I have been on the road for the past two weeks.
Returning home earlier today, I immediately gathered my camera and eagerly set out to capture some of the images which greeted me.
Being away for such a length of time has made me homesick, even though part of this time has been spent with friends I rarely get to see.
Spending time in London was both a pleasure and a shock!
I travelled there by coach and ferry, as I try to avoid flying and the carbon footprint it incurs.
However, this allows me lots of time to do what I love…observe!
Arriving on the outskirts of London, just as it’s vast population begins to awaken and stir, is both magical and awesome, for it is at this time that the birds hold sway, their dawn chorus loud and jubilant!
The occasional fox is observed, slinking home after a night’s forage. (My ‘fox cushion’ evokes a memory or two!)
As the coach rolls down towards central London and Victoria Station, shops are rising shutters and newspapers are being stacked in plastic covered piles outside shops and kiosks…the storm is about to break, as tens of thousands of feet start to pound the beat along the arteries connecting home and work.
I love this city!
The shock to my system confronts me as the beat of life, incessant and purposeful, is now much louder than I remember it.
London is more crowded, people are attached to hand-held devices, living in their own singularities, at least on the outside, but connected to the now powerful force of the internet.
I wonder how many are sitting on trains, buses, workplaces, reading this and unaware of that powerful connection to like-minded people reading this website brings to you?
The Singularity is an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly non-biological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today—the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity.
Watching hundreds of people around me wherever I walked or travelled made me feel invisible, for none looked up, either at me or one another.
For more than fleeting moments I caught a glimpse of the future in cities!
John von Neumann was quoted as saying that “the ever accelerating progress of technology … gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.” His definition of the Singularity was that the Singularity is the moment beyond which “technological progress will become incomprehensively rapid and complicated.”
I travelled on to Kefalonia in Greece, after some days spent in London. This was to celebrate a very special anniversary with friends.
(Much of what I have experienced over this time is covered in more depth, and photographs, than this site now allows for and can be read and viewed on the new website, Bealtaine Cottage Good Life.
I shall be posting there in the next few hours.)
Thanks to all who have written to me, emailed, phoned and signed up to the new website. I am about to work though the sign-up backlog, then take some time to respond to your correspondence.
I am very happy to be home!
Blessings XXX
Colette