A Writer and Filmmaker Find Refuge in Paris

Mi Amour,

Do you ever sit back and marvel at all the pieces and memories and moments and moods that make up a human being?

I do.

I have so many journals, ma Cherie. I don’t remember when I started writing in journals, because I have done it for so many years. Books upon books of my writing, my inner wanderings, my attempts to crack a code. I write to find answers, to unearth pearls of wisdom inside me, to help guide me on my path. Because you know, my cupcake, all the wisdom is inside us. There is no place you have to run or turn to. There is no ascendant being who is going to appear and hand it to you. (Okay, maybe that happens for some people, I don’t know.) Mostly, we are all just fumbling in the dark, trying to make our way, trying to understand something about how the universe works, our own intentions, how to get to a place of peace and happiness, or learn and grow.

I love when I talk to young people, and it is so clear they know everything about how the world works and what we should do. They are just so smart. They have figured everything out, but they don’t know how to apply it in their own lives. I suppose it is that way for all of us, isn’t it, ma Cherie? We must step outside ourselves at times, listen to someone else tell us the truth we already know, in order to hear it and witness it and be ready to receive. Fundamentally, for so many of us, we don’t trust ourselves. And that is the source of the greatest pain.

Let me tell you about a young German filmmaker I met named Nico.

I was in Paris this past January, and the air was relatively warm, even though it had been raining for days. I spent a week writing a book, and one night I ended up at a café near my apartment called Le Refuge, because anywhere called Le Refuge is a place I want to be.

I sat down and ordered a Croque Monsieur, because that is my favorite thing to eat in Paris, and I think there was also a salad, even though I was probably longing for fries. And a young gentleman next to me said quietly, “Good choice,” and I smiled at him, and within a few minutes we started talking and I learned he was Nico, 28, who lived in Berlin and was in Montmartre to shoot a documentary film with a friend who ran a small production company.

Nico’s hair was long and straight and in a ponytail, and he had a delicate way about him, and he didn’t smoke except when a woman like me offered him a cigarette, and the reason you must smoke in Europe is because it is an alternate way of breaking bread with people, and I have met so many people this way, it is like kissing God.

When I asked Nico his favorite movie, he couldn’t pick one, but he told me I ought to watch The Words, which I still have not done and it has been nearly two months since I met him. I fall asleep whenever I sit down to watch a movie, it is a problem I have.

And Nico talked about what it felt like to be an artist, to be lonely, to feel that no one understands you, to make decisions that are against the fray, and to watch everyone live in this boxed-up, closed-up way, and to also feel pulled by that trajectory, but also pulled by the need to be true to yourself and look beyond material things into a vision you can fulfill that inspires others.

It is the artists who carry us through this world, even though so many of us don’t really acknowledge that.

You can’t touch somebody’s hands without all sorts of messages being sent, but I wish now I could have touched Nico’s hands and held them in mine, and told him everything was going to be okay. I did tell him everything was going to be okay, in some form or other. I reminded him how long life is, and how he has plenty of time to become a great big well-known filmmaker, even though doing that might not make him happy, because fame comes with a host of other issues. I told him to meditate, because it would bring him calm. And I told him that I would totally give him my favorite book, which I carry around with me always, if I had an extra copy, but I did not, but he must must read it, because he will feel understood. (It is Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, which is always in my bag.)

And then the waiter came to tell us the café was closing, and Nico and I stood and hugged, and there is always this questioning when two single opposite-sex people stand in front of each other, but what we all ought to recognize is that it is quite beautiful to simply be friends with someone rather than assume you have to have sex with one another, and so I gave him my card if he ever wanted to reach out to me, or if he found his way to America, and I went back to my little apartment and Nico went on his way.

And I have thought so many times since that day that I want to be wealthy just so I can fly Nico to New York, and watch him in action making a brilliant documentary, and show him around the U.S., and see what he thinks of the whole thing, when pandemic life is over.

I wonder if he has read my favorite book by now.

Bisous, ma belle,

Jana Rose

Purchase my book, Letters to a Young Woman: Lessons on Life and Love, from Paris through my website, www.motherjana.com. It is a story of spiritual journey, awakening, and advice to young to be leaders in a changing world. I wrote it in one week in January 2020.