…FROM A PRESENCE…
Stage 23 / Tuesday 19 May / From Lacapelle-Marival to Rocamadour / 39 km
I have entered the natural park of the Causses du Quercy. I am fascinated by the contrasts of aridity and greenery on my stage today. Above, the limestone plateaus [locally called causses] with their dry moors and sparse pastures for lambs. Below, the deep gorges where groundwater seepage pours out under trees and tangled vines. The richness of this presence of water awakens all my senses: sight of course, but also my hearing which delights in the echo of the falcons’ cries of alarm as they soar near the cliffs; smell which is filled with the odor of wild garlic in the humid undergrowth near a stream; touch when my hand grips a mossy tree-trunk to avoid falling on a steep path …
I savor each instant. Living thus in the moment, I free myself of the weight of the past and of the anguish about the future. Exalted, I walk at a more and more unrestrained pace. And then in a steep descent, I almost tumble into the ravine when the tip of one of my walking poles gets stuck between two flat stones. Be careful! I nearly went over … “Gorging yourself on the present,” I tell myself, “shouldn’t bring you to jumping into the void to taste the delirium of weightlessness!” I realize how lucky I’ve been, because I fell back onto the path rather than forward into the ravine. My head swims with heat, and my legs are limp! My heart pounding, I sit on a rock … Enough of this foolish exaltation!
“OK, I must live in the realm of the present, rather than in the moment!” I make this reflection aloud and resume walking. This “realm of the present” takes the image of a segment of time that will slide with me as I progress. It can escort me calmly, with neither precipitation nor languor, but it brings with it the realization of what just happened and the anticipation of what might happen.
It’s as if a better presence of things takes me by the hand to accompany me, without forcing me, but also without blinding me. It doesn’t snuff all my desires to project myself forward, but this acquired knowledge which travels with me prefers to bridle possible danger, thus conforming me better to the necessities of survival. Oh, intemperate presence of wisdom, you take me by the hand, more subtle but more energizing than the shackling inertia of concepts invented by knowledge! Because in wanting to formulate concepts, one easily loses one’s power of concentration.
It is better to be aware of my ability to carefully slip into Nature. I must stay focused rather than being foolish for wanting to plungem, body and soul, deep into this beautiful nature, thus blinding my perception of its reality and danger with fuzzy concepts. For example: the human being’s concept of invincibility in his confrontation with that which is not capable of reasoning; or the idea of a domination over all that lives and moves and which is not “thinking”; or even the harmlessness of the mineral and the inert! And to think that a vulgar crack between two blocks of stone could have caused my doom!
Ah, this concept of the present and this feeling of a presence! Difficult to grasp … It is easier to feel the present when one is in silence, as I was a little while ago sitting on my rock, waiting for my heart to stop pounding. I believed then that everything around was keeping quiet to better listen to those “Boom! Boom! Booms!” leaping inside my chest. More difficult to feel it when one is only a “futile presence” in the midst of a crowd on a city sidewalk. And yet, don’t we say that one can “impose his presence” on others in a group! I’ve done that many times … I don’t know whether if was always a present that I gave them, imposing on them my presence, even in silence!
Here I am leaving the solitude of the shadowy vale of the Alzon, this stream which moistens the foot of the cliff of Rocamadour. There, in the old days, some hermits kept silence, praying, dying … Later pilgrims announced that a certain Amadour, alias Zacheus the publican, would have been one of them. A body was found in the rock, near a sanctuary built in the cliff. Some beautiful miracles took place there. And so, even more pilgrims came to climb the 210 steps on their knees up to this holy place! Their presence is imprinted in the rounded wearing away of the stairs that I climb in silence …
