* Adam’s inspiring account of some of his travels in Paris and life on an organic farm/bed & breakfast in the South of France, along with lessons in freedom and happiness that the land and an unlikely teacher taught him. Includes a brief look at the hidden history of the Cathars, a spiritual group from the Middle Ages who practiced vegetarianism, herbal and energy healing, believed in reincarnation, and whose priests (called Parfaits) were predominantly women. *
THE HOT POTATO
Serving Up a Weekly Helping of
Sustainable & Organic Gardening, Food, Health, and Community
by Adam Brockman & Aireen Joven, February 2007, #6
THIS WEEK’S DISH:
From Paris To The Pyrenees: Lessons In Life, History, And The Barefoot Road To Happiness
SAMOUILLAN IN THE SOUTH OF FRANCE.
Le Moulin (center building), the bed & breakfast where Adam lived and worked, is surrounded by the countryside of southern France with a view of the Pyrenees Mountains. Photo courtesy Le Moulin.
IN THE SUMMER of 2001, just after I (Adam) turned twenty-one, I packed all of my clothes and a journal in a small rucksack and left the United States bound for the South of France. It’s difficult to say what attracted me to that particular area of the world, to the majestic, rolling foothills one hour north of the Pyrenees Mountains, dead center between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. After all, the last two times I had visited France, three years prior, my experience was so traumatic that I had vowed never to return. The combination of my terrible French, making too little effort to speak it, and wearing a jacket with Dutch flags on the arms during the 1998 World Cup Soccer match (which came down to France vs. Holland) got me enough flak and cold-shouldering from the Parisians to make me more than a little bitter. Yet there I was, only three years later, and a peculiar magnetism was drawing me back, one that I have always been at odds to define. I just knew I had to go there, to give Paris a third chance, to experience the wonders of the Pyrenees and this area of the world that, as I soon found out, contains such beauty and history that it has drawn thousands like myself from all areas of the world, some of whom have never left to this day.
GIVING PARIS AND FRANCE A THIRD CHANCE
For nearly a month and a half, I lived with two such individuals, Kris and Steve. They were a gay couple from England who had traveled the world with a theater company and owned a vegetarian restaurant in Scotland before moving to the South of France with Steve’s mother, Doris, just outside the town of Samouillan. I had come into contact with Kris through an organization called WOOFF (now Worldwide Workers on Organic Farms) which connects volunteers to organic farms all over the world. I was drawn to his particular advertisement in the booklet because, besides owning an organic farm, he and his partner also ran a bed and breakfast, all situated on several acres and connected to an old mill (the place was called “Le Moulin” which means, “The Mill”). Excited by the prospect of learning a little bit more about where food comes from, meeting people from all over Europe and possibly the world, and most of all, still drawn by that same mysterious attraction, I made all of the necessary arrangements with Kris by e-mail, bought my plane ticket, and flew to Paris at the end of June. I had no idea when I was coming back, how long I would be working there, or where I would go once I was finished. Again, I just knew I had to go, and I had a feeling that everything else would take care of itself.
This time around, I was determined to use the little French I knew and my inner trust in the goodness of people to make sure I had a better experience in Paris and the rest of France. I spent two days and one night in Paris without sleeping, walking for miles through the winding streets and along the banks of the Seine River, coming upon an impromptu music concert with dancing and lovers dipping their feet in the water and irritated Parisians yelling out of their windows at the partygoers below. I spent only two short days in Paris this time, and yet I fell in love with it, because I was able to let my guard down a little bit and experience some of the soul of that city as I had never been able to before. People still looked at me funny because I was unshaven and wearing rope sandals (two rarities in Paris), but since I made an effort to speak the language, people were actually kind and accommodating. My bitterness disappeared and was replaced with the kinship and joy one feels when a real and lasting connection is made in a foreign land.
LIFE AT LE MOULIN AND THE SECRET HISTORY OF SOUTHERN FRANCE
In my short month and a half at Le Moulin, I did much more than just work in the garden. Every morning I would wake up around eight o’ clock and tend to the rabbits, cleaning their cages and feeding them. I became so close to them that I began to notice individual character traits. One rabbit, wild-eyed and obviously perturbed by his forced enclosure, learned how to reach his little foot through the bars and unlock his own cage. When a disease came, I found a rabbit lying on her side in her cage, her breathing labored, and I cried for her. She died soon after.
There were sheep to tend, to let out into the pasture and corral again before evening, changing their straw bedding in the meantime. There were chickens to feed, chickens who never saw cages but roamed free in a large fenced-in plot with wild grasses and trees. Part-way through my trip, a lean, white goat with an injured hoof (named Honey) appeared in the middle of the road nearby, and she soon became a member of the family. Many days I would accompany Kris or Steve to Honey’s side to do the milking, and I had never tasted anything so delicious and satisfying as that milk.
Wearing purple overalls and a straw hat, I would whack the weeds and sing at the top of my lungs out in the field, my feet constantly being stung by stinging nettles. I spent hours in rubber waders and boxer shorts, digging out the enormous pile of mud that had kept the old mill blocked up for years. On a couple occasions, Kris and I left the farm to help tile the floor of a thirteenth century castle that had been bought up and renovated by two artists from New York.
I was to encounter quite a few of these old castles and similar structures on my many walks through the South of France, an area that is rich in a history that is still relatively unknown to most people throughout the world, partially because of the influence of the early Catholic church and the devastating effects of the Third Crusades. On my time off, I spent hours reading about and visiting the ruins of this secret history, which centered on a spiritual group called the Cathars that existed between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, in what is now Southern France and part of Northern Spain, but used to be called the Languedoc. This area had its own language, and Catharism was slowly becoming the dominant spiritual path among the peoples of the Languedoc, replacing the influence of Catholicism. The Cathar priests, or Parfaits, were predominantly women, vegetarian, sworn to nonviolence, believed in reincarnation, and were renowned for spiritual and herbal healing. They also taught that one could have a direct relationship with God, which was far different than the Catholic teaching that one had to go through the priest to have contact with God.
For all of these reasons, the Catholic church leaders saw Catharism as a threat, and in the thirteenth century, the Third Crusade was organized specifically to wipe them out. The mass extermination of the Cathars culminated in the massacre at Montsegur on March 16, 1244, where two hundred Cathar priests were burned at the stake, and many men, women, and children lost their lives defending their beliefs. Many of the priests and some adherents escaped to areas of Spain and Northern Italy, and it is believed that some of their teachings, including the influence of the Troubadour poets who were Cathar sympathizers, may have helped bring about what is now referred to as the Renaissance.
To this day, Cathar castles and fortresses dot the landscape of Southern France, including the old fortress-town of Carcassone, which has become a major tourist attraction in that area. Despite this, the near-annihilation of the Cathars and suppression of their history by the Inquisitors has caused them to be lost to or significantly underplayed in the pages of modern history books.
Living in this area while learning its history, a history so rich and ancient and yet so marred by violence and bloodshed, was a powerful and transformational experience for me. Walking those hills, exploring the ruins, swimming the rivers, and bounding through the fields, I began to have the strangest feeling that I had lived here before, long ago. I was not alone in this feeling. Kris, a practicing Past-Life Regression therapist, related to me that he remembered his past life living in this area as a Cathar. He told me that many people come to visit, for vacations or meditation retreats, and remember having lived before in this area of the world. The author of The Great Heresy, which is the book I happened to be reading about the Cathars during my stay, wrote a whole series of books about remembering his past life as a Cathar and how he was first reminded of this by a patient of his (he was a psychiatrist) who remembered their past life together as lovers and Cathars. The beginning of this fascinating story can be found in the book The Cathars and Reincarnation by Arthur Guirdham, for anyone who is interested in a well-documented case study offering possible proof of reincarnation.
HAPPY THE DOG AND THE BAREFOOT COUNTRY ROADS
One of my greatest loves during my free-time at Le Moulin was to go for long, barefoot walks along the country roads that crisscrossed the foothills. My walks took me past fields of luminous sunflowers, their faces pointed upward toward the sun in unison, as if in awe of its power and beauty. Babbling creeks, wise old trees, vast fields of flowers and wild grasses, and farmhouses both dilapidated and serene, passed to my right and left as I walked, soaking in the sunlight and occasionally retreating to the shade of trees to rest, write, or compose a song on the guitar. Many times on these journeys, I was initially accompanied by one of my favorite companions at Le Moulin, a four-legged bundle of energy and joy by the name of Happy the dog.
Happy truly lived up to his name; I have never met a happier dog before, or since. It was no wonder why Happy was so happy: the entire countryside was his home, and he would roam about it at will, sometimes not returning for several hours. At the beginning of a walk, Happy, even if he was nowhere in sight, would often sense me leaving and trot right alongside of me on the road, looking up at my face expectantly, smiling in the sun. Without warning I would start running, and he would chase after me, looking up at me from time to time with that same smile. Eventually, I would get tired and slow down to a walk again, and he would stop a few feet ahead of me, turning around to trot back to my side. Sometimes, further down the road, he would run into the underbrush on an adventure whose purpose only he knew, and once he even reappeared by my side nearly a mile away, trotting up to me and smiling with a sample of the wild brush he had encountered still clinging to his hair.
What does it mean to be free? For Happy, it meant having a home where people loved and accepted him, where he was fed good food and where he could lay his head and sleep whenever he needed to. And yet, it also meant having trees, fields, and wide open green spaces to play and run wild, to explore and to learn. I learned a lot from the many people who lived at and passed through Le Moulin that summer, from the books I read and the places I visited, but Happy the dog, running beside me with that expectant smile and boundless energy, was perhaps my greatest teacher of all.
[...] FIRST BIG remembrance and healing experience occurred while I was living in the South of France, when I was twenty-one years old. I happened to be reading a magazine article in which a woman who [...]
I had a similar experience in southern France. Transformative, indeed, but I found the journey through Cathar country leaving me increasingly melancholic. There is an incredible sadness there. I understood the history and effect of the region much better after reading a book about the Cathars called The Fire and the Light by Glen Craney.