City or Country?

Where would you most like to live?  In the city or in the country?  I have done both and once I was able to zip between each.  At the moment I am staying in the enormous, noisy, dusty and visually over-stimulating city of Guadalajara, Mexico's second city.  The smell of tacos of all kinds is on most corners as pop-up eateries abound.  Sometimes, I just wish I could smell nothing but freshly cut lawn, but there's not much hope of that. Unless I visit a soccer field. I went back to Tonalà, the craft centre of Mexico.  Well, one of the craft centres. Puebla is another.  There are many.  I always think about Stendhal's Syndrome and how the over-stimulation of senses, not just arts, can cause a spin-out.  I think, to a certain degree, the whole world is suffering from visual, aural and sensory overload these days.  It's kind of silly to add to it by scrawling graffiti (no matter how meaningful to oneself) over walls and even as tattoos on one's body. Too much distraction.  Nobody's easily able to get down to work.  There's music and noise all around us in cities.  In rural areas, the luxury of being able to sit on the grass and just listen to nothing but the wind and maybe a distant magpie or kookaburra, is taken for granted.  I long for the quiet of our home in the tiny Aussie town of Snake Valley.  It was beautiful.  But too far from family.  And actually, I could never write there.  I found far too much to do and the days just slid by, sneaking past me before I noticed.

We are never happy!  Ruby slippers can click all they want but these days, it is important to make 'home' where you have to be and not keep circling back to the comfort and serenity of the easy places!