no thoughts, just vibes (spring 2025 edition)
Sometimes, Flower Friday will be mostly flowers, such as when I have many flower photos to share, or not a lot to write about. Today’s gonna be one of those.
I’m on vacation, so I haven’t been thinking too many thoughts. It is unbelievably nice to open all the windows to one’s brain and let the wind just blow right through. Oh look, a croissant. Ooh, there’s a castle. Ah, that’s how you pronounce Vosges. Obviously, one should not live like this forever, but what’s vacation if you can’t also vacate the everyday terrors of your own mind?
(It goes without saying, but I am on vacation in France.)
We’re currently in Alsace, whose quaint little villages are supposed to have some unbelievable flowers in summer. We came too early to see windowsills bursting with geraniums, but there have still been some nice early bloomers throughout the town centers.
Earlier today we took a tour through the Château du Haut-Kœnigsbourg, which is essentially a 20th-century castle built on top of much older foundations. The restoration wasn’t practical — nobody was supposed to live there — but was instead intended as a museum to replicate medieval life. (The architect was also an archaeologist, and clearly a huge nerd.) It was also something of a propaganda project for Kaiser Wilhelm II to assert the new German Empire’s power and remind the Alsatians that they were Germans now. (Alsace has changed hands between France and Germany several times.)
I tried to imagine what an Alsatian farmer, taking a tour through the newly renovated castle in 1908, would think of the joint. Would he recognize all the imperial heraldry our tour guide pointed out to us? Would he feel a sense of Germanness in the halls, would he leave a changed man with a new sense of national pride? Or is nationhood a silly little game where the rules are made up and the points don’t matter?
In another week, I might have thought about those questions a little longer and written a whole thing about them. But you must understand, shortly after this tour I caught a whiff of fresh coconut macaroons on the breeze and it was so alluring, so intoxicating, that a deep inhale rebooted my brain to factory settings. No thoughts, only vibes.
During a wine tasting later in the day, the winemaker shared his thoughts on sustainable agriculture, his anxieties about climate change, his hopes for the direction of the wine industry in France.
He said, “The vineyard isn’t my land, it’s my children’s land. My job is just to take care of it for them.”
What a nice thought. What an objectively good and correct way of thinking about our responsibilities to each other and to the land that provides for us. It’s a mindset completely foreign to our cult of individualism in the U.S., land of the leaf blower, home of the LED headlights, where any harm my choices cause you is totally acceptable as long as those choices result in my personal convenience.
But imagine if everyone approached their lives more like that winemaker. The vibes would simply be impeccable.
