laughing buddha

Framed by blue shutters on our neighbours’ sill the quinces were ripening ready for the evening meal as I drew my twisted baroque cello knees to my chest, releasing the tension of too loud Mozart symphonies and gazing up at fig leaves in a pale November sky…..

It was Wedensday in les Couguieux. It was the day of Nadine’s ‘Tagine aux Coings du jardin’ and it was the outdoor ‘cours privé de yoga’.

A black cat drew its fur under the bridge I was making with each gentle arching of my vertebrae, its carbon tail brushing my bottom; redstarts whistled as I inhaled for the count of two in the right nostril, and exhaled on the alternate nostril for the count of four; I released all the tension of living in heaven into the welcoming earth. It was very very tough.

Julian, meanwhile, was studying the fireplace in the next-door ruin and making our winter grillade with its chaux hood à l’ancien - putting firebricks on top of terra cotta and binding it all with his bio-dynamic cake-mix.

I walked the thirty second walk home, checking the colour-me-beautiful Ventoux for today's fashion show, only to find that it must have been he who had been at the yoga class.....

Sometimes I watch him work. He can be washing up after a dinner party and he can be so beautiful, like a little Buddha moving amongst the sauce-smeared plates and treacle-gunked pans, organising the filthy chaos - which to me merely reeks of over indulgence, too many calories and inebriation, smearing grime on the start of the new day - into a shrine of wondrous piles awaiting their soapy dip.

Performing the same task, I am not mindful like my husband. The last time I washed up, not without the odd huff and puff just to show how much effort I was putting into it, he held out the milk pan from which he was about to pour the crème of his café, still with large chunks of OAP tomato clinging to the inside and laughed.

So, I go to my private yoga class, and he potters about just being…..

Some of us are simply natural laughing Buddhas. Others of us keep trying.