A home for the soul #2
“And the moment I find that other place, the one I seem to be looking for, subconciously, continuously, I will know my quest is over.
I will steer my boat to the shore, land and stand on its soil, and never want to leave again.”
That’s how I described it a year ago in A home for the soul. Discovering new places invariably confronts me with to what extent the overpopulated, crowded suburbia sprawl, which almost all of Flanders has turned into, runs against my soul’s needs and desires. Few things can make me as happy as the sight of a woodland hillside, a narrow rock-strewn river, a rolling horizon unimpeded by buildings or man-made contraptions. Time and again I catch myself thinking: ah, if only I could have more of this in my daily life!
Going back home is therefore rarely a joyful occasion. Only, in all honesty, I’m never quite sure whether it is the holidays coming to an end which I regret, or the inevitable return to Flanders. And as soon as I settle into the daily routine of work, meetings, family and friends, I tend to settle into my surroundings, too. They are not all that bad, after all. And no matter how much I can feel my heart opening at the sight of a mountain top in the morning sunlight, I know better than to think I’m cut out for mountain life. What would I do up there? Herd goats? Make cheese? Open a B&B? I already have a thorough dislike for the simple household chores in our three-person family! Of course, as a writer, I can write anywhere. But I’m nowhere near making enough money to live off my craft, let alone sustain three people. In short: one has to be sensible, right?
On our Italy trip last year we met a Belgian couple who did not share my dislike for household chores and had indeed opened a B&B in a Medieval village. Our hostess was the one who told me she had cried after her first visit to the place, because she didn’t want to leave again. “I didn’t want to go”, she said. “Everything within me wanted to stay. I felt I was being torn away from the place where I belonged, where my soul was at home.”
It sparked the inspiration for last year’s blog, for I was jealous of her. I had never come across a place that had felt like that to me. If anything, it only hightened my sense of being displaced, even at home. But it did make me more conscious of it, too.
Now, for the first time, I have perhaps experienced what she meant.
This summer, we wanted to make a short trip into the mountains again. From my French brother-in-law, who took us to the Pyrenees two years ago, we heard that the Cirque de Gavarnie was well worth the visit.
We had never heard of the place, but soon found out it was Unesco World Heritage. Judging by the pictures online, it was a very beautiful spot indeed: a cauldron-shaped basin at the foot of the Pic du Marboré and le Taillon mountains, peaks that were capped in snow all year round, overlooking a carpet of alpine meadows fed by several waterfalls.
Because of its beauty and renown, the Cirque is a popular destination, both for tourists who only drive up for the day and do the 2.5 mile hike to the bottom of the cauldron, and for more experienced mountaineers travelling through the area or hiking up to one of the higher lakes.
The small town of Gavarnie, gateway to the cauldron, is a cul-de-sac. Anyone who drives up there, eventually has to return by the same winding road, hugging the rock on one side and offering a glimpse of the capricious Gave mountain river on the other. It makes for a lot of traffic on one very narrow road. We arrived in the evening of a rainy day, and we seemed to be the only ones driving up. We were, however, met by a constant stream of cars, vans and buses making their way down. The weather was turning nasty, so the crowds fled. Yet by the time we were having supper in what was now a very quiet little mountain village, the clouds evaporated and we got our first view of the majestic Cirque walls in the distance, in the light of the setting sun.
The following day we had glorious weather. Bright blue skies, pleasant temperatures, but not too hot to hike comfortably. Thanks to the advice of another couple staying at the same Bed & Breakfast, we decided not to follow the masses up the main path towards the Cirque, but opted for a longer hike instead. That way, we first gained altitude (400 meters, a steep climb, which brought us up to approximately 1800 meters above sea level), and after that we more or less stayed on the same altitude, then slowly started descending a little, and did the most beautiful hike of my life, along a narrow path that ran through forests and alongside cliffs.
The Pyrenees Natural Park has a tremendously rich vegetation, ever-changing according to the altitude. Fields full of wild blue irises, purple campanula bells, helleborus of which the flowers had only just perished to seed pods, elegant white flowers that were probably a distant kin to Angelica archangelica, different kinds of small ferns and stonecrop creepers flowering profusely, beeches, gnarled dwarf pines, all kinds of plants both familiar and unfamiliar to me, growing lusciously in the meadows or sprouting stubbornly from cracks in the rocks.
We lunched in a shady spot on the trail, with our backs to the rock and a view that couldn’t be beaten (check the second photograph of this blog), and arrived at the Cirque itself by early afternoon.
The place was swarming with people. At the mouth of the cauldron, where the easy trail ended, there was a bar-hotel, and the loneliness of the mountain path immediately made way for something that felt a lot more touristy. We had a drink in the shade, and watched hikers come up the trail, some of them on horseback or with children on donkeys. The contrast with our high altitude walk couldn’t be any bigger. (We’re still wondering how the hotel manages to get all their supplies up there, for even the ‘easy’ road, though wide enough, was unfit for almost all kinds of motorized transport.)
Usually, I’m the first person to run from these kind of crowded places. The energy of too many people together tends to take over the natural feel of a place, and the landscape becomes something of a decor. I can’t help leaving such sites with a taste of regret, wishing we human beings could leave something so beautiful alone.
So it really came as a surprise that the crowd of colorful hikers didn’t bother me. I registered their presence, but all the things that usually make crowds challenging for me (noise, proximity, interfering mental and emotional frequencies) didn’t seem to apply. No matter how many people were there, the magnitude of the landscape effortlessly outclassed everything else.
The feeling remained with me when we ventured into the cauldron itself. There were a lot of people walking, on the trail or off it, partly because the path that was leading to the foot of the major waterfall was not very well indicated. Apparently we even had to cross part of a glacier in order to get there, but since that wasn’t clear and I had misgivings of crossing a vast stretch of ice, we ended up on the wrong side of the Gave river (only a rivulet at that point, but one with a rough and treacherous current and very few safe places to cross nonetheless) and were faced with two options: retracing our steps and crossing the glacier anyway, in line with all the other hikers, pinpricks in the distance, or staying where we were and enjoying the view. We decided on the latter.
As I sat on a big slab of stone above the tumultous little river, watching those immense walls of rock with the water falling down their fronts, I felt there was nothing that could possibly bother this cauldron. The rocks, rising up from the deepest roots of the earth, seemed capable of shoudering anything. The waterfalls added fluidity, the wisdom of letting go. It felt like a perfect yin-yang environment, strong, ever-changing, timeless.
Black, crowlike birds with yellow beaks flocked and flew like acrobats on the winds that also blew the clouds in for the afternoon. Flowers were growing from cracks in the rocks. The river was singing its noisy song, unhindered by any rock or boulder. And the big waterfall we sat facing, at the other end of the cauldron, changed aspects with every whisp of cloud passing overhead.
Sometimes a place can be so big and so right that you just want to be allowed to be a part of it.
This morning, the clouds had once again descended, drowning the entire valley in a chilly, grey fog. We could barely make out the car in the driveway. The Cirque, up in the distance, was completely invisible. Putting our stuff in the trunk, preparing to depart, I felt it pulling at me: the feeling of not wanting to leave.
Again, this surprised me. Rationally speaking, there was absolutely nothing for me here, in this small mountain village that seemed to exist solely to cater for the needs of hikers in summer and ski fanatics in winter.
In every other place I would have shrugged and thought: nice hike, beautiful mountain, perhaps we’ll be back here one day, but right now: let’s get out of here. Not this time, though.
As I slowly steered the car along the narrow road, following the Gave downstream on its way to lower lands, I felt my hesitation grow to sadness. I did not want to go. Something in these rocks, in this river, spoke to me in a way that no other place had before. Leaving it felt a little like cutting an umbillical chord, the main difference being that human umbillical chords are meant to be cut in order for the child to live, and severing this connection didn’t feel right at all.
It was quite clear: as far as I was concerned this was no place like any other. this was, for some reason beyond comprehension, home.
I don’t know yet how I am going to work with this experience and allow it to influence my life. What I have felt, is special enough to make some kind of important difference, one way or another.
For now, I’ll just cherish the fact that I’m feeling sad and a little lost, and in a different way from before. For now I know that there is at least one place on earth where I do not feel lost.
Now my soul knows what it feels like to be home, wandering out here in the world is somehow easier to bear.
And who knows where the next trail will take me.
