At One With The World

It’s Tuesday which means Nathalie from the Auberge does the ballet run and munchkin will not be back until 6pm.  In addition, the weather from southern europe has, for once, won the battle with that of the north resulting in a day of sunshine and warmth usually only reserved for mediterranean resorts.  In any case the fresh air and sunshine will do me good, so I go for a hike.

I decide to take the path that my friend Inger pointed out to me. Inger is a solid, straight talking Brit and when she said it was a good walk, she omitted to say to this flighty, capricious Brit that crampons and an oxygen mask were advisable.  I made it to the top having blown more than a few cobwebs away - my arteries were sandblasted by the effort – and sat down on a log to partake of a sacred moment with my water bottle and my latest read: Lucy Edge’s Yoga School Drop Out. 

Sometimes books are just so good you have to take them everywhere with you and this is one of them.  Edge has written a memoir somewhat in Elizabeth Gilbert’s style (Eat,Pray,Love) about her search for a more meaningful life around the ashrams of India.  I like her writing voice and we share the same attitude to yoga.  We love it, appreciate all it has to offer but want everyone to lighten up a little along the road to enlightenment.  Sometimes yoga instructors or even your fellow classmates (yogis/yoginis) feel the need to impose their beliefs and systems on you and this can become a little…oh here we go… tiresome and then what happens is that the class turns into one long excruciating round of agonising poses as you battle against the enforced brainwashing.  If ever I open a yoga school I shall call it The Laughing Buddha and hold classes in giggling with a series of sniggerasanas.

I make myself comfortable on the log.  I’m at a good bit where Lucy, who is looking for a man on her way to finding bliss, has fallen for an Italian named Bruno but is struggling with raga (attachment to pleasure) on the beach, as the sight of Bruno frolicking in the surf fills her with insatiable desire.

Now, in my opinion romance and yoga always spell trouble.  At the Sivananda yoga school in Geneva I once became besotted with  a teacher who arrived not in the usual orange robes of the Sadhu but stallion like on a Harley Davidson (think Paul Newman in The Great Escape).    I couldn’t concentrate and had problems with my underpinnings throughout the whole lesson.

At one point Lucy meets a Swiss called Emile and I get all excited for her envisioning a life of security full of  fresh air and cheese but alas he is leaving for Switzerland that night.

I am startled as a Darth Vader figure on a bike hurtles towards me.

“Brarbrar” shouts the mountain biking adolescent which I translate as helmet-speak for bonjour!  At least that is what I presume he says as Swiss youth are polite.  Although he possibly could have been shouting Attention! (Get out the Way!) but I’m having a sacred blissful moment sitting on my log and all is good with the world.

After a while I resume my hike and make my way westwards towards the avenue of statues to see if the man in the woods, whom noone has ever seen and I doubt even if he exists, has resumed his woodland art.  I walk further and further into the woods when suddenly I round the bend and see a fire outside the old abandoned hut.  I stop not sure whether to proceed then go a few steps further and see a man with long grey hair in a red checked shirt sitting on the ground in front of the fire.  It is a beautiful tableau, the sun, the birds singing, the sound of rushing water from below and a man enjoying a moment alone with nature at one with the world.  Maybe it is all the thoughts of yoga, maybe I’m a scared chicken but something makes me abandon my plans and turn around not wanting to invade this moment of sacred privacy.