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The thing to
do on a Monday," he said, "is to go to the market in a tiny village
hardly on the map, a dozen miles away." So we went and were amazed.
It was huge, out of all proportion to the place, with cars parked
all over long before you arrived, and many hundreds of people; by
far the largest country market in France we had ever been to.
The stalls were legion, of every shape and size like the people.
There were vast fruit and vegetable stalls with crowds stuffing
kilos of this and that into help-yourself plastic bags. Mo¬bile
cheese shops sporting the best of the region, always with long
queues. Wine stalls and all the marvellous paraphernalia of shoes
and trainers and jeans and dresses and skirts, old records and CDs,
books, trinkets and geegaws. Leather belts and bags, baskets and
plant pots. Honeys and jams. A whole parade of locally made chairs
gleaming bright with varnish in the sunlight, and other woodcraft.
Permanently startled live poultry being crammed into cardboard boxes
and carted off. Even old farm implements, the antique range. it was
endless.
And in the middle of this amiable French hullabaloo of to-ing and
fro-ing, buying and selling, the cafe/bar/restaurant where we sat,
people watching, a favourite occupation.
They were nearly all country folk except for one or two tourists
like us and a few young couples cautiously making their way round
hand in hand, looking bewildered, quite out of place, not their
scene. It was obviously the meeting place and the shopping place for
everyone from miles around. The big town twenty miles away was
clearly not a place they ever much went to. This was an open
supennarket, generations old.
They were all there. There was marathon man dressed just in running
vest and shorts and headband, who was much older than he thought he
looked, just trying on shoes. And the thick strong warrior woman
farmer's wife in her market dress, bright, bright blue emblazoned
with ferocious splodges of orange and yellow flowers. You made way
for her! A lot of big farming men, large chests, great arms, some
crumpled with work and aching bones, others still upright, full of
quiet force.
You could see a lot of hardship in bodies. That woman who went by
leaning forward with one arm bent across her chest and the other
flailing up behind her back in a perpetual frail half-nelson. The
young man, grown bulging, who arrived with his stick and his family,
clearly a stroke-victim. There was laughter and shouted greeting and
the clattering crescendo of many mouths swappmg gossip.
And into the bar of course came the constant procession of men -
young and supple or gnarled and fit, short and stocky, huge swag
bellies, the local jokers, the local mafia. If women came with them,
once inside, they separated off into a room of their own to sit and
chatter. The men outside joshing the daughter of the house who came
periodically to top them up. And glorious Madame, well made-up and
well-maintained, in a fine black dress with subtle slashes of red.
At one point a lean barn-door of a man in his 60s' passed all in
grey - old grey suit, grey shirt, grey trilby and a massive face
also grey, like a modem carving of a grieving Christ. A while later
he came out and I saw that his nearside jacket arm was empty. What
was that story? The songs and the sorrow all around.
And Sheila said - "They're all different" in what seemed like a
moment of great silence. And it is so. Again and again, the gradual
unravelling of life all around us. All different.
Yet also, another thing. A book I was reading pointed out in reality
we have no possessions at all and no home at all except our
breathing. In the beginning and in the end breath is all we have.
And we share that with every other human being, every living
organism. Plants breathe. Birds breathe. The big toad sit¬ting
eyeing me one night in the darkness - he breathes. Granite breathes.
The whole universe is one gigantic breathing, one continuous
breaking wave. This means quite simply that All is bound together in
a Unity. That is a meaning of God.
So all these people are my brothers and sisters, bound to each other
by our breathing. Mind you, if I had strolled out into the market
and said to someone - hello brother or how are you sister (in
impeccable French of course) I would certainly have got some strange
stares. One in a thousand might have smiled and taken my hand,
understanding. I would probably have been told to shove off (in
impeccable French of course) or I might even have been had up for
soliciting. It does not alter the fact that that is who they are,
this weekly multitude that almost certainly, I shall never see
again. That is also a meaning of Holy Spirit.
"God is breath.
All that breathes resides in the Only Being. From my breath
to the air we share
to the "winds that blow around the planet:
Sacred Unity inspires all. "
God’s Hotel
 We
have reprinted this article, first published in August 2002, for a
very special reason. Later this month David Wood's new book, "God's
Hotel" will appear at distribution centres lcoally and in other
parrts of he country. It is compiled from the hundreds of Godspots
he has written for 'Egremont Today', since he first started in 1992
until last September, when he found successors in Lindsay Gray and
Richard Lee. Richard has generously agreed to our holding over his
own article until next month.
This column has been the spirit which animated ‘Egremont Today’ for
all those years and convinced us that what we were doing was
important. As in the article above, David consistently expresses the
conviction that God is revealed in the people around us. All are
welcome. There are no foreigners. He never tries to tell people what
to believe, and shows equal respect for people of all beliefs,
including those who do not think they believe anything. It means so
much to us that we offered to print it free of charge, and we are
indeed proud to have printed about half of it, before before
technical problems forced us hand over the rest of the job to the
professionals at Printexpress.
The last article David wrote for us in September was reprinted in
‘The Friend’, the national publication for the Quakers. We undertook
a print run of one thousand copies, and they may sell out quickly.
If you would like to order a copy, contact us, on
01946 820423, email egremont2@aol.com, or Lowes Court
Gallery, 01946 820693.
Our photo shows David with his granddaughter, Emma, who designed the
cover.
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