Fields at Bordeneuve by Rebecca Stebbins |
Bordeneuve is a place that is hard to come to and harder to
leave. It’s hard to come because of what you have to leave behind: basically,
everything that isn’t in that small space where creativity resides. Spouses,
children, friends, and all the accoutrements: laundry, for example, or cooking,
cleaning, yard work. Animals to be fed and walked and loved. Bills to be paid
and paperwork that piles up and supplies that need to be restocked and messes
to be cleaned up and is there gas in the car? And do I have everything? You
travel.
You arrive at Boussens on the crowded little train and step out
into the Midi and voilà. There you are, with just your bag, your baggage, and
yourself. And there is Noelle, who grabs your very heavy bag and heaves it into
the back of her trusty Peugeot and you are off through the winding roads of the
Ariège.
You pass farm fields and tiny villages, some with stately
little homes and others with crumbly old barns, up hills and around pastures
with sheep or goats, or little herds of cows in all of the colors that cows
come. She turns in to a rocky track, and if you look back you’ll see the snow
on the Pyrénées in the distance. You bounce down a luminous green tunnel of
trees and vines and finally you pull in to a clearing with a house to the left
and a barn to the right. That place on the right hardly qualifies as a barn: it
is lovely, spacious, and filled with just what you need. Food, silence, books,
a deep bath and a wide balcony, places to sit, to draw, to paint, to play, to
dance – yes, even enough room to dance. Indoor space and outdoor space. And no
clutter. You make a mental note: less clutter.
Blanchette & Edith, by Rebecca Stebbins |
The first day you will still be decelerating. You will
wander and sketch, flip through books of poetry, unpack. But then something
funny happens: just as you begin to accept the slowness, and the quiet, you
start to hear all the noise there. For Bordeneuve can be a very noisy place,
especially between the birds and the insects and the very loud cow a few fields
away who bellows from time to time, and the distance village bells you catch
once in a while. And that small space where creativity resides? Like the heart
of the Grinch, it grows. And grows, until it takes up all the space of all the
other stuff you left behind.
View from the end of the track by Rebecca Stebbins |
And as you slow down, matching your speed to the rhythms of
real life, you realize you have hit your stride, and you work. With a passion,
until you are tired and have to stop, and then it’s time for a nap, or a meal,
or a walk, or a bath. The choices are few, and so they are easy to make. Easy
choices reserve brain space for your creative pursuits, you think. You’re not
wasting precious time on TV, or idle chitchat, or wondering what to tackle
next. Your time feels more pure.
You wake up, and it happens again: simplicity. Except now
there’s a complication: oh! There are chickens outside the door, and perhaps
they would like a little treat. You go to look at all the different flowers in
the garden and you see dinner there too, ready for picking. You come back
inside and there’s a cat – and somehow, not by the markings but more by the
attitude, you know which cat of the four has come to visit. You are settling
in.
And one day it happens: you have to leave. And it is hard,
and you are already starting to think about arriving on the train in Boussens
and the long drive down that rocky track to come back. http://bordeneuveretreat.com/
beautiful, honest, and heart felt, your writings are like your paintings, R. Heidi xo
ReplyDeleteThis makes me smile, thank you!
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