Saturday, August 8, 2009

Nothing......Everything

Taking a momentary pause from our regularly scheduled program "A Walk Down Memory Lane" ....
After three days up at our apartment in Paris, we gratefully rumbled down the driveway to the house around midnight last night. We quickly emptied the car, made the Josie call--Joooooooossssiieeeeeeee--to check that all was right in cat world-read: not stuck up in a tree-and collapsed in an exhausted heap to bed. Around 2:30am I was rousted from my sound sleep by the pitiful squeakings of a wee little mouse in our bedroom. I fumbled around for the flashlight, cracked open an eye, and groggily followed the beam to the source of the sound. There was Josie, lolling around on the floor, on the J-O-B, or not, as the case may be, playing with her latest victim. Before I could gather the 'rescue' equipment and return to the bedroom, she had put the little bugger out of his misery....in one swift gulp. I know it's natural, but those years as a child when I had my little pet gerbil, well, that just translates to me always feeling bad for the little guys. But I digress...

So I collapsed back into bed, and though my eyeballs went right back to sleep, my brain decided to ruminate....and I just laid there hanging out...and that's when it struck me. Nothing. That's all I heard...glorious, wondrous nothing. Our street in Paris is very quiet at night, for being in the middle of a major metropolis, but here in the country you really experience the true meaning of nothing....and in the short time we've now lived here, it is Everything.

During the day, when I sit in the house working at the pc and I stop for a moment to collect a thought or ponder the stupidity of a particular French situation...I am not interrupted by anything...I have to specifically focus to even hear something. The rustling of the trees...the distant hum of farm equipment that only rears it's head during particular periods--planting, tilling, wheat/corn culling, tilling again--the occasional moo of cows in neighbouring fields or the slightly off-crowing of our nearest neighbours' rooster (they are about a 10min walk from us) -he thinks the sun rises at 2 p.m. It's not just the thick stone walls that muffle the sounds, though I will forever love them for that particular benefit :), it's just that we have found the actual, physical meaning of peace. A peace so profound that we still struggle to believe we've found it this early in life....the kind of peace that no matter how shitty your day, and believe me we do have some shitty ones, you can stop, sit out front on the bench, take a walk down the drive, stand immobile and look in any distant direction from the house, circle the pond or just lay in the grass and stare up... and literally feel it drain away. Never, in all my dreamy days in Paris, did that ever happen...and why? Because there is just too much everything there, no moments of nothing.
T and I have lost count of the times we've discussed this very thing and still remark every time we come home, 'God, I love it here--it's so beautiful, and so peaceful'....so zen. And in today's day and age you need that, that moment of Nothing, so you can jump right back into the pool of Everything and love it all over again.

So I leave you with two of my favourite contemplation images (do you know how hard it is to just pick two?) that always make me think 'what is it that they see?'....maybe something.....and yet, maybe they too are happy with their nothing.

6 comments:

Captain Dumbass said...

It's hard to imagine you can have that in the middle of Europe where there are so many people. It looks beautiful.

the fly in the web said...

Lovely, isn't it?

L.R. M-J said...

Cpt-amazingly, most of Europe actually looks like this! But most of what tourists usually see is the 'big city'...thus, so much beauty is wasted. Am doing my bit, one blog at a time...ha ha.

Fly-yes, oh yes it is...even in the darkest of times (I'm getting there in my catch up game) we found the beauty ;)

Frances said...

What a lovely post! "Ponder the stupidity of a particular French situation" made me laugh out loud!! I know what you mean about the peace, no traffic noise, it is amazing. Although I have found night time loud sometimes because we have an owl living right outside the house who twit-twoos like a car alarm!

L.R. M-J said...

Frances, we too have an owl that's been here for two summers now--we love to hear his evening hoots, but our thick walls mean we hear nothing in the house, lucky us apparently...I feel for you though, recalling the cooing pigeons in our garden in Paris who were light retarded and didn't realize that they shouldn't be conversing until AFTER the sun rose!

KateC said...

'"Ponder the stupidity of a particular French situation" made me laugh out loud!!'


Me too! It reminds me of when I used to live in NZ. It's part of being a foreigner abroad, finding things that are ludicrous from your outside perspective but are completely ingrained in the place you are living! Hub does it too, now that he lives with me in the US.

Your home looks like a beautiful, beautiful place. Your pets are adorable too!