Heroes Not Zombies

“La source” is French for “the spring”.

This one is just across the other side of the road from where I live now.

After four decades working as a doctor in the Scottish NHS I retired and emigrated to France. I live in a small village where neighbours gather spontaneously to chat in the street. My French language skill has improved enormously over the last ten years but I still study it every day, read French magazines and books, and take every opportunity I can to speak.

I decided many years ago I’d like to spend part of my life living in a different country, immersing myself in a different culture and language, and it feels, undoubtedly a good move. We humans don’t stay still. We grow. We develop. We change. We adapt and we explore.

I am sorry to witness the extent of anti-immigration narratives around the world, to see the huge increase in rules and administrative hurdles as countries build walls instead of bridges.

But I am happy that’s not my personal, daily experience. Everywhere I go I get a warm, friendly welcome.

The other big part of my experience now is closeness to Nature. We have a big garden, some of it a very small forest. It was all badly neglected but we’ve been opening it up to sunlight, planting flowers and vegetables and caring for it again. I encounter more birds, wildlife, trees and plants on a daily basis than I’ve ever done before.

The “source” across the road fills with clear, clear water which, I’m assured, makes its way here underground from the mountains of the Massif Central. It flows out of the pool into stone channels built by the Romans. This was a crossing point for the Romans, for pilgrims, and for Celts and Gauls before them.

I was born and raised in Stirling, an ancient market town with a castle overlooking the main bridge over the River Forth. The town was a crossing point where north met south and east met west.

I feel that parallel deep in my soul….connecting me to a life of encounters, of meetings and relationships between diversely different people.

We are all unique, and there’s nothing more enriching, more fulfilling, than making connections, building bridges, sharing, and understanding……

We all need to know there are these crossing points, these “sources” in our lives where we connect the past to the present, where we encounter “the other”, human and other than human, and find our lives enriched in the process.

La source, for me, is the physical manifestation of flow….the flow of Life, of time and change, of encounters and connections.