Practical Magic in the Pyrenees
I knew l’Hotel de l’Avenue was for me. It was cheap. But more than that, it was friendly and charming and old and nicely located and drew me in. It had a kind vibe. Only good things could happen there.
I arrived in Tarbes and laughed as I stepped off the train into the brilliant sun. This little French mountain hamlet was ridiculous! Disney Does the Pyrenees. Gemütlich baroque town-houses lined narrow cobblestoned streets burgeoning with colorful hanging flowers. Paint peeled off of elaborate portone, helmetless comrades bicycled lazily around with actual baguettes under their arms, palm trees played with the pines in the distance, the village was ringed with deeply forested mountains and literal fields inhabited by happy cows and waving grasses, and dancers frolicked in the fountains in the squares. You could not invent such a place.
My hotel was close to the station and when I saw it my pelt relaxed. After a 20 hour travel delay including everything under the sun going wrong that possibly could go wrong (forest fire in Marseille, an idiot on the tracks in Nîmes, and untold other misadventures), those faded blue shutters and that friendly awning beckoned to me like an oasis. I rang the bell.
Out came a version of my mom! I instantly felt around her as I had felt around my mom when I was little. I wanted to crawl into her lap and nuzzle her cheek. She instantly welcomed me, the weary traveler, to the nest, and she knew me. Even though it was a full and busy hotel and new strangers and travelers were coming in all the time, and I could have been anyone, she saw with her inside eyes and said, “je sais bien qui vous êtes, vous êtes Jordana.” …..She genuinely seemed glad that I had finally made it. She saw me. My heart welled up in with relief, bubbling with all the problems I had had getting here, and she just said, as if she had heard my heart, “après beaucoup des problèmes, de plusieurs sortes” and she nodded and sighed wisely, hearing the problems.
I knew she knew.
It was only after I had installed myself in my charming room that I realized, when I had emailed her telling I would not be coming the first evening, I had only told her just the one problem (because that was all I knew about at the time although it turned out to be the first of many), the fire in Aubagne….
Life at the inn was blissful and I tried not to think about how much it was costing me. When one has one’s period, it’s nice to have a room of one’s own with a closing door, and no men around to get grossed out and miffed. If only the chamber maids were not so dead-set on cleaning my room, despite the large French “do not disturb sign” I had written and stuck on my door. They ignored it and insisted on coming in and making my bed anyway, like termites. But hey, I had my own French window with blue shutters, and the tall curving stairs had a handmade wooden banister that had been there for at least 200 years, and I could spread my shit out and make a mess and be home whenever I felt like it without having to be nice to anyone, and you can’t put a price on that.
I emailed asking for the wifi password and didn’t get it and so the next day when I stopped in just before lunch, I figured I’d get the password from the lady in person. I came in from the street, rang the bell, and instantly she came hurrying out…holding the password for me. I point this out because it is a very old hotel and there are no cameras. No way for her to have known who it was or what I wanted, and yet out she came, tending to my needs without even being asked.
I ate breakfast in the breakfast room/bar every morning and watched her bustling around like everyone’s mom, exuding that particularly French contentment with one’s work that I have occasionally seen in French butchers, bakers, and probably candle-makers. The Italians have their own brand of the same thing…maybe I wouldn’t notice it if I were not American, but in my country, everybody wants to be King. Maybe contentment with a simple life is a European thing.
I had a lesson with Pablo and Emilie in a back room with unopening windows that served as a storage room and we all got soaked through with sweat like we had taken baths, and I learned a lot. Laser-eyed Pablo named me la Felina Hecho del Fuego and said that I draw men into my world and then I eat them, and that I was already good enough exactly as I was. He did not want to change me. He did not want to mess with my dance. He did not want to plaster perfect technique all over me because, he said, something would get lost, it would ruin it, he did not want me to lose my flavor, my special juice. He said that if I tried to be somebody else, it would be fake. And I must not do that.
Sure this is true of everybody, but I got the sense that he was speaking especially to me, especially to my dance. That he saw something special in it exactly as it was and didn’t want to deprive the world of something valuable. He did not want to smooth away my Soul just to make room for some nice Outside, and I loved him for that.
Talk about the best 99 euros I ever spent. Since then I’ve been working on changing my attitude toward my baseline movement patterns, with a vengeance. And whaddya know…the worst “faults” that everyone tried so hard to bludgeon out of me since the beginning are, of course, the exact keys that help me move exactly right for me! For example, all those years of having my natural sagittal and coronal disassociation beaten out of me, and suddenly I’m realizing it’s my own unique key to what other people call leaving their weight on their standing leg, aka smooth weight transfer, aka not rushing, aka not collapsing, aka going with my back, aka actually using my pelvis, aka being stable and in control…aka everything. And the “salsa hips” that also drove everyone crazy…are my own unique key to grounded, stable balance and effortless pivots (and they match what Ariadna and Fernando and Joe and Lucila and…everybody…now say). I figured all that out for myself, but I don’t know if I would have allowed myself to see my “faults” as magic keys to embrace if Pablo had not told me I was already right and good just as I was. Thanks, Pablo, I knew you were a genius.
The gift of dance is not about getting someone else to move the way you move or understand movement the way you understand it. The gift of dance is about getting someone to move the way they move and understand movement the way they understand it.
And I do not know that that lesson could have happened anywhere else. Living there, under the witch’s roof, marinating in her motherly energy that allowed me to feel comfortable as my real self and safe as my inside Me, I opened to ideas that I might otherwise have blocked.
Witches wear many hats. And we need them all, quietly making their way through the world, each doing good in ther own way, spreading practical magic for the good of all.
L’Hotel de l’Avenue, 78–80 Avenue Bertrand Barere, 65000 Tarbes, France
+05 62 93 06 36
