the pea soup syndrome

When I was a teenager, I vowed that my life would be in constant motion. I would be a river, or better yet, an ocean, and I would never, ever stagnate. I would never turn green and thick and slow, I would never succumb to what I called the "Pea Soup Syndrome". As I entered adulthood, I soon realised that it's quite easy to get stuck in a routine that becomes a rut, that inspiration becomes more and more evasive. What's great about blogs and diaries is that you can peer through a little window at yourself in various points in time, and one of the things I noticed when looking back is that somewhere along the way, I had come down with the dreaded Soup. Although I've been travelling a lot, I haven't been drawing much (as several of you have kindly pointed out), and for someone who took immense pleasure in drawing, someone who needed to draw— things were looking a little green. It was somewhere along The Great Anatolian Road Trip last summer, that Pedro and I decided we were going to move. In a very, very short amount of time, I will be leaving Turkey for a new home, a new adventure.

I won't tell you where we are heading yet— and if you already know, let's please keep it a secret for a little while longer... I'll be saying a slow farewell to Turkey over the next few weeks with posts from an Aegean road trip, and tales of the last ditch attempt to see those Caucasian Black Grouse in the Kaçkars. Yes, we returned to Sivrikaya.

Stay tuned for ancient ruins, fabulous kebabs, and fat birds!