When I was a child, I used to hang my head off the couch and watch my mother talk to me upside down. I found this hysterical – the way her mouth moved in the wrong direction, her peculiar smile or frown drawn straight from Picasso. She was a fun house mirror image telling me to clean my room in a way I couldn’t quite take seriously.
Eventually the world would right again, but I would continue to search my mother’s face as she spoke for a hint of the curious shapes I’d seen before.
My reality altered along the fringes.
Perspective shift.
This last week we unexpectedly found ourselves in Montpellier, an ancient city about an hour or so from the Spanish border. Our son’s new baseball team, Cavigal, was invited to a tournament there. Thus, Friday night in quite a flurry, we packed up and hit the road as the sun peaked up over the ocean the next morning.
As we drove, Provençal vineyards, quaint villages, and sprawling forests sped by – a blur of land barely altered in hundreds of years. Then entering Montpellier, we marveled at the ancient aqueducts, cathedrals, and tiny stone streets.
In an instant we jumped between eras: 2022 to 1065 to 75 B.C.E and back again. In this place, time extends back to when Romans built roads along this route at the height of the empire, where wars of religion and conquest were waged.
And then on street over, a Burger King.
I followed my eyes out beyond this city to take in the vast rivers meandering their way from the stoic mountains in the distance. They stood in knowing – knowing that this human experiment is but a tiny flash in the pan.
Time will press forward, these hills will rise and fall, these rivers will turn their course. Perhaps an old stone wall or arch will persist two millennia from now, but likely not much else.
Time is fleeting…and so are we.
Perspective shift.
We stayed at the Hôtel Richer de Belleval, the former city hall of Montpellier and before that, the palatial home of the de Belleval family and Charles de Boulhaco. Another storied building remodeled and repurposed for a new time.
The craftsmen did a magnificent job of blending the old and the new, adding modern art in unexpected places making you second guess where you are. Each turn a thrilling surprise.
After a day of baseball, we stumbled into the old library room for dinner. This room was surprisingly tall, it’s a ceiling climbing maybe 40 feet up. At the pinnacle where a colorful fresco once stood, was an iridescent indigo, jade, and gold winged dragon, “L’Élytre”. She was brilliant in her colors and as the light shifted, the character of the elytra changed in kind. Stunning and magical.
The wall on the far side housed a whimsical cabinet of curiosities. Each shelf contained an increasingly unique set of objects – from bottles of rare alcohol to ornate glass containers to odd taxidermy. More perplexing, however, was the wall itself.
As the wall stretched higher, it cascaded overhead along the arched ceiling until the upper shelfs of books and globes were in fact parallel to the ground. Like a Salvador Dalí painting, the installation teased my mind with its defiance of gravity and physics.
What is stable and what portends change? Where was the predictable order?
Perspective shift.
There’s something fascinating about uprooting your orientation, turning it upside down and looking at it from a fresh perspective. These moments capture the imagination, the thrill of being untethered to gravity – to reality – to time.
The truth is, you can’t always trust what your eyes are showing you. Trying to make sense of things that flirt with nonsense can be a fool’s errand. Sometimes you have to twist your mind around the unexplainable – reach deep inside for meaning that skirts logic and marries you to wisdom beyond the senses.
Sometimes when nothing makes sense at all, you can almost touch the tender edge of knowing. It’s where magic touches down, where the distant horizon fades to white light.
Perspective shifts of the highest order.
40 Weeks in France 