Month: April 2023

The Tao of Treignac

Trying to choose a village in France to set up a small tourist rental biz was a challenging process. There were a lot of things to consider, we had very limited resources, we did hours of online research. All of that culminated in a three-week journey from Paris to Limoges and then all the way over to Marseille and back a couple summers ago.

There are literally hundreds of small towns in France which are charming and where houses are inexpensive. Many of these villages, however, are in decline. The businesses are closed, there are no young people, the tourists might drop by to see the local church or to do a hike, but they don’t stay or spend money. We visited a few dozen towns, some of which were magnificent and had exactly what we were looking for at very low prices.

But too often it was obvious that a town was fading irrevocably. Risking one’s life savings on a town without the potential to make a living was something we had to consider carefully.

We hit Treignac twice on our initial visit. It checked off several boxes: A medieval town with layers of history, a charming natural setting with a river and lakes, forests and mountains, a modern supermarket and hardware store, some small local specialty shops, a nice expat community of folks from the UK, proximity to a few larger cities. And, most importantly, an outdoor sports infrastructure and a developed beach at a lake which attracts tourists from late spring into the fall. Treignac had an energy that was missing in many other similar towns across south central France. And the population had actually increased lately.

One quite pleasant surprise here has been a Tai Chi course. For $40 a year we get three 90-min classes a week, two focused on Tai Chi and one on Qi Gong. Fifteen years ago I took two years of Tai Chi in Baltimore and I’d continued practicing on my own ever since. Having the opportunity to learn a new form and practice with a highly skilled teacher was something I never expected to happen in a village of under 1300 people in rural France.

Our instructor is nearly 70 but looks and moves like a man in his early 40s. He studied with a master from China and has a certification from the French government as an instructor. He is a patient, funny, and serious practitioner and instructor and gives detailed personal feedback. I’ve been doing Tai Chi and mindfulness for a long time and he has broken my bad habits down and rebuilt my practice in just a few months.

I hope to learn the full Yang style form with Alain. So far we have completed and are fine-tuning part I, ‘The Earth.’ Next up is Part II, ‘Man.’

It’s been a huge adjustment going from 20 years teaching and having either a small yard or no yard to having a massive garden on multiple levels to maintain. Often the work is intense and as an oldie I get stiff and sore. Tai Chi and Qi Gong have been a huge help in keeping these old bones limber, and as I reconnect to the natural world a bit of Taoist philosophy and attentiveness to my body and its connection to the universe will continue to ease my aches and pains.

Living in Another Language

In the USA there is an unfortunately large group of people who are absolutely intolerant of anyone who speaks other than English. These people often get exasperated and even violent when they hear others speaking Spanish on the street, or when a shop or restaurant is playing the TV or radio in another tongue. Spanish of course was spoken in large areas of what is now the USA LONG before English…

But any American who has had the experience of living abroad in a place where English is not the primary language understands immediately how difficult and how taxing it is to become comfortable in another tongue.

We lived in Panama for four years. I never got my Spanish up to snuff while living there. We worked for an international school and all teaching and learning was required to happen in English, we gravitated socially to staff and expats who spoke English, we were in lockdown for almost an entire year during covid–there are lots of excuses I can make. On top of these reasons, the Spanish in Panama is quite ‘gummy’ and difficult for an untrained ear. Words are lopped off casually and crammed together. The pace is rapid but the articulation is laconic. It’s beautiful to listen to but challenging to comprehend. Nevertheless, I was able to navigate my way through basic conversations by the end, to feel confident in restaurants and shops, and I even got through a hospital admittance process when I had to get a hernia operation, totally in Spanish. But my Spanish remained at the level of an early elementary student’s.

When we travelled to Colombia or Mexico, however, I could comprehend the Spanish much more easily. Every consonant and syllable was carefully articulated. Riding in a hired car from Medellin to Guatape I had a 3-hour conversation with the driver. I noted his name was Alain which was not a Spanish but a French name, and he told me his mother was a fan of the French actor Alain Delon and his mysterious green eyes. I told Alain how much more easily I understood his Spanish than the Panamanian Spanish and he said ‘they speak that soft Caribbean Spanish over there.’ Others we encountered said that Panama was full of hicks and was regarded as the equivalent of Texas in Colombia, with its own peculiar language.

When we left Panama we flew directly to France and spent a couple nights in Toulouse to adjust to the time difference. French felt easy and after struggling for four years in Spanish I was immediately much more confident in a language I’d studied extensively as a young man. When we arrived at the house we were buying the owner had set it up so we could stay in the gite apartments for a couple days before settlement. He gave me long, detailed tours of the house and instructions about the systems and how things worked. Then, we went through the notary process and the purchase. I was surprised at how quickly French returned after 2 decades of under-use. But it was EXHAUSTING. I wasn’t thinking in French, I was translating in my head. I became so tired and frustrated after a few days that I wanted simply to sleep for a week.

But we had clients in one apartment the very first day–no rest for the weary!

I still have great difficulty listening to French radio or watching movies. I read much better than I hear! Subtitles for films are necessary but the colloquialisms and slang phrases are beyond my ken. I work on trying to improve daily by revisiting old text books I used before ( French for Reading currently is helping a lot). I also subscribe to and read a couple journals and try to go beyond the “quick tour” of apartments with clients and to engage in a bit of conversation with them. And: novels. Balzac you are killing me!

There are many people here in town who are native English speakers, most of whom have lived in France for more than a decade. The majority of them speak almost no French at all. An Australian friend who moved here last year got a phone call when we were out to dinner and immediately thrust his phone at me because the speaker was French–it was a real estate agent calling about a property he’d seen. When I handled this fairly simple phone transaction our Aussie mates thought I was some kind of wizard.

Most French people, even out here in the rural Correze, are quite patient with those who can’t speak French. I wish folks back home could be like that: don’t judge someone for not speaking your language. Be empathetic and compassionate with them. It’s really difficult to pick up another tongue. Try it and you’ll see.

Jobless

It’s been a bit more than 10 months since we arrived in France. We quit our jobs and used 85% of our savings to buy an old mill in a small village in the Correze. We are “jobless,” in the sense that we’ve dropped out of the system which requires you to show up at a place of employment and subject yourself to the whims of an employer for huge swaths of your life.

But we are hardly “not working.” Today, for example, I weed whacked for two hours, I cut down scrub brush and overgrown ivy and dead trees for two hours, I prepared two rental apartments for overnight guests and greeted them and toured them around (in French). My wife and I carted barrows full of gravel down from the street level at our property to the garden where we intend to set up a glamping tent.

Tomorrow we will have to clean the apartments and do laundry and prep them for the next guests. We don’t make anywhere near the money we used to make when we had salaries–but we make enough. We own our property free and clear. We have solar panels. We have a basic and simple life, and I’m starting a vegetable garden. The goal is to have a business sufficient to live a simple and comfortable life without all the rat race BS we faced for decades in the USA. And 10 months in, we are doing so.

Whatever your dream is–whatever it is that you wish you could do, or hope to do someday–do it NOW. Stop buying into the culture that you must rent yourself to a corporation in order to be successful and happy. Get out of that mindset. It’s not easy. The visa renewal process and French taxes are driving me crazy! But–you can live by a river in an old mill in France (or wherever you want) for a fraction of the price of a condo in DC or NY or Vegas. Do it now!

We have two families of four staying over tonight. They had luck with the weather and spent their first few hours here in the garden exploring. They told me how cool our place was and they took many photos of our building and the river, and their kids ran around kicking a soccer ball and having a blast. That is all I need. I don’t need a big salary and retirement. I don’t need 65 hour work weeks and stress.

Jung at Heart

In my 20s and early 30s I read a great deal of Carl Jung’s work, often in a haphazard way, often without much comprehension. I got through the major tomes and even many works by other Jungian analysts and practitioners, but about one-third into the Mysterium Conjunctionis I petered out. At one point I went to a release party for Jung’s The Red Book in New York where there was an exhibition of his paintings. Although I excitedly bought my copy, it has languished on the shelf for 15 years, barely perused. I suppose I felt I was saturated enough by Jung and his thinking.

But suddenly on Monday evening I took down Volume 18 of the Bollingen Collected Works, The Symbolic Life. I’d purchased this years ago and shelved it.

Why the sudden renewed interest? On Monday my wife hosted a small dinner party for some friends who’d helped her with a project in our garden. We live currently in rural France in a small village. One of the guests was a young German woman who’s lived locally for most of her life. She is 30 and a mother and is marrying a young man who is not the father of her child (a complex love story).

In conversation we stumbled somehow on the topic of Jung-I believe because she’d seen my library?- and she was immediately interested to discuss Myers Briggs results. I shared that I was INTJ and she became quite excited to share a lot of her knowledge of Jung and how his ideas have been influential in her relationships. She stood at one point and lifted her shirt while pulling down her skirt a bit, revealing blue tattoos running from the dantian upward to between her breasts.

“Now I know why you are so secret, and so calm,” she says. “When your wife is hosting events you are never there until you are needed and suddenly you are there and then you disappear. It’s the INTJ!”

She shared how Jung has helped her use symbols and ritual to structure her life and function in relationships, and to communicate ideas she can’t put into words despite fluency in 3 languages.

In our 90 minute conversation about Jung and the structure and functions of consciousness in his theories I realized how soft my understanding had become over the years. I’d drifted completely from the ‘scientific’ Jung and was wholly saturated by the ‘mystic’ Jung.

Fortunately, the Tavistock Lectures, featured first in The Symbolic Life, offer a clear and summative refresher of Jung’s basic theories about the practice of analytical psychology and how consciousness functions. Also in Lecture 2 Jung discusses how Germans have a strongly differentiated thinking function whereas the French have a strongly differentiated feeling function, and this is why the French and Germans have historically been at odds. I wonder how my young friend would feel about this idea, being a German who moved to rural France at age 12 with a soul rooted in each place.