Zoraldia.com

Zoraldia

Zoraldia is the name that I have given to my domain. Domain has to be understood in its World Wide Web acceptation as well as in the more landowning one of the name given to this patch of land that I have made mine here in the Basque Country.

It may come from a linguistic misunderstanding? Never mind, it's a nice sounding name, said Augustin, my new octogenarian Basque friend. Eventually, one of its meaning, that I discovered later, matches an other aspect of the reality that I missed to make out in my first approach.

Zoraldia, in the Basque language, is the determined form of Zoraldi (pronounce the initial Z like the sharp S of sun). Zoraldi, according to numerous dictionaries means a bout of madness. According to the dictionary that I consulted first, it would mean ecstasy, rapture, delight like the sensation I have, each time when, sitting at my desk, in front of my computer and diving into the semi-virtual world of the Web, I turn my head southward, to look at the meadows in the valley that slightly descends to the feet of the hills opposite, kinds of stepping stones toward the top of the farther Pyrenees.

Or when, at a short look westward, I contemplate the closer hill where a few bunches of broad-leaved trees, in rainy or too sunny days, provide precarious shelters to the horses, the sheep or the cows which, depending on the season, alternately or together, enjoy its luxuriance.

Is this moment, where, by the chance of a vacation stay, when reason already gives way to the impulses of one's heart, and when my wife and me decided to buy this plot of land to establish ourselves, anything else but a bout of madness?

Don't ecstasy and rapture verge on madness? The simple-minded ravi, whose rapture is taken for madness, is a recurring character in the Provençal tales.

But whatever it is, madness or not, this ecstasy, this rapture is renewed every day.

In winter time, when in a clear sky, a low-angled sun makes the white top of the mountains glitter. When at spring, meadows are flooded by flowers for the pleasure of swarms of laborious bees.

Or in the morrows of a finishing summer, when the already tired sun, is long to clear away the morning mist that clings to the hills, covers the bed of the valley, like a cotton sea from which only the tops of the hills emerge, where white houses, with red and green shutters, in the silence, watch like sentinels.

Rapture also, when I listen to the deep peace that still exists here, the neigh of a horse, the barking of a dog in the far, the song of the crickets or the one of the birds, that have a whale of a time, hardly disturbed by the sound of a faraway tractor.

And again, the ritual of the seven o'clock blow, when after the suffocating summer days, a refreshing breeze coming from the nearby sea, sweetly caresses your skin and takes you to the height of delight.

And what to say of these contrasted days, when after a gaudy day, the sky bright blue so far, suddenly darkens to let a torrential rain wash the air and drench the soil.

Because here, after long whiles of absolute tranquility, suddenly everything moves and changes, in bouts of madness, never-ending movement of nature. Zoraldia!