Getting to Oui

Last Monday, I posted this picture.

A friend commented: “Good for you! Have fun. Please do something that I wouldn’t do . . . then tell us about it.”

My warrior self declared, “Ready my chariot. We’re off!”

Another part of me quailed. What did my friend have in mind?

Did she mean being a nude model in a life drawing class at this age (for hadn’t I just read an essay about that)?

Or was she thinking I’d grab the nearest Frenchmen and ask him to kiss me by the Seine? My luck, he’d turn out to be from Akron.

I carried her suggestion like a niggling worm everywhere I went . . . along with half the world, it seemed. Paris was crammed and hot as the cigarettes that burned everywhere.

When I started to notice the energy of those around me, I had an idea. Many moved around the famous sights with an Excel spreadsheet kind of energy—check, check, check.

What if I picked just one and sat.

Stilled.

Stayed?

I started to arrive early in the morning at Notre Dame, a five-minute walk from my hotel.

I’d eat my croissant and sit with the big and sacred body.

I say with intentionally, for that was something else that occurred to me on this adventure. When we travel—myself included—we often take energy from the things we encounter. Please! our spirits cry. Gimme whatever makes you special, because I want to be special too!

As the buttery flakes wafted down on my bare legs, I wondered if Notre Dame or Mona Lisa ever felt like hot and sweaty parents—yes, wanting to shepherd the spirits in their care to the Good—but at the end of the day, depleted by all the demands.

So, I would sit in front of Notre Dame and bless her.

Thank you for offering hope and grace.

Space and light.

Thank you for showing us how to come back from tragedy and be even more beautiful than before.

Then, I’d rise, brush the crumbs from my lips, and make my way to the line already forming to go in the sacred space.

Once inside, I turned left and stepped the side chapel where this hangs from the massive stone wall.

As I stilled, and more and more people swelled past me, I found myself slipping into two of my favorite practices. The first was visio divina—where you sit with a work of art and wait for the Greater Than to reveal something—quietly and shyly as a deer.

I’ve been arrested by this practice again and again—and soon, my spirit sees.

Behind.

Beyond.

In Light of.

And that’s the other practice—trataka.

It’s an ancient yoga practice of steady, uninterrupted gazing at a single point, most often a candle’s flame. It both cleanses and calms a restless mind, and it was one of my favorite things I learned in my yoga teacher training. Whenever I do it, I feel its effects almost immediately.

So, there I sat on a hard, wooden bench in Notre Dame morning after morning. Some days my eyes would fix on a single spatter.

Others, it was the tiny wooden door on the altar beneath the tapestry.

Sit and stare.

I could sense people stopping to look at me, could hear them whispering. And taking pictures of me. Of what I was looking at.

Sit and stare.

Stare until I was sure the door was about to open, and who knew what bright spirit might step out?

Stare until the sacred mess of black dots turned into a Face. That’s when I readied myself to hear whatever it was going to whisper.

I almost laughed aloud when I heard it: Oui.

Yes.

This.

I suddenly felt like fragrant wood had been thrown into the fire inside of me.

I burned.

I sat.

Yes.

Just so.

I stared until I cooled, still as the stones around me.

I blinked.

And blinked again.

I held out my open palms.

And bowed as I left.

A few days later, I would stumble upon a mass in a different church. As I sat there, I didn’t understand a thing the priest said except for two words: hallelujah and amen.

A sudden realization of the good and joyful.

So be it.

Oui.