For me there are two great restorative sources in the world - the sea and the sun. When my cup runs empty these are the things I need, the gentle caress of a warm sunbeam, the meditative comfort of the waves breaking on the shore. Today as I sit and type I am blessed by the first and the latter is almost replaced by the whistling of the wind in the trees around our garden. The repeated surges are so similar I could almost believe myself lost inside a wave, caught up in the cresting spindrift being tugged along to the shore. I think I would like to be washed up by the waves, a shell or a piece of driftwood, if I could land at last on a warm sunny day and be taken home to be treasured by a kindred spirit.
Maybe I dream of being someone else's beach treasure because I so like to collect things at the shore myself. This is a habit that has clearly rubbed off on my children to my husband's despair when our garage is full of buckets of pebbles, shells and seaweed!* We have a few rules about collecting most importantly not to be greedy. Although the general conclusion of this article is that beach combers are not responsible for changes in seaside ecosystems it does encourage us to err on the side of caution and limit what we put in our pockets. Often I encourage our children to pick one or two things from what's caught their interest and leave the rest behind. To make this process smoother we often make Land Art with our finds at the beach and photograph it, thus creating a visual souvenir of all the beautiful things we found. The photo below shows shells and crabs collected over many trips to the beach which we are in the process of cleaning and sorting.
Sometimes I leave what I found in my pockets because the joy of coming across it unexpectedly weeks or months later when I wear those clothes again is great. A tiny coiled white shell found in the depths of the pockets of my favourite yellow dress on a rainy day in the city has been known to keep me smiling for the rest of the day. Such good medicine.
*accumulated over several trips usually because we are lazy about sorting our finds.
It's been a long and busy summer here with non-stop guests all through August and well into September. Thanks to everyone who stopped by to see us we really enjoyed all these encounters even if they left us little time for blogging and other activities!
That's all set to change now with our lifestyle shifting as we ease into autumn and rediscover the inside of our house and renewed energy for our individual creative pursuits. Although our record number of activities outside the home is making finding time very difficult. I think it's always a dance as a homeschooler getting the balance right between time at home for being and learning and time outside the home learning new things and socialising. It's always been important to me that we have enough free time to think, dream and make, to do something unplanned, to experience quiet and emptiness as much as hustle and bustle and noisiness. It's an interesting conundrum and one we're constantly navigating.
As usual we've been spending a lot of time at the beach. I've recently become somewhat obsessed with seaweed. Anyone who knows me well knows that I tend to develop enthusiasms for things and dive right into them exploring them as fully as possible. For now that thing is algae and I am really enjoying exploring it in my poetry and through photography.
We visited the amazing Chateau de la Hunaudaye this week. It's one of the finest medieval sites in Brittany and after months of reading about castles and knights and life in medieval times it was great fun to finally visit a well restored castle. We had been to Guémené previously where the castle ramparts, a door and queen's baths inspired us but Hunaudaye was something else all together. In better condition it was much easier for us and the kids to imagine the castle as it would have been in its prime. Add on to this the 3D simulations you can watch and the castle really comes to life. We were all particularly fascinated to see exactly how the drawbridge functioned using counterweights. As a homeschooling family these visits are an important part of what motivates and invigorates our learning.
The children also had a great time in the afternoon at the locally organised Rally des Loups. We walked around four sites each offering a different activity for the children - grass weaving, land art, medieval armor and weaponry and hunt the bugs. The children loved it all but I think their favourite was the one we took all the pictures of. After all getting to try on different pieces of real (replica not period) armor and pick up an axe and a sword was almost too much fun. We also discovered that knight's probably only fought for a very short time as their armor was so heavy they would have quickly tired.
All in all a wonderful day and a great continuation of our medieval studies.
Apologies for the poor quality on the photos - we forgot the camera and the phone quality left a lot to be desired in the dim forest light.
Right now there are lots of secrets emerging in my garden - courgette flowers blossiming under huge green leaves, hortensia flowers slowly turning blue and pink, first tiny hard green tomatoes and tiny little apples budding on our tree. It is a time of discovery, hope and joy for us as we watch the beginnings of the food that we hope will blossom and grow so it can nourish us later on in the season. Very exciting.
We are learning new things about the sexuality of flowers and the pollination needs of squash. And always more bugs and pests and how to keep them off our Pak Choi and salad. We are nervously preparing to leave our garden for a little while and crossing our fingers that it will be well taken care of and we'll come back to red tomatoes and a bumper crop of courgettes, cornichon and tomatoes.
And then there are the other little hidden gems, tiny droplets of rain hanging on the leaves after a thunderstorm, a snail snugly tucked into rose petals (damn that photo didn't work out) and little elves running in and out of the clover and the trees delighting in the summer sun.
