Once I had followed a random writer on his WordPress blog that said he hadn't left his house in nearly 10 years. It was a bold statement, but I believed it.
Around 2021-ish posted this song you see below.
Lo Boier sung by Hans-André Stamm.
The song intrigued me, but I wasn't ready to feel all the emotions this song would make me feel in the future.
I rediscovered the song as Lo Boier by Patrick Lenk.
I then recognised I had heard it before, back around 2021 when I had been going through a weird time, and it haunted me more this time.
Cathar hymn? What exactly did that mean? A dive into wikipedia revealed the lyrics of the song - for the first time I researched it.
The song has so much history. It is from a region in Southern France called 'Occitania'. The way I got into it was because some people have called it the 'Cathar hymn', mainly because of a legend that followers of the Cathar faith embedded a message into it.
The lyrics sing about an oxherd whose wife is dying and he listens to her final wishes.
She says how she wants to be buried when she dies.
I was particulary betwitched by the line 'te farai un potatge' translating to 'I will cook a potatge for you'. 'Pottage' or 'potatge' in old Occitan, meant a stew.
I was struck by the love the oxherd shows for his wife with that gesture, so this strange new word 'potatge' basically now meant 'love' to me.
Lo Boier is a strange song to me, I kept thinking about it and revisiting it, but hadn't looked up the lyrics and meaning yet.
Now that I know, I feel like there is so much I still don't know about this song.
Google reveals some things, but not the spiritual power. I believe this song has spiritual power.
Let's see.
You can hear the other versions of this song on my playlist here.