Mary Magdalene's Feast Day from Llanes to Vézelay

Today honors the energy of the divine and feminine grace of Mary Magdalene. Having just come from making the pilgrimage to Vézelay in Burgundy, France, where her basilica honors the highest point of that ancient Gallo-Roman hilltop village, I am even more appreciative of her beauty.

This spring I hiked to Vézelay from Avallon on a day that was threatening heavy rain throughout. As much as I love to hike into wild and unknown territory, I resisted starting. I resisted and resisted and then I knew deep down that if I let the rain stop me, I would regret it for the rest of my life. I forged forward through my resistance. 

As soon as I set one foot before the other—finding my way down the steep fortified hillside of Avallon toward the Cousin river and into the Morvan forest—that magic took hold that every pilgrim knows: The road began to show me signs and my way was clear, one step at a time. Prior rains had washed out parts of the trail. I lost it. I found it. I lost it again, but always found it again. Song birds punctuated my triumphs, my mind taking their song as a victory dance. White Burgundian cows munching on lemon yellow mustard flowers sauntered over to greet me, making me pause to see where to pick up the trail across the field. Once, was that a snake that slithered loudly to the right, making me notice the trail marker I'd missed painted on a leaf-covered rock? Even the threatening weather ceased. Grace punctuated every turn, no matter how trying some turns were. The expected heavy rains did not arrive. The storm clouds literally parted and dramatic striated rays of sun shined through.

It took eight hours through the forest and the rising and falling vine and mustard covered hills of Burgundy to arrive in Vézelay. First, the hill appeared, the highest in the vicinity, and grew as I walked. Then, the towers of the basilica became apparent. Finally, the scorpion shape of the hill—as one book described it—upon which the church sat revealed the pathway from the scorpion's tail at the foot to its crowning head at the top. The pilgrim’s path to the basilica was like walking along a rising spine, some ancient kundalini that the stonemasons and monks must have known implicitly.

And when I finally entered into the nave of striated light-play from the high arches of bicolored stone, Vespers was about to begin. Sound and light in perfect harmony swirled up and down the basilica and entered into the crown of my head. 

An active monastic community of nuns and monks live in Vézelay and carry on the sacred traditions within this medieval Romanesque church dedicated to this Lady of Grace. Her crypt is beneath the nave, built of the stone carved out of the hill. The small chamber allows visitors to sit and meditate undisturbed. 

The strongest feeling, one that recurred each time I entered the basilica, was balance. It is a place of harmony and balance, between male and female, heaven and earth, god and mortal, sound and light.

Another church that I love, that is also dedicated to Mary Magdalene, is in the heart of the fishing town of Llanes, along the northern Spanish coast in Asturias. On a smaller but no less powerful scale, it also offers the experience of harmony and balance. 

Here, I love how this photo of its altar captured a fleeting streak of light.

To read more about Llanes and the surviving expressions of the ancient feminine divine that holds foot in northern Spain, as well as into southern France, the fabled territory where Mary Magdalene may have lived during her later years, please read my piece for Perceptive Travel, The Goddess Still Lives Here and also see my book, The Spiritual Traveler Spain.

Stepping away from routine and into magic

Complacency and routine seem to be the kiss of death to a fully present life. Pilgrimage has taught me this. Rather than focusing the life force on fear and the fruits of fear (having enough, having the things everyone thinks everyone needs to have, seeking comfort as the first order of life…) it has taught me to focus on what to do next to grow, what to look for, to savor beauty, and to expand.

I think such a routine-busting focus makes amazing things occur, so much so that the frightening things that forced a person into complacency and routine in the first place are no longer an issue; a person learns to be ever at the ready for the next step, the next unexpected adventure, the next cosmic gift that wants nothing better than to give itself to her or him.

A pilgrimage teaches this magic by example, by giving the walker-seeker a gift each day as soon as his or her focus shifts to the growth side of life.

Each step becomes a step into the unknown and into real magic.

My most recent encounter with this constant lesson was on a recent pilgrimage I made to Vezèlay, one of the four major pilgrim starting points in France along the Way of Saint James to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, Spain. I wanted to arrive at this sacred site on foot, from a point east. I wanted to feel what it was like to see the enchanted hilltop village with its basilica dedicated to Mary Magdalene appear on the horizon at the walking pace.

Black Truffles in the Périgord, France

The Dordogne (also called the Périgord) is famous for its black truffle, that delicious underground fungus that grows symbiotically with tree roots, such as oak, beech, and hazel. It is the ingredient that enchants savory dishes from omelets to roasted chickens to pea soup. Winter is its time and from November to February truffles begin to appear in the weekly town and village markets throughout the Dordogne.

When I first came to southwestern France, an elderly woman I sat next to in a café in Sarlat told me how in December she would gather black truffles in a forest near her farm and take them to market, hoping for a good month so that her family could afford the festive foods of Christmas. She then leaned in and whispered, “If you are saving your Euros for a truffle, save them for truffles in late January or February. That’s when the truffle season peaks.”

I heeded her advice. I also learned that January and February are the months when it is easiest to find the truffles, even if you don’t have a dog or a pig to help.

A friend from Sarlat who is a truffle expert with his own truffière—truffle trees—taught me. He explained that there are telltale signs. One is of little flies that aggregate about the ripe truffle. If you see a delirious buzz about the ground around one of the trees that are symbiotic with the black truffle, you are in the vicinity of a culinary gold mine.

But another sign, one that is sure even if the flies have not yet arrived, is a slight ground swell that wasn’t there before. This of course requires patience and close study. A true truffler will know every contour of his territory and notice subtle changes to it. It enters the realm of mindfulness meditations, which explains why the truffle hunters I’ve met are some of the most grounded and calm people I know.

 

When you’ve located a ground swell, you lean in and the next sign should be a pricking in the nostrils of that unmistakable and strangely earthy and otherworldly scent that arouses all manner of romantic images.

Once you have this expensive fungus, how do you handle it? I have only once purchased a truffle and the truffle hunter told me her two favorite applications: grated into scrambled eggs or sliced thinly and placed on top of foie gras toasts.

Fortunately, annually Sarlat holds a truffle festival in the middle of January and regional chefs prepare all manner of recipes with the black truffle, allowing people to sample its diversity without going broke. (It’s like a truffle tapas party where little plates and glasses of partnered wine can be purchased for a few Euros at a time.)

With all this serious research—including some excellent treks into the region’s wild forests—I can now say that my favorite recipe comes from that same lady in the café. This is the recipe her family enjoyed as appetizers in flush years for New Year’s Eve and it is the simplest and most sublime of recipes because nature has done all the work:

Canapés aux truffes:

A fresh baguette, sliced into disks

A black truffle, sliced thinly

Good quality sweet butter

Sea salt

Brut champagne

Butter the bread and layer on the truffle slices. Sprinkle lightly with sea salt. Enjoy with friends and a glass of dry champagne.

Bon Appetite!

Wild Mushroom Hunting in Southwestern France

A lot of my treks lately have been in and around Aquitaine in southwestern France. It’s an amazing region, from the wild areas of the Pyrenees to the wild Atlantic coastline, to the interior of limestone prehistoric caves and rock shelves, river valleys, medieval chapels and fortresses, and vineyards as far as the horizon.

It was an odd autumn here, as in so many other areas. Instead of a cooling and wet season, the days remained bone dry and warm.  Anticipation of the year’s wild hunt for porcini mushrooms, regionally known as cepes, was dashed. Many locals, mushroom experts for decades, told me that because there was no rain in September, there would be no cepes this year. Cepes crop up magically overnight when the rains come in September. I had asked if there was a chance that they’d appear in the forests if it rained in October or November. The answer was a somber no.

So imagine all our surprise when in mid-November, after some decent rains, older farmwomen began appearing in the weekly markets of the Dordogne with baskets laden with cepes. It created a buzz and people’s hearts lightened. The season was not lost and moreover, those delicious fungi were still willing to grow even though September had come and gone. We cheered for now egg omelets with cepes, mushroom tarts with cepes, and simply olive oil and garlic sautéed dishes with cepes were back on the menu.

I had the unexpected delight of going mushroom hunting twice with good friends. One day we went to the neighboring south central French region of Cantal, from where the famous Cantal cheese comes, and on another day we stayed more local in the forests of the Dordogne near Les Eyzies, the heart of prehistoric painted and engraved cave country.

The challenge of a later cepes crop was that by now the fall leaves had turned color, dried, and fallen off the trees onto the forest floor. To look for the telltale tan brown top hat of cepes meant a form of mental concentration and being present in the moment that modern humans are less practiced at compared to their prehistoric brethren. But being so near the latter’s homes in the rock shelves overhead inspired us. 

Both days, we found lots of mushrooms of all varieties. Many were poisonous and we had to be careful. But only cepes have the bulging stems that look like a person after Thanksgiving dinner. Those, we kept and took home and sautéed them in olive oil and garlic and tossed them with eggs and a hit of sea salt and sat to a meal with a crusty baguette, a green salad, and a medium bodied red Bergerac wine. It all tasted so much more vibrant for the day spent hunting and gathering out of doors. 

In moments like these, I feel more intensely that I am connecting to our ancestors who some 25,000 years ago lived in these forests, valleys, and rock faces and hunted and gathered for a living. It is moments like these that I also hope that I can take that level of concentration and mindfulness back into the modern world.

France’s Vin de Domme and Dodue the Valiant (Pug) of the Dordogne

 [A Hike in Southern French Wine Country]

There was a scream and my friend Béa came running out from behind the stand of bushes where she had disappeared. Running behind her with tongue lapping out the side of her mouth was little Dodue, a blond pug with a black stub of a tail and a perennial smile on her hard-to-read, wrinkled face.

“She licked me!” Béa said with alarm. “While I was taking a leak!” She then quickly set straight the misunderstanding written on our faces, “No, not there, on the thigh, but still…”

Dodue was the name we had given this little member of our hiking team. I added, Dodue La Vaillante, The Valiant, after she joined me on an ascent up a lookout point that made us both sting mightily with vertigo: I inched my anxious self back down the shaky height and she stayed with me the entire way, body low to the ground and shaking like beech tree leaves in winter, but she did not abandon me. She let me know we were in it together.

We six, five humans—my four adventurous local friends Petrus, Béa, Thierry, and Bruno—and Dodue, were taking in a day hike of the Vin de Domme region south of Sarlat-la-Canéda in the Dordogne, that part of southwestern France famous for its prehistoric caves (such as Lascaux), foie gras, and black truffles. The local wine industry was only recently making a comeback after the devastation of the late 19^th century phylloxera epidemic that wiped out a region once blanketed in vineyards. One glance today and all that once-striped wine land is now nearly covered in indigenous forest, except for the famous Bergerac area west of here and the Vin de Domme.

The Vin de Domme resurgence began in the mid-1990s with a grassroots gathering of several growers, some who were also sheep herders, tobacco growers, and farmers, who decided to turn their attention to the terroir and wine-making of the land, knowing its soil, climate, and exposure promised good bottles down the road.

The fifteen-kilometer rugged and rocky trail through forest, hills, abandoned ruins, and revived vineyards was the idea of Béa and Bruno, area experts from Dordogne Fellow Traveller. They were taking the slower winter season to show me and Petrus their favorite places. 

It was in one of the old villages that Dodue found us. She joined a larger dog, a tawny colored cocker spaniel, to bark at us as we arrived. Once we passed through the village so courageously guarded, the spaniel dropped off and went back to her front stoop to sleep. But Dodue stayed with us, trotting along with that funny smile and side-hanging tongue. We kept telling her to go back, but, no. Dodue was ours.  Or more accurately, we were Dodue’s.

Béa tried to read the tag hanging on Dodue’s red woven collar. After a struggle—Dodue jiggled any time a hand came near her—Béa got a hold of the tag and saw a cell phone number, with no name or address. She called from the edge of a vineyard. 

As we waited, I could see the sweep of merlot and cabernet franc vines rise then fall and dive toward the rocky hills north and south of here, hills that promised chalky limestone soil, hot sunny days, and cool nights.  A young man answered.

“Hello,” said Béa, she paused, then blurted, “I have your little pig here.” We all heard silence and then laughter coming through the phone and the man said, “She does that a lot. Where are you?” Béa explained that we were on the trail heading to the Vin de Domme cellars. They agreed that he would get “his little pig” at the winery.

We never got the little pig’s real name and so continued to call her “Dodue,” an endearing term in French that means plump, or in our usage, little fatty. Apparently, the village from which she adopted us was not her home either.

We then stopped for a picnic lunch in a thicket of oak and that was when Béa was jovially licked on the thigh in the bush.

By the time we arrived at the winery, Dodue had become a member of our expedition, a daring and valiant one at that. I was impressed by her courage and devotion, staying with me on that lookout height that made us both go green. But it was a spectacular height: it afforded us a view of the entire wine growing lands of some 17 growers, the serpent’s winding of the Dordogne River, and the hilltop fortress chateaus of Beynac and Castelnaud. To the south, it revealed the drier but more attuned to wine growing lands of the Lot that opened toward Cahors, another rich wine area, especially for malbec.

At the wine coop, we explained our dog situation. The president of the coop, Bernard Manières, did what any self-respecting French person would and invited Dodue to join the tour.

In 1989, Germinal Peiro, a native of the area and regional counselor, proposed reviving the vineyards that had lay silent for a century. In 1993, the Association des Amis du Vin de Domme, Association of the Friends of the Wine of Domme, was created, with over 300 members. By 1995, after some experimental plantings on half a hectare of land the year before, three locals joined the planting revival—Eric Duclaud, Bernard Manières, and Michel Perry—and planted several more hectares on prime wine land. Today, some fourteen others have joined the planting and the coop has twenty-three hectares of vines and aspires to increase it to thirty hectares in the future. The Amis du Vin de Domme now has over 2300 members.

The five wines that they produce—three reds (Cuvée Tradition, Périgord Noir, and Cuvée Cabernet Franc) and two rosé (Rosé de Domme and Rosé Gourmandise)—are standard fare in regional restaurants in an area dedicated to eating and cooking from locally grown and produced ingredients. The table is now complete: local grilled duck breast is heavenly with the Vin de Domme Cuvée Tradition, an unoaked cabernet franc and merlot blend, a wine made the old way, before oaking became popular.

(For those desiring oak, the Périgord Noir (cabernet franc and merlot) and the Cuvée Cabernet Franc (pure cabernet franc) deliver the right notes.)

We went to see the press, the stainless steel containers, and the barrels. Dodue wove in and out, like a seasoned wine connoisseur. We ended at the tasting room where Mr. Manières offered us tastes of the three reds since we were a crowd of red wine lovers. The Vin de Domme’s two roses are also worthy wines: the Gourmandise is sweet, meant as an aperitif that can easily be paired with foie gras, traditionally demanding a sweet pairing, and the Rosé de Domme is drier, perfect for pairing with first courses such as smoked Aquitaine trout or a traditional salad with greens and thin slices of dry cured duck breast.

Somewhere between the second and third wine, we lost Dodue. “Uh-oh,” said Petrus, “now we have to find her to make sure the young man gets her back.”

We looked around steel tanks, behind oak barrels, beneath the picnic bench in the tasting room, to no avail. Suddenly, there she was, all along, asleep on the floor with its dominant cream and brown tones just like hers. She was asleep right on the place names painted on the floor, imposed over the logo of the labyrinth of the Vin de Domme label, showing all the micro growing regions involved. He little paws and thick snout lay right on the word Domme. Clever girl. She went right to the heart of matters just as she had gone to the center of our hearts.           

At that moment, a young man walked into the tasting room. “I’m here for my little pig.” Everyone laughed. We were happy that he had not taken offense. Indeed, he looked relieved. By now, we all knew her as Dodue but were curious. “What is her name?”

“Ficelle.” Which means string.

“Ficelle?” Three of us said at once, incredulous.

“Oui, Ficelle.”

We said goodbye to “Ficelle.” We bought a few bottles of wine. As we took off to the trail again, almost as one voice we each said, “She’s no Ficelle. She’s Dodue, Dodue the Valiant.” And we felt something lacking. We knew it was the presence of our sixth trekking member, smaller than all of us but full of life, energy, and daring. We could not imagine Dodue returning to a life as Ficelle, one that seemed woefully rife with lolling about before the television, eating bonbons, and longing for another adventure.

The wine from the Vin de Domme is an honest wine, made with traditional methods, by locals dedicated to the land and the fruit. For me, it also tastes of that day, of that little friend who adopted us, and of adventures as yet unknown until you strike out onto the trail.

Forever in my mind, the Vin de Domme will be the Vin de Dodue. Certainly not Ficelle.

Some practical advice:

Getting to the Dordogne, Quercy, and the Lot, where Vin de Domme is situated, is easy by train from Paris, Bordeaux and Toulouse.

The two best ways to get to the Vin de Domme cooperative are either with Dordogne Fellow Traveller or by car. With Dordogne Fellow Traveller, they will tailor an excursion  to your interests and they will handle all the logistics, from picking you up from your home base (Sarlat is an excellent base), driving, arranging the tour, and if you desire, taking you on a wine trail hike. The appearance of adorable, must-take-home-dogs cannot be guaranteed. If you rent a car, head south from the town of Domme to the village of Bouzic and from there follow signs to the Cave du Vin de Domme, in Florimont-Gaumier.

Vin de Domme also makes an appearance at Sarlat’s Saturday market during the late spring and throughout the summer.  Their label is distinctive and the best way to find them au marché: a labyrinth in the shape of a wine leaf. When I asked Bernard Manières why they chose this emblem, he said, “It is a labyrinth to come here.” It felt that he meant this both physically, and it was, as well as metaphorically, detailing a century of return and comeback with slow, deliberate, and paced work.

Cave du Vin de Domme

Moncalou

24250 Florimont-Gaumier

telephone: 05-53-28-14-47

email: vindedomme@wanadoo.fr

Hours: June-September: Monday thru Friday, 10 AM to 12 PM and 2 PM to 6:30 PM; Weekends and holidays, 2:30 pm to 6:30 PM. October-May: Contact them to arrange for a time to visit.

The Esoteric Camino to Santiago de Compostela through France and Spain

Jaca’s cathedral in Aragón has a basilisk that seems to come from some pre-Christian Pyrenean past. 

Eunate’s church in Navarra has a sacred flutist possibly harkening to a Sufi influence, not to mention its ring of thirty-three external arches that are akin to Islamic prayer beads, acting as a meditation upon the ninety-nine names of God—three times around, and entering the hundredth door, as the Sufis call it. Eunate in Basque actually means 100 doors. 

 

Nearly 500 kilometers further along the Camino, Santo Tomas de las Ollas in León possesses nine horseshoe arches in its apse that form an eleven-sided polygon. Another mediation on 99, not to mention on the interfaith nature of the sacred road?

Even St. James’ tomb in Santiago de Compostela may instead contain the bones of another beheaded martyr, the Galician Priscillian, a monk, hermit, and local leader from the 4^th century who wove many locally beloved pagan ideas into his rendering of Christianity.

Throughout the sacred pilgrimage road to Santiago de Compostela, the Camino, many churches are infused with a sacred geometry that only makes fuller sense if the pagan, the Classical, the Judaic, the Christian, and the Islamic traditions are considered together. Moreover, all along the corridor spanned by the Camino there are dolmens, menhirs, engraved stones and cave walls, and holy springs that also speak of a prehistoric past that saw this corridor as equally sacred.

The Camino—the many roads across Europe and across northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela—has many layers; the Christian layer is only the most recent and evident.

I have recently published a multi-layered travel guide on the Camino, The Esoteric Camino France & Spain, as an application download for iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touch. (An eBook is forthcoming.) Based on over 25 years of exploring, walking, and studying the Camino as a pilgrim, anthropologist, and writer, this app carries in it explorations into the many layers of this sacred road, from prehistory to the present.

The Esoteric Camino France & Spain complements other Camino guides, the more numerous practical how-to guides, and does something no one of them does in one place: offer the deep layers of ancestry and the less obvious lineages and symbols of the places along the Camino. It is rich in esoteric lore, regional folklore, and sacred geometry.

Moreover, as I continue my treks, I will continue to explore stretches of the many Caminos in Europe. As I do so, I will expand the entries in the app. 

The current edition of The Esoteric Camino France & Spain covers the French Road, the Camino Francés, from St-Jean-Pied-de-Port, France, to Finisterre, Spain. The current app also covers the Camino Aragonés from the Somport Pass to Puente la Reina, Spain, as well as parts of the road that begin in Le-Puy-en-Velay in France. 

The Esoteric Camino France & Spain is available through Sutro Media on iTunes and on Android.

Buen Camino!

Hike, Eat, Drink, and Contemplate the Pyrenees near Lourdes, France

There is no question that Lourdes in southern France, on the edge of the Pyrenees, is a powerful spot. Indeed, the entire stretch of mountains, from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, possesses several mystical spots, many associated with Mary.

I have traversed several of them, and also a few in northern Spain. All are remote places in overwhelmingly beautiful natural vistas of mountain, ocean, or forested valleys.

Maybe because of this, on my pilgrimage to Lourdes, I felt overwhelmed by the number of other visitors. After paying my respects to Our Lady, I sought to return to the quieter contemplation of the pilgrim’s road.

The tourist office in Lourdes had just the answer. The voie verte, the green hiker’s and biker’s path, from Lourdes south, went right into the Pyrenees. I could take it from the town edge or I could catch a local bus and pick it up deeper into the mountains. I opted for the local bus so that I could start in the midst of the wild and then trek back into Lourdes on my own foot power.

I now realize that the two activities are the perfect balance for the sacred traveler who wants both to pay a visit to one of the world’s great shrines and to partake of the landscape that Saint Bernadette herself would have seen as more familiar than the Lourdes of today. It is a landscape that still inspires transcendent experience.

To take to the path, visit the tourist office for a good map and advice, asking for La Voie Verte des Gaves, the name of the walking and cycling route south of Lourdes.

Culinary Miracles: Hidden in those hills is a culinary miracle, the restaurant Le Viscos in the village of St-Savin (http://www.hotel-leviscos.com/en/hotel-le-viscos-saint-savin-table.php). I dare say, hiking will never be the same after resting my feet and ordering chef Jean-Pierre Saint-Martin’s shorter—five course instead of seven course—walker’s menu, Le Menu de Retour Balade.

Other Marian Routes: If you are interested in powerful but little known Marian sites along coastal northern Spain, fishermen’s shrines dedicated to Mary, please see Chapter 9—San Vicente de la Barquera to Navia in The Spiritual Traveler Spain (http://www.beebesfeast.com/book-flier.html)