace recently (not remembering the details is also a symptom of this mid-life business) that in the middle ages,  4:15 am was called the “witching hour” because women of a certain age – crones – would gather at that time (no Facebook) to probably complain about why they were up in the middle of the night and, apparently, to sometimes complain about the general status quo as well.  (This caused some fear among the guardians of the status quo and retribution for the women, i.e. burning at the stake.)  I have wondered lately what great actions we contemporary early-risers might take on in the middle of the night with all our energy and passion.

As it stands, my crack of dawn energy and passion is directed, like a laser sometimes, at myself. What are you doing awake at 4:30? What are you doing with all your waking hours? Time is running out… What are you going to do with the rest of it? The questions are related to the ones I hoped to form for my children when they were young: What are your gifts? How can you use them? What kind of person will you be? But at this stage in life, with so much behind me, it’s the shadow side of the questions that hounds me:  What did you do? Why did you do it? Why didn’t you do something else? And then, What are you going to make of what’s left? No wonder it’s hard to fall back to sleep.

I can see it may be time to diffuse that laser beam a little.  I am imagining that this time of abject enjoyment might be preparing me for a softer approach toward my life in general, that I might phrase those questions again like a much younger  person, one with a lot less history. To ask God or the universe how to live: to help me understand my gifts, to see what skills I could still develop –to open my eyes and my heart to identify and focus on that “one thing” for which I can live full-throttle, truly engaged. Some goodness for which I can pour myself out these later years.

I think I still have enough energy and passion to storm some more forts before this is over (it’s Bastille Day here).  But I’m going to need a little sleep.

Le Potager à l'Hotel de Ville

I posted this garden report in my Gainesville blog:

There is a wonderful demonstration garden right in the center of Paris in front of the l’Hotel de Ville, a 15th century municipal building.  The closest space we have like this is Gainesville I think is City Hall, a plain 1960s building surrounded by concrete and former goldfish ponds. Normally, the area in front of the l’Hotel de Ville is a large paved plaza area with benches and a fountain – not so entirely different. But in early June, raised beds were created in wooden boxes and installed throughout the plaza along with information on “bio” (organic) methods of gardening in small places.

They have fine weather for gardening here in the summer – about twenty degrees cooler than our summers and a little more dry. The garden is beautiful and, everytime I pass it, full of people enjoying it – which is the idea. The word for vegetable garden in French is potager, and the word for sharing is partager, so this potager for partager is also a nice play on words.

For the rest of the story, go here.

Centre Pompidou

I especially appreciated the Kadinsky and Calder exhibits because they included the biographical information about the artists and their influences. One, an early twentieth-century Russian who was painting in Germany, Paris, and Moscow during the World Wars, and the other an American sculptor with an engineering background and artist genes. I like artists in general – the courage and self-confidence they have to honor some inner drive to create, often with little appreciation and all kinds of material hardships. I like their vision – how Kadinsky’s work in the 1920s foreshadows the space-age designs of the 60s, and how once you know what to look for (thank you audio-guide) you can begin to see the things that influenced him from both the outside and from within.  Same with Calder with his playful wire sculptures and performance art, again (to me) much more reminiscent of the latter part of the century when everyone began to “get” them.  But how strange they were at the time.

Then there’s that capacity for being moved by art that we all share – even without an audio-guide. One painting of Kadinsky’s looked like space – a dark blue background with tiny points of colorful light, then larger colorful spheres and ribbon-like things that floated around it; it was beautifully quiet and  peaceful.  Another had two dark objects face to face, bearing down on one another, but with a tiny space of white between that grew larger towards the top and was filled with colorful, floating bubbles, Knowing that it was created during the height of the Second World War made me see it as the hope for peace, but I would have felt that anyway I think. Calder’s exhibit on the other hand seemed much more playful and light-hearted. People were smiling while walking through the rooms of disembodied wire busts, mobiles, and inventive toys. I’m sure they weren’t all “educated” either.

I know some people don’t like modern art much and, I have to admit, I am often confused by it.  A lot of it is not pretty and some quite disturbing. It makes me want to learn more about art and artists – both the desire to create unity and beauty and represent some underlying spiritual truth behind the “the motley world” (the name of an early Kadinsky painting)  – and the drive to show life as it really is, what it’s like here and now in this particular time frame seen through this particular pair of eyes. This interests me regardless of the genre.  What if we could all do that somehow – reflect back what is both real to us and what visions we have?  It would be very interesting, wouldn’t it, to see what others see.

Big view from the top

Open Window inside Sainte Chapelle

I woke up early after a bad night of sleep, and the last hour (in which I had forced myself to try to go back to sleep until daylight) was filled with mini-nightmares.  I was driven up a steep mountain and the only way down was via an amusement park “drop ride,”  I realized at the last minute that I was the one who was supposed to prepare the food for a big function John was organizing, and I witnessed the death of a friend in a car accident (and when I called John to tell him he said that all hell had broken out at home and he couldn’t help me).  Truly, these are great horrors of mine – heights, irresponsibility, death, and abandonment – but how does one’s mind spill them all out in less than an hour? Oh, and a little tiny dream at the end about wearing terrible shoes. I want to say that this one came out of nowhere, but I have been lately a little self-conscious about how un-Parisienne my giant Chaco-clad feet are.  So, fear of not fitting in rears its ugly head as well.

Fortunately I had laid out a plan the night before involving google maps, metro guides, a guidebook, and my little green notebook (fear of being lost) to go on another historical adventure this morning while it was cool and quiet. I was on the metro by 8:30 heading toward the Isle-de-la-Cité, the oldest part of Paris. I had always wanted to see the Conciergerie where Marie Antoinette (and many, many others) spent their final days and also the gothic church Sainte-Chapelle which is on the same Palace grounds.

The Conciergerie was finished by the beginning of the 14th century on the same grounds Clovis had established his royal residency in the 6th century.  By the end of the century, the royal residency was moved to the Louvre and the heavily fortified building became a prison instead.  It saw particularly heavy use during the Revolution(s) when one group after another chopped off the heads of all their enemies. This was the place the prisoners slept and ate their last meal before being trotted off to the Place de la Concorde (in view of the lovely Tuilleries gardens) to be executed.

Prison Cells in Conciergerie

Right next door is one of the most beautiful churches in the world, built between 1242 and 1248, and famous for its amazing stained glass – 70% of which is original. I know I sound like either a broken record or a yokel, but again I was dumbstruck by its beauty. It would have taken all day to thoroughly see the 1,113 scenes from Christian scripture depicted on the fifteen sun-lit windows (15.4 meters high) that covered three walls. It was breathtaking – the beauty, the skill, the deep love of the subject matter – and amazing, too, to watch the mouths drop open of the tourists walking into the room. What a feat to create something so beautiful and so lasting.

Two of the Fifteen Windows

And what irony that the same folks who attended mass there were busy right next door preparing to viciously chop off the heads and “break the bodies” (lash to a machine that would slowly tear then limb from limb) of their enemies. Apparently, not unlike today, they were dozing during the “love your enemy” parts of the sermon.

I came across this yesterday from my own home town. Fear, in whatever century, is the root cause of so much destruction and horror. As human beings, we all share a capacity for it. When are we going to learn a different way to handle it? It seems like it should be about time.

View from Buttes aux Chaumont

I’ve taken several excursions since my last day of class on Friday (I have only two this week, on Tuesday and Thursday afternoon), I have hiked through two woods, sleuthed out some obscure but very interesting historical sites, and visited the Musee de l’Orangerie. In between I have read from the stack of books on my desk based on whatever whim captures me at the moment: Mange, Prie, Aime (Eat, Pray, Love in English), Why the Mystics Matter Now, Paris: Biograhy of a City, What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, and The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage – often on a park bench or a tablecloth spread on the grass. Yes, I know this is heaven, and I am grateful for every minute of it.

Life has been . . . beautiful lately.  I left late in the evening Saturday night for an “historical walk” I’d been looking forward to taking;  I hoped to finish up the evening at the Seine at sunset. Because the sun sets after 10pm here, I haven’t been out  in the dark much, and I was looking forward to seeing that famous river lined with young lovers, sparkling under city lights (my cheesiness again, I know). But first – armed with my little green notebook of directions – I found the house where Abelard and Heloise fell in love, the building where Nicholas Flamel (a real person, not just a Harry Potter character) shared his home with poor folks while operating a popular cafe on the ground floor, and a piece of the Roman wall built around Paris when it wasn’t Paris yet. It was so fun looking for these place, many on obscure streets where I was the only person walking.  I don’t know why I love this so much, but I do – and it’s the perfect thing to do solo since I don’t know anyone who would tolerate the wandering required for this, or the getting lost.

Abelard and Heloise slept here

Nicholas Flamel's House

Once a Great Wall

On Monday morning, I arrived at the Musee de l’Orangerie just as it was opening. There were few people there so I could move freely from room to room listening to my audio-guide. Art museums here can be insanely overwhelming (the Louvre) or incredibly peaceful. This one was the peaceful kind.  And it’s located at the beautiful Jardin du Tuilleries which was a little busier but still pleasant on such a sunny cool day. Such a variety of human beings from so many different places strolling around the fountains, the statues, the flower gardens. I sat in one of the reclining chairs provided by the city of Paris and enjoyed watching them go by in between paragraphs of Parisian history.  Again, heaven.

Inside le Musee de l'Orangerie: Monet's Water Lilies

Outside Musee de l'Orangerie

These beautiful trips into the city were book-ended by hikes in the woods: the Bois de Vincennes again and a new “parc” that both of my daughters thought I would like: Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. Once an ancient mining site (many of the lovely buildings in central Paris were built by the stones quarried there) and then a gypsy campground, Napoleon decided to turn it into the third largest park in Paris during the early 19th century. It’s very hilly and has some lovely views.  Good hiking up and down those hills too.

I’ve mentioned “heaven” a few times, and I have thought of it occasionally when I am out and about soaking all this in. It seems childish to think of “heaven” as a place where we are continually delighted by things hand-picked for our particular desires. But I do feel that way sometimes about this place, or this time in my life.

I felt quite the opposite not so long ago. My youngest son was in the hospital possibly dying of sepsis (from chemotherapy), and I was charged with keeping a calm and positive demeanor while watching medical staff with an eagle eye (they had made some serious mistakes at this point). I was also spending many evenings with my ex-husband (a very nice man, but still sometimes hard on both of us). One night, when Ben had visitors, I slipped away to a waiting room to watch TV and found that every channel I switched to held some tragedy related to my own: a child dying of leukemia on Law and Order, a mother who killed herself because of grief over losing her son (some show about a ghost), a news show about medical malpractice…  I honestly felt like Life had to be conspiring to torture me, that there could not be a set of circumstance more perfectly devised for it. I don’t seem capable of disbelieving in a God, but I found myself doubting the existence of a benevolent God, which was even more frightening to me: an Evil Genius God plotting my demise.  (Yes, fear and grief can push one toward egomania – “Why is this happening to ME, ME, ME?).  Thus, the phone call from the hospital  bathroom floor to my husband. I was overwrought, afraid, and wondering if I was losing my mind.

This was the low point of my life so far, but I have struggled with depression in the past – the feeling that life makes no sense, and the lack of hope that it’s possible to find meaning, much less happiness in it. (Perhaps you are wondering if I am bipolar at this point? I am not; but I have experienced a range of emotions approaching both extremes – especially over the last few years).  Once, a friend – who had been called in to talk some sense into me the one time I was actually clinically depressed – asked me if I thought it were possible, even at that point, to find a winning lottery ticket on the ground. An aggravating question for someone who believes she is struggling with the core meaning and value of life, but he persisted. Is it possible, he insisted, and I had to grudgingly admit that it was, that suddenly and unexpectedly life could change radically. And therefore, statistically speaking, it was possible that my life could as well.

This thought by no means cured me; that would take a little pill, some therapy, and a trip to visit a dear friend (at least one of those things worked; I’m not sure which).  But I’ve returned to it several times in the intervening years.  And this weekend I thought of it again. Paris is an extreme good in my life. The opportunity came out of nowhere, and it feels like it contains the perfect mix of ingredients for me – the weather, the beauty, the history, the mental stimulation of learning a language, the delightful people, the markets… I couldn’t have planned it because I had no expectation of finding it so exactly right for this point in my life. And so it feels like evidence of some benevolence outside of myself – a good God perhaps, or something about Life which holds the possibility of unusual and surprising goodness – along with all the rest of it.  All I had to do was bend down and pick up that ticket.  Who would have thought?