Occupy Doorstep.. Uptown: Uptown Pilgrimage

The Universe knows me so well. It understood that the only way in which I would heed a call would be if I were to find myself surrounded by at least a hundred pianos, varying in age and uniqueness, pianos which had felt the hands of thousands of musicians before myself, pianos through which music had been born.

My boyfriend at the time and I had begun our warm summer day wandering through a dusty piano store in the heart of Toulouse France. I had run my hands over at least twenty pianos before settling in at a pretty Zimmerman to play an entire song. As I finished, a lovely, middle aged, fair skinned yet youthfully freckled woman started chatting at me in rapid excited french. Ten minutes later, she cheerily waved us on as we drove off out of Toulouse and pointed our car towards her home where we would meet her husband Michel.

Michel, with his endearing smile and eccentric Beethoven-esque grey hair, met us at his beautiful Chateau de Pompignan,a stunning home built in the mid 1700s surrounded by acres of lush historical gardens. (Gardens which Michel is currently fighting bitterly to keep as high speed rail has chosen to build a track directly through the heart of his property..but that is another story..)

As beautiful as the château de Pompignan was, it was merely a backdrop for Michel's passion and life's work of collecting and repairing pianos. We walked through room after room crammed with stunning pianos at all levels of disrepair, age, and beauty. Pianos with peeling paint lined with gold leaf, pianos whose tops opened like butterfly wings, pianos with incredibly detailed carvings, pianos in their own suitcases etc.. I played a piano from 1794! Michel, in his excitement, had taken on enough work to keep him busy into the next thousand years.

Towards the end of our visit, Michel led us into a dark quiet chapel with light filtering in though colorful stained glass windows. At the front of the chapel, next to a large double keyboard Bechstein, was a door to a tiny circular room. Within the smaller room, the bare stone walls were carved with multiple symbols of the stonemasons and the signs of Saint James. As my hand reached up to touch the tiny scallop shell carving, I realized that my feet were already standing on the pilgrims path.

According to legend, the body of St James, a disciple of Jesus, had washed up, covered in scallop shells, on a beach in northwestern Spain in the 9th century. For nearly 1100 years, pilgrims have walked hundreds of miles across Europe from their own doorstep the the feet of Saint James, crossing front lines, enduring hunger and physical aches, danger and fear, simply out of faith and hope. Pilgrims have synched their footsteps to the countless who had walked before and the countless who would follow in order to become closer attuned to the beauty of the surrounding universe.

Since fitting my hand over the cool stone carving a few years back outside of Toulouse, I now see scallop shells everywhere. As a result I have recently made the decision to heed the call and walk the way of Saint James this summer. However, my pilgrimage does not merely start in Southern France, but rather here in America, in Chicago, in Uptown, in me. So, in order to help prepare for thirty plus consecutive days of walking through southern France and Northern Spain, I will begin my pilgrimage at home, walking Uptown..seeing beauty not just in the exotic and far away, but here at home.