French Flights of Fancy

When I walk the dogs through the fields, I sometimes disappear into a very particular fantasy.

In this version of my life, I am a female vigneron, from a long line of female vignerons, and the chatelaine of a modest five-hectare domaine, the kind people only know if they really know. The vines overlook the Pyrenees and are bordered by forest, a river, and just enough olive trees to justify producing a small run of very good oil that friends always ask for and I never quite have enough of.

Some of the vines are thirty years old. Old enough to be taken seriously, not old enough to be dramatic about it. The appellation is specific and slightly inconvenient to pronounce. Everything is biologique, obviously, and the harvest follows lunar cycles. Grapes are picked by hand. Slowly. Properly.

My yoga shala sits just above the vines, positioned so the morning light hits it perfectly. Practice begins with a walk through the rows, checking leaves, soil, moisture, the mood of things. When harvest comes, I chant mantras as the grapes are cut, the same way I chant over cacao. Entirely sincere and ridiculous.

The house itself is exactly as you’d imagine. Lime-washed walls. Stone flags worn smooth. The faint smell of fresh baguette purchased that morning from the local patisserie. Everything collected slowly from brocantes and neighbouring villages. Nothing matches. Everything works. There is a long wooden table where lunches run on far too late and a library stacked with Sartre, Beauvoir, Foucault, books I absolutely read, and often quote of enjoying a soupçon too much of my own wine. This rural Ideal, naturally, does not prevent me from the occasional trip to Paris for theatre, exhibitions, and long conversations that begin with “we should really do this more often”.

It’s a very good fantasy.

And it falls apart the moment you look too closely.

Because winemaking is hard. Properly hard. It is meticulous, physical, weather bound, and increasingly under pressure. Climate change is reshaping entire regions. Demand is dropping. Insurance costs are rising. Fires, floods, drought, frost, smoke taint, diseases, one bad season undoing decades of work.

I’ve stood in places where vineyards that had been in families for generations were wiped out in a single fire. Entire livelihoods erased. This is not poetic. It’s devastating. And it’s happening more often.

Which is why this fantasy doesn’t actually work. Not really.

And that’s where it starts to look uncomfortably like the way many of us imagine yoga practice.

If I practise, I’ll float through my life.

If I practise, I’ll be calmer, wiser, more spacious.

If I practise, my life will start to look like the version of me I’ve imagined.

But real practice, like real winemaking, doesn’t work like that.

It’s not candles and crystals.

It’s sweat, repetition, and attention.

It’s showing up when conditions are unfavourable.

It’s responding to what’s actually happening, not what you hoped would be happening.

You don’t impose a vision on the land. You listen. You adjust. You prune. You wait. You act. You accept that some years are generous and some are brutally lean. You accept that effort does not guarantee outcome, and that devotion does not protect you from loss.

This is the part that rarely makes it into the fantasy.

Yoga, when practised honestly, asks for the same thing. Not transcendence, but relationship. With the body you have. The life you’re in. The season you’re moving through. It asks for discernment rather than intensity, patience rather than performance, compassion rather than comparison.

It asks you to keep showing up, even when the story you told yourself about how this would feel starts to dissolve.

The fantasy is charming. It’s seductive. It draws us in.

But the real work, the graft, the attention, the humility, the willingness to respond rather than control, that’s where practice actually lives.