A thousand-layer life
Reading a book about the changing of the seasons in the south of France, within the trenches of a Boston winter, is maybe not my most appropriately-timed reading choice. I almost cried looking at a beautiful photograph of a field of yellow wildflowers in a Provençal summer, imagining myself running through them, barefoot, preferably in a long dress. Whenever Jamie Beck writes in An American in Provence about foraging wild rosemary and cooking with it that same night, or asking the farmers at the local market which strawberries are tastiest that day, I feel another little bit of my soul detach from this city and land somewhere in Europe. I’ve never been to France except for a layover in the Paris airport, and I am (I think justifiably) afraid of French people cringing at my attempts to speak their language, especially as I haven’t had any practice at it since college. This doesn’t quell my daydreaming. Nor does listening to “La Mer” by Charles Trenet on repeat. It’s only January, but I think I may have irreparably skewed my 2024 Spotify Wrapped already.
I really don’t think that anyone has to abandon the life they’ve made and move to the French countryside to be fulfilled. Discontentment has no borders. And “the winter of [my] discontent” is only partial: After 2.5 years in Boston, I finally feel that I’ve found a home here, good friends and a good church and fellowship, all of which I was despairing a year ago that I would never have in this city. But I still at times feel far away from myself, as if I am made up of many disparate parts that never quite work in harmony with one another. I know why. It’s the same reason when, nearing the end of a roadtrip to my parents’ house in Connecticut, I always feel a pressure valve release in me. I am among trees again, running water, the quiet Long Island Sound coastline, bunches of wispy cotton in October and cotton candy clouds of cherry blossoms in May and blue hydrangeas in July. I am at home because I’m with them, but I’m also at home because I can feel grass and hear quiet again.
When travelling, I always think that a couple of days in a place is so far from enough to get to know it. I can’t not be a tourist, but I desperately want to understand how it is to be a local. What is life like when you have more than three days there, when you have endless days stretching ahead, days that can be slow and meandering, not lived at the breakneck pace of an international vacation? What would it be like to live in a landscape that fills your soul instead of draining it?
Writing of her life in the Luberon in An American in Provence, Beck says, “I need to have more time, more years, more layers of the same—as if my life could become a mille-feuille, a thousand-layer French pastry of compiled years of the sweetest life.” This thought spoke directly to my longing to build, or curate, a beautiful life steeped in the richness of years, of intimate knowledge of a place throughout its every season. At the same time I worry this is the most selfish desire I could have, centered only on what I want. On what would make me happiest rather than giving myself to others or going (or staying) where God has placed me. I don’t want to try to mold what I perceive to be the will of God into what is really my own will. But if the gift God has given me is art through the form of writing—writing that needs beauty as sustenance—then it might be that he would have me follow that.
I bought purple alstromeria at the grocery store yesterday after church and carried them home on my arm (because my hands were full of shopping bags) like they were a bouquet tossed to me. They are now in an antique mason fruit jar on the kitchen table, in the sun, where the light catches their iridescent petals and glows through their greenery. These flowers are a small and important beauty, reclaiming some agency in my life rather than letting myself be governed by the mindlessly dull routine of my 9-5 job and the endless scrolling of social media. There have been so many times in my life when I’ve felt I’ve wasted too much time. I am old enough to have had a childhood without much influence of the internet, and no social media till my adolescent years, but I am young enough to have experienced so much of my life lived online. How much time has being chronically online taken from me? Would running barefoot through a field of French wildflowers heal that? Not necessarily, but it couldn’t hurt.
I was talking with a wonderful friend over dinner the other night, about making beautiful things and the craft of story-telling, like 20-something girls do, and running out of time to talk about it all, even after three hours, also as 20-something girls do. But one of the bits that mattered most to me was the topic that our lives are really just beginning. I’ve all too often bought into the cultural notion that our 20s are somehow the peak of our lives, which is ridiculous and ageist (not to mention conceited) in the extreme, so we chucked that idea right out the window to start with. Life is meant to become richer as it goes and I am slowly working on adjusting my mindset into fully believing that aging is a gift. I’ll be 28 in two months. Maybe at 30, I’ll pick myself up and go off to Europe—not to find myself, but to find the depths of beauty in places unknown to me, hand-painted by the Great Artist.
Even if I don’t do that, though, I hope I’ll know a little better by then how to walk through discontentment and come out the other side grateful for the place I have been given.
Heck yes to buying flowers as a way to declare to one's self that beauty in real life matters. Also, it took me almost all of 27 for me to come to the realization that the big unknowns of the rest of my life could contain good. For me, unknowns were always connected with stress and striving – but what a relief to find that unknowns could also bring wonderful things beyond our wildest imaginings!