The countryside: to speak or write is not enough to convey the effect of such a place on the body and mind. Even the photos cannot tell the truth of such a landscape as I have just seen. Words like “majesty,” and “beauty,” and “grandeur” were created for much smaller things. Within the last twenty-four hours I have re-centered myself. I have found gravity to not only be a force, but a state of mind and a tangible energy.

Whereas the city is conducive to introspection, as narrow streets squeeze the mind like a ripe olive in a press, allowing intensification and distillation of essences; the country allows the mind to extend tendrils which grasp things beyond reach and then brings them back for consumption. Even now as the TGV rushes me through the prosaic countryside I can feel my mind still floating on the clouds in a valley of stone and wild verdure. I’m carried back to long views and the sensation of cold wind carrying miles of fresh air around my body and through my lungs.

Three hours from now the city will once again have me within its grasp. The foothills of the Alps and the bustle of the Champs Elysées now sit awkwardly together in a series of mental and physical sensations that are as foreign to my soul as this land is to the unfamiliar striking of my footsteps.

I have walked through puddles of urban detritus and stacks of limestone glacial till with eyes perched so far from my body that my sight was like a blindness. Like a lover, this land has taken hold of me and as a love lost it makes no apologies to me as it sits there, stone cold, not offering one word of condolence to the pain in my heart; a pain brought on by the pending divorce of my departure.

And why wouldn’t I stay for one more kiss? Or until death demands my exit from my perch above the Seine? Why shouldn’t my love entice me to make a compromise so that my heart can still beat to the steady change that causes the bloom of spring to carry life like a river through time? No one knows me here; and yet anyone who has ever loved knows that France has become my lover. I speak of her like a man speaks tenderly of his wife as she blushes silently at his side.

If there are any more words to describe a world where time has no effect, then I must find them; they must find their way into my mind and through my veins to the end of a pen which bleeds ink into this paper just as surely as my vein would bleed the oxygen of the mountain air out into the Earth.