Café Langues Échange

It was around back in January of this year when I posted this flyer around my village of Puget-Theniers here in the southern French Alps. At the same time I was taking a French Intensive course with Alliance Française in Nice. Everyday for a month I took the 790 bus from here to the city and the ride was 1.5 hours each way! But it was worth it because I learned so much and made some lovely friends.

Anyway, back to the flyer. I had this idea to make an exchange with a French speaker wanting to learn English. I imagined we could have a coffee and speak part of the time in French and part of the time in English. And, perhaps I could even make some new friends. Out of curiosity I did some research and turns out these types of exchanges already exist, which was fantastic to know. So I posted this flyer up at the local carrefour supermarché and on a village bulletin board, not knowing what to expect. I believe it wasn't until near the end of March when I got a call from Laurent.

I was nervous but we had a coffee and great first meeting. Laurent speaks English quite well and his level of English is higher than mine in French, but we manage well. Soon after our first exchange, he brought his partner Magali who also wants to learn English. Her level is more novice, but I've printed out worksheets for beginner English learners and we've had laughs and made progress over ambré beers at Chez Math, a local bar and restaurant. Turns out Laurent and Magali live just down the street from us. And, it also turns out that I have made two wonderful new friends.

It's such a small world because Laurent makes the deliveries of the veggies and eggs at the farm where I work at so we are also colleagues in a way. And, Magali is one of the bus drivers for the 790 which I took to Nice everyday for my French lessons. After I finally formally met her, I recognized  her right away as the really nice bus driver! That's the beauty of village life for you.

This is my 5th year studying French! I can't believe it's been that long. I've only ever had 1 month of formal study in a classroom. But I've been living on and off in France for the last 5 years and so have learned French mostly just in daily life, with some self-workbooks sprinkled in. Though it's been an informal learning, I would say it has been a very integrated study. I've been learning French as a child would learn a new language, all in the context of real life through practice and everyday exchanges with people. Below are my tips to learning French, or any language. I was 26 when I started learning French, so age is no matter!

Les Essentielles: Les cafés, la croissant et la dictionnaire. 

5 Tips for Learning a New Language:

1. Surrender, accept that you will make mistakes (lots of mistakes), some very embarrassing. For my surfers out there it's like when you are out in the water and you just have to surrender to Mother Nature and the waters, and going with where the waves and tide take you rather than resisting.

2. Surround yourself with the language. It really helps to immerse yourself, in whatever capacity you can. The best is of course living the country or a community with people who speak the language you are trying to learn and just hearing it everyday and seeing it written everywhere on signs and menus. Being forced to speak the language daily also trains your brain and those muscles in your mouth and tongue to formulate those words. If you can't quite immerse yourself yet, watch lots of movies or listen to music or see youtube channels about this language. If there is a specific topic you are interested in or have a passion for, like for me it's gardening, then look up videos or media on this in your language of interest!

3. Speak, Speak, Speak! Don't be afraid to speak the language as much as you can and with the surrendering of number 1, don't be afraid to make mistakes and sound silly. Have compassion for yourself, you are learning, your brain is growing bigger, people know you are learning and most of the time have compassion for you and appreciate you learning their language. It's all good. It's very important to keep exercising those muscles in our mouths and tongues that are foreign to our native language. Set a timer for an hour and speak only the language you are learning, no matter how hard it is. Start a Café Langue Échange in your community! Post a flyer or go to a forum/social media outlet and post that you are looking for a language exchange. Speak for 1/2 hour in the language you want to learn and 1/2 hour in your native language for your exchange partner.

4. Read, Read, Read! Carry a pocket dictionary or picture dictionary around and look up words you don't know or make notes of words you hear and don't know to look up later. My French to English/English to French dictionary is my best friend, well next to my opinel (French pocket knife). For me, looking up words the old-fashioned way with a book dictionary somehow allows me to remember better that word. Perhaps it's the time it takes to look it up and read the definition? But I find that when I look it up that way rather than google translate on my phone (although google translate can be helpful at times too) I remember the word so much better. As you build vocabulary, you have more building blocks to make new sentences with. For me, as a visual learner, when I see a word and how it is spelled and used in a sentence, I remember it better and know how to use it. I like reading these little pamphlets from the organic store which come out monthly, sort of like a newsletter. It's just my level of French, simple, and the topics are everything I am interested in: food, farming, creating personal care products, so I feel motivated to read and to look up words I don't know since it's a topic that interests me. Graphic novels are really great, too! Oh and subtitles! I would watch a movie in French and read the subtitles in English and then watch English movies with French subtitles. Or, French movie with French subtitles. All three ways can be helpful, as well as starting out with a film or story you already know. Explore what works best for you.

5. Make friends with people who speak the language you want to learn. If they don't speak any language other than that language you want to learn, even better! This will really force you to learn and practice. My landlord for our first apartment in France (the apartment castle) didn't speak a word of English, and I always enjoyed having tea or mojitos with her because she was a cool person but also because I could really hone in on my French with her. Even more romantic, if you can fall upon a lover who speaks the language you want to learn and, the important part, who doesn't speak your native language. So the last part of that last sentence is good for learning a new language I think, but I imagine that being really hard to growing a relationship with someone. Jorris, my husband, speaks French but also English (and Dutch, German and Spanish), so it's great because he helps me with my French but also not great because he loses patience quickly and turns back to English. For our relationship though, I'm so glad he speaks English so we can communicate our feelings.




*photos and flyer by me. 

New Beginnings

Freshly collected organic eggs.

This week I started my new job at Agnès and Renaud's organic farm here in the Southern French Alps. We buy our veggies and eggs from them every week at the artisanal store right by our house called Montagnes Paysannes (Mountain Peasants). We also sell our honey at the same shop. We’ve known them for a few years now and they are a kind couple with strong organic farm ethics, so when I spoke to Agnes about looking for a job maybe working at the store, she said to me that they were looking for some farm hands for help this season, and my eyes lit up. 

I’m so happy for spring’s arrival. The many blossoms and flowers add some color to an otherwise green and gray canvas of hillside and mountain. I feel like these are gifts from nature for making it through winter, a token of appreciation. I can feel a shift in the energy of my surroundings. I see bees buzzing around the blossoms, hear the birds more loudly, and all of our farm friends are up over their heads with work. It’s the beginning of a new season indeed, and I am hopeful and excited. 

Purple Irises add globs of color to the side of the farm house. 

Mysterious cone flowers the bees go crazy for!

We started off the week with a large egg delivery. I was in charge of collecting and preparing hundreds of eggs in their cartons for delivery to CSA (community supported agriculture) members and up-end restaurants and hotels in Nice. It’s no surprise that some top restaurants on the French Riviera want local, organic and quality eggs. We are lucky to have them each week too. Working at another CSA farm, where the consumers and farmer share a risk in the struggles and benefits of farming, reminded of my early days years ago farming in Montana. 

I greet the hens and say thank you for each egg I harvest in the end house. It’s been a bit of a dilemma for me because a part of me feels bad for stealing their eggs. Perhaps it’s part of my woman’s instinct, though I have not experienced motherhood, taking away the babies of another feels wrong. Jorris made the point that they are not fertilized eggs so there is no baby yet, but I still feel that it is a potential baby the way I see then hens sit on them, keeping them warm and protected. Most move out of the way but some are more aggressive and don’t want to leave their eggs. Their pecks and the way they fluff up their bodies tell me so. When I do get the eggs, they are warm in my fingers. I say thank you, sorry, and leave. 

Every morning I say bonjour to the girls et merci.

Gifts I pull from their little nesting houses. 

"Bio" (organic) eggs I packaged into cartons for the stores.

I suppose it’s the same with honey. We are technically stealing honey from the bees who make them. Of course, we don’t take all of their honey like some do. But maybe it doesn’t affect my moral judgement as much because I don’t see a bee sitting on its honey and protecting it? I feel the sting though, occasionally. 

Perhaps the silver-lining of working with the hens, gathering their eggs, stepping in their poop, giving gratitude to them each day, allows me to be closer to where my food comes from. To me it’s a special feeling, perhaps even rare in this day and age, to know so intimately where our food comes from. It is something our modern-day society lacks, and I believe this disconnect between where our food comes from and ourselves is making us sick. The low-quality, processed commercial “food items” produced on massive monocultures, mostly of genetically-modified corn and soy, making Mother Earth sick and us in return. 

The taoist see the inner body as a landscape. This metaphor resonates with this notion of our relation to Mother Earth’s landscape. If her rivers and oceans are polluted, so is the blood that flows in our veins. If we poison her soil with chemicals, we poison ourselves. 

I’ve been enjoying my work outdoors in the fresh air of the French Alps, chemical free. We drink pure water, which comes directly from the local spring. Our hands hold living, clean earth saturated with microorganisms, which I’m sure are making me healthier, along with the chicken poop. So much of our earth’s soil is dead from over-farming. So much of the food most people eat from the supermarkets are pasteurised or overly clean. How can we expect to live harmoniously with the many other microscopic organisms if we kill them all off? How can we expect not to get sick or have allergies when we sterilize everything and our bodies are not exposed to any bacteria?

I love all the freckles and imperfects of these beauties, not to mention taste! 

Heavy cases of eggs ready for delivery. 

Anyway, I digress. Farming is hard work, no doubt. But, I am learning how to work smarter and not harder. This doesn’t mean cutting corners or faking it because in farming, you can’t “fake it till you make it”. Farming is something else. It requires patience, honesty and you literally reap what you sow.  

I feel like I am developing a different part of my brain. For one, the language part, since while I am learning to farm I am also learning a lot of new French vocabulary. Secondly, I am getting better at understanding economics, making predictions, and calculating time. For example, with the eggs, I was placing the finished cartons in the big box for delivery and that big box was to my left on the table. After I filled that box with 21 egg cartons, I had to lift it down to the ground where it should have been. thought to myself, why didn’t I predict that it would need to be on the ground and just leave the box on the ground, adding the egg cartons into it, eliminating the steps of lifting the box onto the table and then later lifting the heavy box loaded with fragile eggs to set it onto the ground? These seemingly little innocuous things add up and I want to preserve my physical capabilities for the long haul. 

With tasks like these, I look to do things more efficiently and find that I naturally apply these little improvements to other parts of my life. Saving a little time here and there through efficient work saves a lot of time at the end of the day, week, month, year. And time is precious. 

"French Breakfast" radishes freshly harvested and washed for artisanal store.

As simple as packaging eggs may sound, which it is, I’m learning so much, finding beauty in the mundane. After all, farming is really just a combination of monotonous tasks, I’m learning. Sure, the end results of big leafy rainbow chard or crunchy “French Breakfast” radish (which I got to taste yesterday straight from the ground) and happy customers are all beautiful and romantic pictures of what it means to farm, but it’s not what we see nor do everyday. What we see everyday is a puzzle piece of irrigation lines and parts. What we do everyday is walk back and forth, to and from the same fields, looking for pieces of irrigation parts or moving things around. And the most seemingly simple tasks such as putting up the plastic of the hoop house takes hours. But through the small little moments of waiting for Indira to throw me the line from across the house so I can secure it on the pole, I take in the fresh air, admire the white cherry blossoms and birds chirping.  

The serre where we added the plastic onto and the cherry blossoms.

I am a romantic at heart, can’t change it even if I tried, and believe me I have tried. I’ve learned to accept my nature though, even appreciate it. Because, I have seen around me, even from the very hard-working farmers who probably started out as romantics, that life can harden you and you can loose perspective so easily in the mundane. As Indira, my colleague, whom I work with said yesterday while we were in the chicken coop in French something like, “Life will swallow you up, if you’re not tough,” I thought to myself that is very true and I am getting tougher, but I also I wish to safeguard the appreciation for beauty and curiosity of life because if we lose touch with those, what is left or worth living for? This is not to say that she has lost touch per se, just that her quote makes me think that it is dangerous to be soft and vulnerable in life. And it is, but I think only when we take that risk of vulnerability can we experience true beauty and joy.

*photos by Tiffanie Ma.

Dukkha

We’re all a little bruised and broken. Suffering is indiscriminate. No matter who you are or where you come from or where you were and where you are going, no matter your gender, age, the color of your hair, your morals and beliefs, rich or poor, we all suffer.

The Buddha said that life is Dukkha. Life is suffering. To live is to suffer. Because, as the Buddha explained we are living in the cycle of samsara: life, death, rebirth; and with living comes suffering because karma, the law of cause and effect, can lead to suffering.

Some say our sufferings stem from ancestral wounds that never healed. This is a new concept for me, which I am curious about. I wonder though, does this mean that we can blame others for our suffering? Does this mean that we have no control over it, and it’s all predetermined through an ancestral algorithm of sorts? If not any of these hypotheses, then what does any of it mean?

Of course, humans are not the only beings or spirits which suffer, though I feel as though our suffering is worse because we are complicated creatures who perhaps bring a lot of it upon ourselves.

Some days, like today, all we can do is feel it through and just observe. For me it’s yoga, a walk in the woods, playing guitar, or writing a blog post, but for you, it could be something else. Whatever that space or action that can lead to cathartic expressions I believe can be incredibly healing.

Today I got onto my mat and discovered a deep well of sadness. I felt its darkness and absence of love. I didn’t know it was there until I got into a posture, just lying on my belly and breathing, and I began crying for all the things I felt and couldn’t say. In this state of delicacy, however, my mind was so clear. It was as if my mind was soothing my heart and just observing these emotions, and sort of consoling my heart that it’s ok to feel emotions like sadness and “just cry, just keep breathing and feel what you need to feel, without judgment, attachment or shame,” my mind instructed.

I think my meditation practice has helped me become so much stronger, mentally, spiritually and emotionally. I have to thank Andy Puddicombe from my Headspace app, and my soon to be brother-in-law Steven for having introduced me to the app in spring 2017 when I had gone to visit him and brother Kevin in San Francisco. I’ve been meditating since then and this practice has changed my life.

I’ve learned tools to help me not be afraid of my thoughts or emotions and to just observe them like passing clouds because underneath all the dark clouds there is always a blue sky. This analogy can often be found in meditation practices, and I learned about it through headspace. We just have to remember we have peace of mind all the time (blue sky) and that sometimes those clouds of sadness or doubts will creep in. Meditation has allowed me to better understand myself and my mind. Slowly I begin to see patterns and why I do or think the way I do, all from a place of tender curiosity and deep compassion. I am reminded of how human I am and constantly question what it means to be human and why we do what we do and don’t do what we don’t do.

Life, even in the Southern French Alps, is not always a fairytale. It’s hard no matter where you are. I’ve made more French friends here and have learned of more sad stories and pain and suffering are the recurring theme. It puts things into perspective.

For me life has been so condensed and charged with change these last 6 months. I got married, moved to a new country, moved to a new village within that country, intensified my studies of this new language, continued building my business while my husband continued building his and finding a way for those to blend together, all while raising a young cat and the learning curve that comes with raising a cat for the first time.

In this moment we are the crucible of building a new life, together. It’s getting hot inside as more responsibilities and deadlines pile up for this loan to that. It seems to never end and some weeks, we seem to never see each other as we live in the mountains and loans and banks live in the city and now the bees are on the coast so Jorris has been driving back and forth between all places, his cup filled with bee work, business class work with a dash of bank/finance work.

He’s stretching himself in all directions and you can imagine what that does to a person, and for a newlywed couple. His cup can fill no more. There’s no more room for drops of my quirky jokes or childish comments like this morning when I said “what if I loved Bodhi (our cat) so much he turned into a real human?!” Texting a business text and not hearing my comment, Jorris continued with his work. 

Then those quirky jokes and my wish for attention get swept under the rug and soon the rug isn’t big enough to cover it all up. Then what?

It seems like this sort of pressure-filled feeling has always been in our relationship since the beginning, perhaps a sort of relationship karma? At first it was, soon I’ll have to go back to CA because my visa will expire so we’ll be apart again but for how long; then it was where do we want to make our life in France or U.S.; then now, how are we going to do it...all these choices and life decisions that just seem to keep demanding an answer now.

Jorris had been camping in L’Esterel and working with the bees and various business formations in Nice so we hadn’t really seen each other until we went on a date night on Sunday. It had been the first just-us date night in a while at the local Au Bon Coin (The Good Corner) restaurant in our village. Over trout and pizza we had a moment to just be a couple, and while some clouds lingered, I could see the blue sky for a moment.

This morning though, I’m not sure if it’s as blue. My heart is heavy. I continue to breathe through the uncertainty that is life. What else can we do? Whatever happens though will happen as it should and life will continue because it just does. Someone close to my heart the other day wrote to me and reminded me of how I was a bright ray of sunshine to her from across the ocean and that she admired my authenticity and how I could put love above all else. It was beautifully written and sincere. I felt a sense of peace after reading it because even if I accomplish nothing more in this life, at least I know I inspired love and light from a place of authenticity for one person and that’s more than enough for me.

If, to be human is to suffer, but to suffer is to know or have known true love, beauty and wisdom, then perhaps it is worth it, wherever our paths may lead.





*Photos by Tiffanie Ma