THE WISDOM OF THE STRAWBERRY
Welcome to My Garden
There is a question I have carried for a long time, one I never quite knew how to put into words until I finally found them: what makes a life wise?
Not perfect nor painless. Just wise.
This book was born from that question… And from a strawberry.
The Strawberry, First
I grew up in a house in Niort, France, where my father kept a large garden. Not just a decorative one, but a real, working garden, full of vegetables, fruit trees, and rows of strawberry plants that produced for only a few weeks each year. During those weeks, I never waited for the strawberries to arrive on the table. I went straight to pick them myself, crouching between the plants, eating them while still warm from the sun.
That memory stayed with me because it holds something essential: the patience of a season, the reward of ripe fruit, simple and direct pleasure. A kind of wisdom it took me fifty years to truly understand.
It became the thread running through this project. The strawberries, my Strawberries of Wisdom, are the lessons I gathered over the decades, picked one by one, often without knowing it at the time.
What You Will Find Here
The Wisdom of the Strawberry is a memoir series in six volumes. Six decades. Six chapters of a life that crossed quite a few kinds of terrain.
Early childhood in Niort, gardens and grandparents, classical ballet performances, and the first silent lessons about family and trust.
Adolescence, Spain, India, England, a bout of meningitis during a summer heatwave, and the meeting with the man who would become my husband. The years when character is forged without anyone quite realising it.
The twenties in London then Paris, marriage, motherhood, the early jobs that didn’t yet look like a calling.
The thirties in Eure-et-Loir, Qi Gong, Tai Chi, upheaval, reconstruction. The era when you begin to understand that a life isn’t chosen once but constantly.
The restless forties, South Africa, Congo, Malawi, China, Greece, Vipassana meditation, and the first time I looked inward rather than outward.
The fifties, a return, a new beginning. The belated discovery, or perhaps finally at the right moment, that wisdom is not the destination.
How This Project Was Born
In 2020, during a training with an Autochthone Canadian couple, I came back to an idea that had been rattling around in my head for a long time and that I could no longer push aside: write all of this down. Not to recount my life, but to extract from it what might be useful to someone else.
Because behind the anecdotes, the motorbike in Spain, the elephant in Mysore, the scorched fudge saucepan in Kingston, there are patterns. Things I learned about character, habits, emotions, the beliefs that paralyse us, the values that hold firm under pressure. Things nobody taught me formally, but that twenty years of meditation, personal development, traditional Chinese medicine, and travels across more than twenty countries gradually revealed to me.
The Strawberries of Wisdom are those lessons. They punctuate each volume, after the narrative chapters. They are not recipes. They are reflections and questions worth sitting with, accompanied by a strawberry, if at all possible.
Who This Is For
For those who recognise in their own lives the same situations or tensions, between wanting to please others and staying true to yourself, between the comfort zone and expansion, between the love we receive and the love we give ourselves.
For those who love true stories, with their rough edges and their humour, because yes, there is a great deal of humour in these pages, even in the difficult chapters. Especially in the difficult chapters.
And for those who are fifty, or twenty, or seventy, and are still wondering what any of it means.
Next Time
We enter Volume 1: Early Childhood. Niort, the nineteen-sixties, a young and warm family, Sundays at the grandparents’, classical ballet, the first invisible wounds. And the strawberries in the garden, which waited for no one.