Thistle Seeds Floating In The Wind
A Couple Floats To France To Find A Better Life
Some of us are rooted, and some of us are nomads, like the thistle seed floating in the wind. My wife and I are of the floating seed variety. Less than a week ago now we left the cacophony, speed and spiritual vacuousness of Southern California and landed in a tiny village in the French countryside - three planes, three trains and one bus later. Our goal is to heal from the normalized everyday madness of Southern California, and to read, to learn and to write again. We will not own a car. We will walk and bus as need be.
What will be written remains unclear.
We had lived in village France six years earlier, only returning to America to help care for two young grandsons. We love our grandsons beyond words, yet we could not take root in that place. We knew years ago that we could never take root there, but love allows us to tolerate and to survive things we might otherwise not.
And so with the end of this summer, our seed pods formed, and though now in our 70's we have placed our trust in our fragile thistle parachutes to land us where ever it is that we need to be. As I write I am looking out the window of our temporary abode in a limestone home built in the 1500's in a little village filled with such homes. I am surrounded by ancient stone and timbers, and in the knowledge that untold generations have sat in this same spot looking out at the village center enjoying the morning sun. And I somehow feel "held" by the ancestors. If I can quiet my mind long enough - perhaps they will speak to me.
—Gary Weglarz
How beautiful! Wishing you every happiness. 😘x
The photo is the bridge over the Tarn at Pont de Montvert, Lozere, a place I have known and loved all my life. If the thistle seeds have dropped there they are truly fortunate, though of course like everywhere else it is now a bit closer to the present century than it was. When I was sixteen I remember Abel Guin, the patron of the Auberge de la Truite Enchantee, going down to the river with a net to fill an order for truite au bleu, and then full of trout and local wine (yes, they had that then - purple ,rough and incapable of travel save to the lips!)) tottering to the farm field "camping" to listen to A Witer Shade of Pale under the stars of Mont Lozere. Blessed time.....