Time to illuminate the interior
Here in Paris I have often walked to the park where, I believed, some of my late mother’s ashes were scattered. On the way I pass a hi-fi stereo store with an uncanny slogan pasted on its vitrine. “Transformez Votre Intérieure” (Transform your interior). And “God,” I think each day, “Change me!”
Every time I set out to let go of the noise around and inside me, I find more of who and what I am really made of. It is a silence beyond the vast empty landscapes of Pictou I hold so dear. It is definitely outside the cramped, cobbled, cacophonous streets of Paris. Illuminating my interior this official Lenten season will mean hearing myself, seeing myself, accepting myself as empty of all my grand illusions as I can possibly be so that perhaps at Easter, maybe during or following the spring equinox, I can be revived from this dust of despairing.
Indeed as I write, some clever man is hammering out a souldestroying rhythm on some nearby rooftop. The ‘work’ of improving the exterior is ceaseless here as everywhere. But this dead of winter time – frighteningly balmy as it has been in Pictou and Paris – affords an atmosphere to rediscover a deeper peace amidst the racket.
In the little courtyard I call home here, the clamour has been deadly lately. Neighbours gleefully announced in January that they were renovating the cell next to mine to rent out.
“You’ll have two hard weeks; get over it,” the posh French lady announced to me after her husband, a doctor, had knocked on my door to share their intentions.
Like so many improvements planned by man, their job has gone way overtime. Our relations have become strained. It has taken every ounce of my inner strength to bear the constant drilling and sawing they are busy with. But much worse has been their utter lack of empathy – let alone sympathy – for my suffering. Transforming my interior involves letting go of the unkind ways I want to cope with their meanness.
Humour helps. So I have cast myself in a comedy of the mind which I relate to the writer George Sand each day in a different garden, the Jardin de Luxembourg. She sits there holding a book – one we may never know since it is carved into her sculpted hand – and patiently listens to my grievances. Such are my ongoing Lenten prayers of confession, repentance and petition. She accompanies me into the silence that is beyond the noise, to face my own music.
I can hear my mother egging me on. She started really communicating with me via my sister some weeks ago. During a call for help she revealed some of my mother’s ashes are interred in the Luxembourg gardens. I knew she had secreted some of the dirt that was our mum’s remains away from her official resting place in a B.C. church flower garden, but I didn’t know the specifics. So I have been laughing at my own mistaken interior sounds… I’ve been “finding my mother” in the wrong garden all this time; walking in the Jardin des Plantes while she has been resting quietly in the Jardin de Luxembourg! All nostalgic messages previously “heard” from her have now been replaced with her chuckling “You were in the wrong park!”
Now that I am in the right place, leaning on George Sand, I already feel different. Maybe with this laughter in my heart I can face up to my neighbours without being clever. Clever is shallow. I want to be deeply kind – and funny – like my mum. So instead of cursing their bullying tactics, I plan to sing a little song each time their ugly noise rears up.
“Hello darkness my old friend. I’ve come to talk to you again…”
After Simon and Garfunkel I’ll hum some Fleur Maineville tunes as I pass these labouring folks on my way to laugh with George in the park. I hope that the music stored in my heart’s songbook, will soothe the uncivilized creatures we all become in the din of constantly renovating exteriors.