Eiffel in love with the city of Paris at first sight…

How bad am I at writing regularly? But to be fair to me, my head has been all in too much of a whirl to put my fingertips to the keyboard. You see, one of my big dreams has just come true and as silly as it sounds, I’ve had to try to get my head around it. I wrote on a Sleepy Saturday a few weeks ago, ‘I fear so many things: I fear rejection and being accepted, I fear failure and success, I fear being hurt and being happy. Both sides of every coin. I think because there has been so much trauma in my life, I always believe that the other shoe will eventually fall and so I steel myself for it.’ So, when the good news came, I needed time to digest it and just make sure it wasn’t all some sadistic joke played by the universe, just to be pulled away from me again.

You see, after years of dreaming that I would one day be selected for an overseas artist in residence, I have been. Not only that, it’s in France, in a chateau, no less. It isn’t in Paris, which is just perfect as it gives me a chance to immerse myself for a few weeks in my art and the French countryside. Of course, I will land in Paris so will have a few days there to reacquaint myself with the city of love. Oohh la la!

I have 9 months to prepare for the wonderous event and in that time I have to raise some money for incidentals and the free time I will have before and after the residency. My very first thought when I saw the acceptance email was to say no, I can’t do it, I can’t afford it. (my negative side speaking) Then the positive side of me kicked in and I thought to myself, you’re 62 and you’ve just been offered a few weeks in a Chateau in France. Will you ever be offered this chance again and would you be any more ready for it then? The answer to that is probably never and no. So I started to nurture the positive Pollyanna side of me and ignored the negative Nancy who haunts my thoughts.

I can do this and I’m definitely going to. Next year, my angel daughter Aimee would have turned 40 and I wanted to spend her birthday on the teacup ride at Disneyland as she had dreams of working for the Disney corporation. Of course, I had no idea how I was going to do this financially, but I was aiming at Anaheim. However with the upcoming election and what that may mean, I was nervous about going. But the universe had other ideas and serendipitously, this will mean, if I extend my stay for just a few days, I can still celebrate her birthday in Euro Disney. Yes, it’s not Anaheim and Walt Disney never walked those streets but it feels right for now.

So I have 9 months to get (much) fitter than I am now and to raise the extra money to ensure the dream is fully achievable. If 9 months is enough time for a woman to create a whole human being (and I did that 3 times), this is a breeze. So my mind is ticking over too much to really think straight. I know that will settle down soon and my organising brain will kick in. I just have to make the ‘you enjoy exercise’ part of my brain to also kick in. Oh that’s right, I don’t have one of those, so I will just have to force myself. I will keep reminding myself of how breathless I was when I was walking up the stairs at the Eiffel Tower back in 2013 and I’ve had another 11 years of unfitness since then. But all that breathlessness was worth it for the view at the top.

I did download DuoLingo on my phone to learn some French as well, but it was just all ads and completely unusable in my opinion, so will start to research another app to help me learn just some basics of the language. I know I’ll never be fluent in it, but it’s important to know some language of the country you are a guest in. I mean, I need to know where to buy a croissant and a champagne, don’t I? Oh hang on, they are the same in English you say? Well they just sound (and taste) so much better with the accent lol.

It’s not even 7am on a Sunday morning and I’m wide awake (and have been since 5am) so I will do all the things I need to do, then I might go lay down and find a wonderful French movie to immerse myself in for a few hours. If I go to sleep through it, then hopefully I will dream of all things French. So au revoir until next time..

Happy dreaming (heureux de rêver)… Livvy xxx