Mary Busse

Hermitage, Olive Grove, Village: a Sabbatical in the South of France Mary Busse

A French contemplative-travel feast. The provencal sun pours across the pages, as the reader is gently beckoned to bask in the creative challenges, deep peace, and immense joys of a contemplative orientation in the world--as seen through the lens of the author's Sabbatical season spent in a ravine-edged hermitage, embraced by an ancient olive grove, nestled within a Medieval French village in the Maritime Alps. Gifts for the reader abound in the exploration of such themes as presence, silence, simplicity, balance, community, generosity. This contemplative memoir celebrates the gift of sacred solitude (hermitage), the beauty of creation (olive grove), and the immense dignity of each life, human or animal (village.) With simple eloquence, the villagers themselves--through the daily humility, warm humor and integrity of their own lives--encourage readers to look within: to receive and rediscover, yet more deeply, the intrinsic beauty and profound gift of their own lives. With sensitive and compassionate brush-strokes, verbal paintings of village life emerge as such concepts as emptying and opening, dwelling in the Center, living in the "now" are encountered--not in a didactic way but rather in an attentive breathing-in of what each present moment offers. Cafe-table chats and sacramental altars are discovered, not as polarities, but as interconnected: the secular and the spiritual recognized as a mutually-embracing expression of the dance of Life and Beauty in the One Love--sustaining the soul and nourishing the heart.