This rambling patchwork [see, 2 days back & the words are pouring out again] of a Qito blog will show up on Facebook as a Note. And on several other groups I enjoy, as a feed. All I do is press Publish & it’s automatically done for me. Magic. Long gone are the days of typesetting and printing presses. Gone are the days of cut & paste & photocopying. Backing up my new hard drive today after the recent Apocalyptic crash, I’m shocked by how much stuff I have stored, how many external hard drives I own [embarrassing] & well yes, how times have changed.

I am from here. England to me is about history. We like to preserve. To hold on. To sustain and maintain. Antiques, houses, cars – everything. I grew up in a low ceilinged house marked in The Doomsday Book [William The Conqueror 1085], so I laugh when people from Elsewhere tell me their 50 year old house is old. I LOVE being Elsewhere, where the architecture is more often than not: clean, uncluttered & wider, bigger & lighter. My tastes are more minimalist Zen / Shaker, than cluttered trinket laden mantles & fluffy flowery valances.

Yet, wherever in the world I roam, these road signs [road signs particularly irk me], colours, windows & guttering, street corners & accents are my DNA. They may not be my preferred choice anymore, but they are home. They don’t resonate with me the way other places do, I still get claustrophobic the further I am from London airports [and London] but there is a huge relief being in the same country your passport is from. No more ‘itinerant wandering alien’ with no rights [but that's another subject]. English sun dappled lanes, green air, jumpers [sweaters], socks & slippers. Clothes is what makes the seasons work. That and copious amounts of tea (from 2 litre electric kettles! Joy).
Food: I’m hungry. I’ve been spoilt by the heirloom tomatoes & abundant organic produce in the Californian farmer’s markets. The local stores here are Waitrose & Tesco & I feel like little they stock will truly nourish me. The overly-chilled plastic-wrapped romaine is not speaking to me. Everything here is expensive – superfoods are prohibitively so. The only way it makes sense to eat the foods I want & need is to have trade accounts everywhere again & have juicy big deliveries. Time to go find me some late season nettles & wild foods in these verdant lanes. I’ve almost immediately reverted to blended foods – something I haven’t even thought about since I last was here.

The past month was a humdinger! I don’t know anyone who hasn’t gone through something vast in the last 6 weeks. Our internal horizons are being called to change. The lessons are bigger, clearing faster & YES we love our jackass mothaf*king teachers: Ho’o Ponopono. So much gratitude to Mama Mango & Papa Smurf for the time I spent with them in the last few weeks. Many friends blow me away with their grounded wisdom – thank you for having my back when most I needed it. This time, acceptance made leaving America [& seeing Jacquie for a final squeeze] easier than expected. Everything felt/feels unreal & surreal – which made my departure, sleepless flight [five movies - a record!] & arrival kinda floaty.
For the first time ever I watched someone I knew surf. No biggy if you’re from California, but ‘I’m not from round here’. So thank you Eddie Sunburst for my first surf shoot, & for re-entering the freezing surf when I wasn’t quite done having fun. And for the Big Sur journey South to LA – stunning.. ❤
