I realise now that I’ve been so busy healing myself from the events leading up to leaving England, and setting up a business here in France, that I’ve not written about living in France. About how it feels to set up home in a foreign country where you don’t speak the language… Not in the country you always WANTED to live in, but the one where you think you can make a successful business. One that has grown on me, slowly, over the last 3 years, but which I still don’t love. It might sound odd, but living my old life in England wasn’t always perfect, of course, so why should not liking a perfect life in France be strange? Living here has healed me. Living here has shown me just how beautiful life can be, how beautiful the world is. I already know I will never again live anywhere quite like this, surrounded by fields and countryside, isolated from people. The beauty of my surroundings is constantly there. I don’t need to be reminded of it – I just look up, and whichever window or door I look out of, I can see trees, crops, sky…
Our bedroom faces east and most mornings I get to watch the sunrise. In the summer, for week after week the days are very long, and the sun rises early… I should sleep on, but it’s hard to. I should close the shutters, but I’d miss this miracle. Each and every day I watch the sun steadily climb upwards, so bright that I’ve considered keeping an old pair of sunglasses next to the bed! I sit there drinking tea and reading, but glancing up frequently, watching the beauty of the day begin. Whatever the crops in the fields – even when there are no crops – I find the view beautiful. The colours and textures of the field, the woodland and hills in the distance, the space…. The huge expanse of space is still, I find, incredible and I feel humbled by it.
“At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.”
― A River Runs Through It and Other Stories
