Maurice Godefridi

· 01 Jan 2021

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Reminder. 17 years ago.

1 January 2004: an old French New Year's wish 'Au gui l'an neuf'
With the mistletoe (Gui), with M. and with all the other people and herbs from Bellegarde walked into the New Year.
Our first walk on the first day of 2004. We follow the path 87/ 88 behind the house of the Ditman family. Mr and Mrs Ditman decorate about 1 km of driveway to their house in the summer and give us the impression that the street belongs to them too. The rest of the valley (slopes, stream and pasture) is also really their property and I own (stupid) it me with my eyes and my nostrils now also a little bit. Maybe it's even more for a human being than the material possession of it. Well, the lusts and not the burdens of the landscape.

At a small collet path 88 climbs further to the big hill, but that's not for today, we descend to another valley of Combe Limbert. A beautiful place with an old farmhouse until recently used by Rolf and Rosie as a gîte and chambre d'hôte for motor enthusiasts. Unfortunately with the many rain from early December the whole mountain with house and already 15cm has fallen. Not much but enough to dislocate the entire building and make it uninhabitable. Rolf and Rosie now live further down the road to Bellegarde in a cottage they previously rented as a holiday home. Nature in Bellegarde, beautiful but also a bit inexorable, especially in winter.

We are actually 14 days on a retreat in the mountains of Bellegarde-sur-Diois. In an empty house, a room with nothing but a mattress and a bottle of lavender oil. Without radio or TV, no music but a few books and a laptop.
The kitchen with 1 table, 2 chairs and a wood stove. A fire that we keep burning with waste wood, floorboards and antique beams from our neighbor's house.
In the evening in our vegetarian hotel followed a conversation between 'un professeur de yoga' and others about fasting (le jeune) and about (once again) everything is spirit, or rather matter does not exist. I myself have only thought and kept silent, even because my French is not good enough to have philosophical conversations. Lucky but! So I thought I did, and I thought, give me the spirit of matter'. The smell of wood and soot, the roughness of old boards, the scratches of burrs on my skin, the tattooing of Tineke (just for a moment). And I thought, too, but didn't, if I slapped the professeur over the head, would he experience that as a ghost? #herinnering #wandelen #nieuwjaar