The Big Reset, Part III

‘…we learnt to be still, to be patient and to wait and then something quite unexpected started to happen…’

Slow Living.

The expectation was all go, go, go, how quickly can we get the renovation done, how quickly can we get it up and running as a business so we can start earning a living. But slow living started despite the unfulfilled business potential of the chalet. We cook nearly everything from scratch, mostly prompted by the shocking lack of dairy or gluten free products here, school is practically part-time, only 4 days a week and all the holidays are longer with a few extra religious holidays thrown in for good measure. The home day on a Wednesday forces a mid week pause. We spend a lot of time in the garden and one of my greatest pleasures is drying laundry on the line. The air is so clean here. When we lived in Hastings I constantly had to wipe the line down because it would get traffic soot build up on it from the busy road. Also, we have started a tiny veg patch.

An Art Filled Summer.

Thankfully, from Spring onwards, 2021 was a great year on the art front. I had loads of great and interesting projects come in. I created the Coastline wallpaper for Osborne & Little in my temporary art studio in the main house during the summer which was bliss. The main house is not connected to the water and has no heating or functioning toilets but it has a wonderfully bright and large room for painting in which is a dream for the summer months. It is so prohibitively cold in the winter months though that I can’t use it then. As already mentioned the school summer holidays here are long, eight weeks to be precise so Michael ended up caring for our daughter so I could get the artwork done. The renovations pretty much ground to a halt. We relaxed into a rhythm, a simpler, slower approach to life, which was the aim in theory, but shedding our impatient UK rat race expectations of wanting everything done asap has been difficult.

Living here through the pandemic, away from friends and family, away from people in general has been both isolating and healing at the same time. We didn’t have the vaccine pass that was necessary to go into any public spaces last year so we spent most of 2021 in isolation. Life in rural Bourgogne is like life 20 or 30 years ago. People still use cheque books. No-one seems to have heard of crypto currency or NFT’s, websites are shockingly crap. People do not email or text but call you on the phone, which has been problematic for me with my very poor french language skills. Shops shut for 2 or 3 hours over lunch. Weekends and holidays are observed religiously. The work/life balance here is strong. The population is mostly older retired folks, which on the whole are very friendly, they have immaculate and impressive vegetable gardens and neat houses. Most jobs are linked to agriculture and forestry. There are some young families here but not a lot, our daughter’s school has about 36 pupils in total.

There are quite a lot of empty houses and old hotels. A lot of the houses are second homes for city dwellers but a lot have been left to fall into disrepair which is heart breaking and goes against my typically British home renovator spirit. It has taken leaving the UK to see just how entrepreneurial the British are in their mindset, property is valued so highly in the UK that you very rarely see properties of any standard staying empty for long. I was drawn here by the cheap properties, if you like wine that is also cheap! I am very pleased to see regeneration happening in the town. Shops are being refurbished and we hopefully have a tea salon coming soon. Tea and cake is something I have missed a lot! I’m not sure what will happen with the empty hotels. In the UK they would be snapped up and turned into apartments in a shot! So if there are any property developers out there wanting to take on a fun project you can hire me to do the interior design ;)!

The Dreaded French Red Tape.

I must address French administration, the red tape, the masses of difficult and complicated paperwork that is necessary in this country. I suppose looking at it objectively, when you are in your own country, life admin is spread out, so I guess you wouldn’t notice it as much, but when you start a new life in a red tape heavy country, it is totally overwhelming. We had to apply for our Carte de sejour (right to stay in the country as an ex-pat), we had to register our businesses and register for tax, you pay income tax to one government department and social contributions to another. We also had to register for our carte vitales which give you access to health care, get social security numbers etc. Sort out Taxe Fonciere and Taxe d’habitation (kind of like council tax but two separate taxes). Get a carte grise for the car (register your car with french plates). Sort out house insurance, car insurance, public liability insurance for your child to attend school, setting up utilities, phones and internet. Now the problem has been that none of these processes are straight forward, and so much of it is circular, you need document a. to get document b. but you can’t get document a. without document b, c and d. first. It is the most infuriating experience. Now imagine trying to negotiate all this complicated paperwork in another language you don’t speak. We also added to the stress and paperwork by getting married in France. Gosh we don’t make things easy for ourselves! But to be fair, we were supposed to get married in Hastings before leaving for France but the wedding was cancelled due to lockdown. We ended up having the smallest wedding ever at our local town hall here in France with my sister as the only guest and our neighbours as witnesses.

The photo on the left was taken on the day we were supposed to get married in England and on the right the day we got married in France (it was the smallest wedding ever!)

The Straw That Broke The Camels Back.

I had read about the french red tape before we moved here, and I thought it can’t be that bad, but honestly it has been the most challenging and draining thing we have had to deal with since coming here. I reached a point earlier this year where I had had enough. Our carte grise application had been returned so many times because they kept asking for one more document, each one seemingly more obscure and unnecessary than the last. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back and I announced sobbing into Michael’s chest that I wanted to come back to the UK. I had slipped into a funk of hopelessness, of feeling a bit trapped by the project remaining unfinished. Since then, I have calmed down and am keeping an open mind. I miss the UK a lot, I miss friends and family, I miss UK humour, UK TV, pub lunches, fish and and chips on the beach, the novelty of being able to speak without using google translate and stumbling over every sentence. I miss the shops and convenience of the UK, of familiarity and knowing how everything works and being able to ring up a helpline if you don’t know how something works. We have weathered the harsh winter and of course now the sun is shining, everything is lush and green and we are enjoying our garden again. Sunshine makes everything better. I would still like to return to the UK but it doesn’t have to be right away. It makes no sense to abandon our renovation. In an ideal world I would like to have somewhere in the UK and keep the French house, rent out the chalet as a holiday let and keep the house for ourselves for holidays or for hosting retreats, art retreats, health retreats, spiritual retreats, there are many options. But we still have a very long road ahead to get it ready for that. I do not know how long it will take and I have accepted that, I have let go of the plan.

The winters here are harsh, well, harsh compared to what I am used to in the South of England! The lowest we have had since being here is -12*.

Waiting For Harvest.

I wanted to develop my wallpaper designs and that is happening, it is a much longer process than I had bargained for. The design, painting and then digital post production all take time and must be tested and sampled way ahead of launch. Once wallpapers are launched it takes time for marketing and sales to kick in, and royalties are paid quarterly. It is a long term plan of building a passive income which I am very happy with. Michael has played a huge part in the wallpaper endeavors, he has done all the digital work and anything tech related and we are now working on some new designs together. After twenty years as an electrical engineer Michael is finally pursuing his own art too which is what he always wanted to do but like so many he took the ‘sensible’ option and got himself a ‘proper job’.

We have weathered the lean period of sowing the seeds for the future we want. We have launched four wallpapers and our seeds are starting to sprout and I hope that it will not be too long before we can reap the benefits of the harvest. We have done the hardest part, and it has tested us immensely. But all the challenges have produced some serious personal, spiritual and emotional growth. The hard graft of developing a new business venture will soon start to pay off and we can resume our renovation. I question sometimes whether I would have made the same choices if I had known how difficult it was going to be at times, and I think I definitely would have hesitated but for us it has been worth it. To achieve the life goals we are aiming for it has been necessary.

It is interesting to see looking through my back catalogue how many of my paintings resonate with the imagery surrounding me now.

The Artist’s Way, More Than Just A Book.

I want talk about a book called The Artist’s Way. It was introduced to me about seven weeks ago. It describes itself as: ‘A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity’. I often feel a bit blocked or negative about my artwork so I thought I’d give it a try. It sets out a programme of tasks and activities for you to follow, the main one is writing ‘the morning pages’. Each morning you write three pages of whatever is on your mind, like a journal. It explains right at the beginning how we all have a ‘Censor’ voice and our authentic voice. The censor voice is the one that tells you things like ‘you don’t know what you are doing’ ‘this is crap’, ‘this won’t work, why are you even bothering’. We all have one, it’s quieter for some people and absolutely crippling for others but we all recognize that voice.

I thought doing this programme would help me with my art, I did not anticipate how much the lessons and tasks would apply to every aspect of my life. Perhaps it entered my life at just the right time but this is no co-incidence. The book tells you not to write off serendipity as co-incidence. There is a something far bigger at play if you are willing to look. Going through such a major reset and re-evaluation of life can turn up so many questions, especially the censor one of ‘what on earth are you doing…uprooting your whole life and turning it upside down!’ With the guidance of the book I have been able to separate out that censor voice from my authentic voice and challenge each negative thought that is a brick that is built up into a wall not only to block your creativity but your enjoyment of life in general. It will challenge you immensely and get you to look at some painful memories, experiences that crushed your creative spirit, that forced you to spiritually retreat. But it is so freeing on the other side. It helps you separate what you feel you ‘should’ be doing and what you actually ‘want’ to do. We had already started our journey with the move to France but the book has helped me to make sense of it all. The trials and struggles we have been through in France were clouding our original vision and they were weighing me down but since starting the book I have been able to take a step back and assess things more objectively. Our exodus has not been a stroll in the park but it has bought us a huge amount of healing and afforded us a spiritually nurturing environment to reset. To reset all of our bad mental habits, the conditioning we go through, not just from family growing up, but societal pressures and western consumerist values, but our own deeply damaging insecurities. To let go of old ambitions that no longer serve us. To answer the question honestly ‘what makes you happy?’

We also said goodbye to our dog Fred just before Christmas, he nearly made it to 14. We laid him to rest in the garden.

Is It Worth It?

To conclude, has turning our lives upside down by moving to France been worth the turmoil? Absolutely yes! Will we stay here forever? Perhaps not, but I will be forever grateful for the rebirth that has taken place by taking the leap of faith to cut away the branches in our lives that were not bearing fruit. I am excited for the future. Practicing gratitude in the face of trials and focusing on what brings mental and emotional health and freedom has transformed our lives. Our measure of success has changed. Are we rich? No! Do we have an ‘Instaworthy’ home to share on social media? Defintely not (yet)! This has been a huge stumbling block for me. The expectation was to be able to share an exciting and fast paced renovation on Instagram like so many of the big reno accounts I follow and admire. The fact that we have had to hit the pause button on that made me feel all kinds of frustration and feelings of failure. I have had to question who am I doing this for and who is judging me? I am the one living this reality so what does it matter if it doesn’t look good for the gram! Are we successful? Personally yes, I can confidently say that I feel successful, not because of worldly achievements but because I’m starting to feel like I understand the assignment that is life. I stress ‘starting’ because I am humbly aware that you never know what trial is around the corner and I still have a long way to go but I at least feel like I am on the right path.

As I finish up writing, I am sat here in this light filled room which has four large windows with views of the trees through each of them. The sun is warm, and it is near silent indoors apart from me tapping away on my ancient laptop, but outside all that can be heard is the gentle rustle of the trees in the wind and birdsong. We have owls, wood peckers, cuckoos, herons, egrets, jays and in the summer, hoopoes as well as all the garden birds and of course lots of swallows. This is what my soul hungered for. Have you heard of Shinrin-yoku? It is the Japanese practice of forest bathing. Harnessing the power of trees to heal. I might not be walking in the woods everyday but visually being surrounded by them really has aided so much healing. It is my desire that I can share this place with others at some point and that they may experience at least just a fraction of the peace and healing that has touched me whilst being here.

If you read all three parts, well done and thank you! I know it was very long for a blog post but I have been unable to write it for a long time because I was in the thick of the struggle. It has been been important for me as part of my ‘Artist’s Way’ journey to write my account honestly and not to worry about whether people will get bored because it isn’t snappy and funny enough.

If you would like to read the book ‘The Artist’s Way’ it is by Julia Cameron. Obviously I highly recommend! I will do another blog post when I have completed the book to share my results.

Is there something you have always wanted to do…?