the path through the rocks

I spend part of my year in a forest by a lake, among huge granite boulders like great sleeping animals, rock and tree cohabiting, adapting to each other.

This is where I come for stillness, to write, to feel the expanse and spaciousness that is ours when we stop cramming every minute full.

This is also where I learn from trees, find green healing, remember the way a tree joins heaven and earth – arguably our task, too, in our inner lives.

I walk the forest, listen for the birds, the rivers, the cascades, the stories of the wildwood that rustle in the leaves above me and the growth on every side, think of the great interlocking network beneath my feet, the mycorrhizal network that keeps each tree in connection with the all, the forest, and carries its own stories of carbon, sugars, water, messages from tree to tree. How much we can learn from such an ecosystem – invisible, utterly interconnected, vital.

In the forest, I walk on paths trodden since the Iron Age (the great oppidum whose ramparts are shown above is mentioned in Caesar's De Bello Gallico, The Gallic Wars, and I like to think that it was the last village to hold out in the face of Roman invasion, as in Asterix) and possibly since the Bronze Age and the late Neolithic before that.

Beyond the forest, our ancestors live on visibly in the great structures they've left; structures whose purposes we're unclear on, but that they had purpose we can be sure. This great longbarrow, allée couverte, dates from the late Neolithic; has been standing for more than 5000 years. I smile at the inscribed pairs of breasts – the Great Mother – and the inscribed 'axes' that to me look much more like phalloi, but there – who am I to question the experts?

In the forest I step into a different kind of time. It's not simply that it – in human terms – so clearly stretches back so far into the past, but also that it allows me what Thoreau described as a 'broad margin' to my day, and my life. I love this; love the unaccustomed spaciousness where I'm not striving for anything, trying to complete anything, trying to get to the end of/get on top of anything; be responsible to anyone; I'm simply letting the natural rhythms of my day and night unfold in forest time. Everyone needs a broad margin to their day.

 

One of the things the French do so well is their holy-wells-come-lavoirs, just outside a hamlet. This one is dedicated to St Jean, and there's a sculpture in the niche of a very homely saint with a big head.
Ever pragmatists beneath the romantic veneer, the French have diverted the water from many wells into channels and baths where until relatively recently the village women would bring their laundry. I love this mixing of the sacred and the secular.

In my time in the Pyrenees I washed all my clothes in local lavoirs; sometimes too my hair, when the mountain streams were too tumultuous or cold.

Because food is important to the French (in which I'm including the Bretons for my purposes here), another thing they do well is the picnic bench. Here's a beauty: right next to the well-lavoir, there's what looks like a mini-monolith off to the right, and the table itself is capped with an old stone.

Next to it is this ultraviolet hydrangea, ubiquitous in Brittany, and truly here the colour of heaven.