And continuing along the yoga theme…

 

 

 

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.

A Chicken’s Ass is the Secret to a Happy Marriage

 I”m reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s Committed – A sceptic makes peace with marriage.  She is the author of the bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love where, following a devastating divorce, she takes a year off  and travels to Italy, crying over plate after plate of pasta, to India, seeking spiritual solace in an Ashram and Indonesia where she unwittingly falls in love with a Brazilian gem stone dealer.

 In Committed she explores marriage: examining her own terror of getting hitched again to Felipe the Brazlian; how it has evolved over the centuries and why so many fail spectacularly.  This is Gilbert grown up.  No more crying over bowls of pasta and navel gazing; it is a solid piece of research delving into her own psyche and the collective.

Donning her anthrolophogist hat, the book begins as a social essay charting her days spent with the Hmong in Viet Nam but although interesting you find yourself yearning for her to take off the serious Panama and put on her Aussie Outbacker with the corks dangling around the edges.  I fast forward, skip paragraphs and sometimes whole pages which reminds me of being back at school speed reading Molière.  As a researcher/essayist she gets the salient points across but it is the personal writing that Gilbert is so good at and thankfully she is soon out of the Hmong mud hut and back on dry land with Felipe writing from the  personal aspect which is far more entertaining and enlightening.  (If you have yet to discover Elizabeth Gilbert and you like this blog, go get yourself a copy…that’s me comparing myself to Elizabeth Gilbert ha ha).

So after travelling the world talking to many, many women about marriage Gilbert comes to the conclusion that the problem why so many marriages fail is one of expectation.  We, and by this I presume she means herself and those who have tried and failed to stay committed, (do I sound smug?  maybe a tad) believe that our other halves will not only help pay the bills, look after us when we are ill and put the bins out on Mondays but are also responsible for our happiness at every minute of the day.  I think she is onto something here, at least if I look around at the many around me who are divorced – not counting those who really are better off and should never have got involved with each other in the first place – I think many have blamed each other for their own failings, dissatisfactions and the downright difficulties of staying on an even keel and in happy bunny  mode through a life which is not always forgiving. 

As preparation for marriage to Felipe she lists a whole page of her own character failings and reads them out to him on the banks of the Mekong river.   (Note to reader your kitchen in Reading will do if you don’t happen to have the Mekong handy.)  At the end of a pretty honest, warts and all list which makes us want to be her best friend, she asks Felipe  in typical Gilbert style – which makes you take that wish back because she really can be too much at times -

 Do you still love me?

 To which he replies,

“I know all of this and I’ve been watching you for a very long time and I believe I can accept the whole parcel.” 

This is where you want to throw the book at her because if she doesn’t marry him I know a few thousand women who will.  That’s the thing about Gilbert and her writing, she can get a bit carried away with the me-ness and you find yourself batting for the other side on occasion.  Anyway, having wrung all the romance out of the holy matrimony of “marriage” through analysis, interviews and contemplation she starts to explore the bit that really cannot be explained away no matter what hat you are wearing at the time:  Love.  She writes of  her grandfather burying her grandmother’s ashes on the family farm and manages to convey, without once telling us, the years of love they shared and the ache in his heart since she has gone whilst  the tears gather in the rims of my reading glasses.

Of Felipe – whose faults she lists and lays out to dry in the sun for all the world to read: drinking too much wine and being hopeless with money – she writes: 

“I love this man.  I love him for countless ridiculous reasons.  I love his square, sturdy, Hobbit-like feet.  I love the way he always sings “La Vie en Rose” when he’s cooking dinner. (Needless to say I love that he cooks dinner).  I love how he speaks almost perfect English but still manages to invent marvellous words and has never quite mastered the exact wording or pacing of certain English-language idioms either.  “DONT COUNT YOUR EGGS WHILE THEY ARE STILL UP INSIDE THE CHICKEN’S ASS” is a terrific example.”

And she means that with every flaw in her being.

Jamie Oliver’s TED Prize Wish

Life coincidences are strange.  Today in the mountains one of Sophie-G’s school pals spending the holidays with us asked for a Mars Bar for breakfast.  He’s charming, smart and kind but he’s not my son and so I let him eat it with only a wry comment from me.  Later, feeling guilty, I manage to get him to eat an apple.  But still life throws me back a question mark by leading me to Jamie Oliver’s speech a few hours later and I realise how remiss I was by not refusing and  cooking up some eggs instead.  Mine was a small task and I failed.  Jamie Oliver’s task is humongous.  He is attempting to convert all Mars Bar eaters in the USA to eat apples forever.  He’s brilliant.

I go for a run and have a think

The French call jogging  “le footing” and that is more of an exact terminology.  One foot in front of the other in a bouncing motion.  Anyway I don’t even get to start my “footing” until I arrive at the flat bit at the top of the hill in the woods.  For the moment I am power walking down the hill towards the river when  I pass the couple-without-children-with-the-four-cars going off to work.  I say “bonjour” politely although without the heart chakra engaged  because I harbour a fury towards their his and her minis, the four wheel drive and the porsche.  A few years back they were burgled and ALL her expensive underwear was stolen.  In fact the claim for expensive underwear outbid the other items taken during the robbery.  I know all this because we have the same architect and Georges is our friend.  Along with the fury at the conspicuous consumption is the curiosity as to how couples-without-children live.  A life where sensible, flesh coloured underwear for easy washing is banished, I presume.  I know they spend most evenings in their jacuzzi because I can see the steam.  (This is the second jacuzzi, the first had to be torn down because they failed to ask the Commune for planning permission as it was more than the size of a garden shed – of course it was this is a couple with four cars!).  After downing a jamboree of champagne – I swear I can hear the cork popping all the way up the hill to  my house – they have wild, rampant, loud sex in every room in the house, every night.

I am now at the river.  I soldier on up the snowy path listening to JB Glazinger.  This guy makes me laugh out loud.  He is a self-development guru and has to be the biggest bragger in the world.  He is a martial arts expert, has an MBA and PHD and is taking his pilot’s license which he somehow manages to remind us about in every podcast.  I giggle inbetween pants making my way up the wiggly footpath crunching in the snow as he tells me that I am a magnificient spiritual being living in a material world.  That’s me!  I finally reach the flat bit on the running trail and start my footing but my mind, which is inclined to always take the easy way out, says “Stop!  You’ll fall and break something!” This morning it sounds uncannily like Madre.  “It’s icy and then you’ll not be able to go to London this weekend.”  I take small steps gingerly avoiding the shiny patches then remember what I learned in Martin Brofman’s seminar about perception and reflection knowing full well that if I tell myself I am going to fall then I will.  I pick up the pace and sure enough the ground is firm and compact.  

Friday I leave for London. It is my nephew Myles’ sixteenth birthday celebration weekend so we have tickets for X Factor Live!  I know it’s lame but that’s the kind of family we are.  Aunty Sally, Godmother to Lexi, is even printing off Masks from the X factor website.  Madre has opted out as she is more of a Strictly woman and Mr. Jules is skiing with his Norwegian buddy. First, before the fun starts, Lexi has an interview and exam to get through.  We have been doing mock interviews over dinner and trying hard not to snigger when she articulates carefully and puts her posh accent on.  Mr. Jules told her to write “examining nine year olds is ridiculous” next to any questions she cannot answer.

I am squeezing in an afternoon of flat hunting with Casper, Edward and Jeremy who have some bijoux broom cupboards in fabulous locations to show me.  Heehee.  I am still amazed that people speak this way, I thought the Labour government had eradicated Hurray Henrys and any self-respecting ambitious London men spoke like Sir Alan Sugar.  Perhaps it is just property-speak.  My favourite is Stephen Lovelady, who speaks normally and whom I have been unwittingly calling Ladyfinger.  I think I have some sort of disease where I garble words or mishear them at times.  The girl on reception told me that they have a poll for the best alternative surname for Stephen and mine was topping the bill so far. I am a little ashamed to show my face at the uber-trendy Foxton’s on the King’s Road Friday at 4pm.