What would Janus do?

I’ve gotten a few emails lately from friends reminding me that I have a blog. Coucou! 👋 I’m still here, traveling. As is often the case in the face of serious world events, I fall off the radar. The mild adventures of a woman of a certain age don’t seem all that important in the face of things. 

So. Because things have gone to hell, I’ve decided to start a religion.  Not a totally new religion, with sky peoples and the like, but resurrecting an old one, an old god. Can I talk to you today about Janus? The two faced guy. They’re the one we need. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

We’d been traveling in France through Burgundy, Doubs, and the Jura regions this summer. I could wax poetic about taking in deep French history, hiking to waterfalls, sitting and waiting out the rain, not to mention testing the local cheeses and charcuterie. It was all very nice. Nice is good. Some places were duds. A couple of towns zoomed up to the all-time favorites list, notably Dole and Cluny (swoon). After 3 weeks we arrived in the Burgundy town of Autun. I needed to see the cathedral’s 12th century tympanum that survived the sledgehammers of the revolution because prudish monks thought it best to plaster it over in the early 1700s. Thank Janus for their uptight souls. It was a marvel. 

Another doorway’s tympanum wasn’t so lucky. The monks sent Eve packing to be a stone in the foundation of another building, but she was found in the 1930s.

The entire cathedral and its astronomical clock are utter gems.

But besides that, Autun was a major Roman city and thus is dotted with ruins. We’ve seen loads of old Roman stones in our travels, that doesn’t mean we don’t dutifully schlep around to see them wherever we are. There’s a very cool funerary pyramid. I got the old Ozymandias feeling looking at this.

I’d been told that there wasn’t much to see at the Temple of Janus, but when was I ever going to get back to Autun? Last day, nearly the last hour, we went to see it.

It’s true, there’s not much there. But there is a presence. Or maybe that’s just the pareidolia talking.

I looked my man Janus up. He faces forward and backward and thus is the god of “beginnings and endings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, and frames.” I have taken him as my personal god. The saints of my birth religion are all stolen from pagan gods, I’m merely going back to the source. Yes, I’m joking, but maybe I’m onto something? Or maybe it’s blasphemy? But we Janusians don’t believe in blasphemy. We believe in flow, rivers, motion. I think of him as a god of liminal spaces, of not knowing, uncertainty and openness. When you’re on the verge of something, invoke Janus. You worship Janus as you travel, whether across country or around a corner, by paying attention to what is revealed. He loves that shit.

All of this is a roundabout way of revealing that a door has been closed to us. We are no longer seeking citizenship. We passed our language test with flying colors and dutifully gathered documents. But a new edict has come down that essentially eliminates our eligibility. So it goes. Countries do that. Anti-immigrant sentiment is everywhere and we are not immune to its effects. Nor are we in dire straits, unlike others. Quite unexpectedly, I feel lightened by this, and even more happily untethered. I’m not leaving la belle France, but things feel open even as uncertainty is being ratcheted up all around. I’m hanging with Janus in the midst of it all.

Cheers,

Maer