They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder. I wonder if that is evidence to my fascination with England and my wish to return. I have been home for over a month now and my head, my heart and my soul hungers for London. An amazing city that appears to have filled my heart and soul with something that I cannot do justice too in words. I think if I had stayed in London for one more week I may not have been so willing to come home. It was wonderfully exhilarating and extremely foreign, yet I felt right at home. Now how does that work?
Having said that I was glad to see sunshine once I hit Sydney airport and I did not realise how bright it is over here. In fact the glare at Sydney airport sent me searching for sunglasses in the bowels of an endless pit of a small thing called my handbag. It is really interesting how things get lost in a woman's handbag. Still search I did whilst my eyes began to water from the glare. I didn't miss that at all.
Since arriving home my head remains in London. I watch every English program I can just so I can see the buildings and the suburbs and listen to all those foreign voices that I loved hearing. Most of all I look for places that I visited. I am feeling an incredible sense of missing London. I want to travel around the UK and see the places I did not get to see. I want to go to Wales and hang out at Petworth House, home of William Turner's works that hang on the walls. I want to study Turners works up close and personal. I want to experience snow. I have never seen snow and I really want to be in England when I get my first touch, taste and feel of snow. I want to feel the cold on my cheeks and rug up in warm clothes. Yes folks I fell in love with London and the surrounding cities that I did visit. There I said it. It almost feels surreal to admit that I fell in love with a city. I never thought that would happen to me, not ever. I thought that nothing could equal my sense of belonging and love for Noongar country. But there you have it, I fell in love with London, and I have to say it is a strange feeling to have a love affair with a city.
Now that I have declared my love for London openly to the world, I just want to say returning to normal has been a struggle. I spend parts of my day with the sights, smells and sounds of places that I experienced. I can visually see them in my mind and it has just occurred to me that I am extremely observant. In fact so observant that I have imprinted my experience into my genetic coding and overlaid my genes with new information. Having noticed my sense of observation I realised that my experience has added to my evolution as a human being. The basic principal of evolution is to be taken out of our natural environment into a different environment thereby creating adaptation to our changing environment that then overlay our genetic coding with new information. It is this basic principal to the process of evolution that I feel the change. I feel the difference in me as I begin to think globally rather than locally and broaden my response to the local with a global perspective. It is amazing how small the world is once you step outside of your backyard and roam the foreign highways of another culture, familiar yet different. The most incredible difference in my thought process is the realisation that we are all fundamentally the same yet different. I always knew this but when you actually experience it you really begin to understand that phrase, it becomes clear and transparent. Our similarities as human cultures out weigh our differences and if we actually focus on our similarities rather than our differences the world would be a better place. My thinking is roaming foreign lands with foreign thoughts and I am having trouble putting things into perspective as I move out of the localised setting into the global. My adaptation to new information is continuing to be processed.
I have had a taste of what is from my perspective the 'other' and now wish to explore its culture and experience the history of those that lived before us. It is an amazing journey of human resilience and is testament to our ability to adapt to our changing environments and to improve our lifestyles. In fact you could say that I am having an anthropological response to a wonderfully exciting experience that I wish to continue.
Life my friends is here to be lived!
Life is good!
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