Introduction, September 2022

As I begin to write my book, working title: 'Should I Move to Portugal?' (subtitle: the search for a place to call home), I see that this richness of experience (nominally good and bad) is what I am here for - ALL of it - and that this backdrop of culture and kindness, against which it all takes place, is another blessing, for which I am most grateful. 

So was my move here an escape?

I would prefer to think I was creating an easier and more appropriate backdrop in which to enjoy life, and as I have said, that blessing has been afforded me. This is a place where I have been 'lucky' enough to have my heart opened, for it to be honoured and to make heart-to-heart connections as well. And I realise more deeply that saying: home is where the heart is. It's not just where you move your body and living life to. 

And of course anything that I may have been avoiding or trying to escape, I will eventually come face to face with! About that we can all be sure!! As we seem to be saying a lot at the moment ... wherever we go there we are and after the luggage comes the baggage and what's under the flying carpet? (that takes us from the place of our pain to the supposed new venue of our pleasure). There's no escape. "There is no coming to consciousness without pain".

I write this on a day when we hear of enforced energy blackouts, and of water being turned off, with the 'news' in full doom-signalling mode for the coming months and years. Yet, as I have said before: "Portugal may not quite be Heaven on Earth, but it's certainly a better place than many others in which to face man-made misery".