a crow, a kitten and a newborn baby .

these days in short sentences:

making a studio for myself at home for the first time since I started to share a room with my special person. Painting our new wardrobe in aventurine green.

visiting the Baltic see and feeling like a young girl again. Memories of swimming in the Baltic for countless hours, until my lips were grey and my fingers old and crumpled. Ficus saw the see for the first time, instant zoomies, he run circles in the sand with a stick in his mouth. 

first time ever close interaction with a crow, instant fascination mixed with a little scare, recognising high intelligence in the bird's penetrating gaze. Kitten lived next to us for a day or two, heralding the birth of my first godson, the second son of my brother. I found a perfect first bike for him already, dumped on the street next to our home, with a face of a tiger painted on its front.  

i draw more and make more time to just sit at my new desk space, on its wall - the Empress and Death; the need to produce, produce, produce and then to cut, cut, cut. 

i made my 10000th portfolio and again, think this one is the strongest one yet and I hope I finally get a shot in a dreamy artist's studio, I fear of jinxing it.

very slowly I can start wearing one of my favourite perfume again, the last days of summer, I see the autumn stepping into our garden. 

i literally shaved myself and now I am excited to watch myself grow.

future pollinators .

 I've been sick and bedridden, but the first thing I wanted to do when I felt better was visit the garden. Just when I think it’s reached its peak beauty, it surprises me with the dance of flowers going to seed and new species emerging from the ground.

This year, we decided to transform an unused plot of land behind our shared home in Berlin. We let it grow wild, except for patches where we planted vegetables and selected flowers like nasturtium. The most important thing we did is simply enriched and loosened the soil, that was all the work necessary. Konstantin is studying Horticulture, and I am blessed to be learning so much from him. Now, countless plants have self-seeded, from the tiny scarlet pimpernel to the towering king’s candles—taller than Konstantin, and he’s tall in my scale...I’ve tried to identify them all, but sometimes I feel like I can't catch up, or get overwhelmed.

The only thing that makes this sweet experience bitter is the amount of butterflies and other insects that we’ve encountered this summer. It is so little in comparison to the amount of flora taking over the patch of land, the poor bees cant keep up with work (but they are there, all buzzing, always busy). 

I had been thinking a lot about flies in the past, preparing my graduation project at the master studies in Iceland, where I tried to befriend a fly inhabiting my home. It makes my mind wonder: what if flies become primary pollinators, following the flowers evolving to attract them with scents of compost or decay? Flies thrive on the waste we leave behind (as humans we tend to leave so much of it), becoming our constant, often unwelcome companions, no matter where we live.

At home, we have two notably pungent plants: the Gynura purple, with flowers that smell like old gym socks forgotten in the locker for summer holiday, and Stapelia variegata, whose fishy scent captivated us so much we took a cutting of the plant from the botanical garden. 

I am still recovering from the sickness so this is enough of brain work for today, but I will come back to it; if any of you reading have some recommendations on future pollinators, possible, plausible, probable, or completely fictitious, please reach out to me!

x ma

.

all gas .

Under the influence of a sweet, home-made chocolate bites, with a mind-bending filling, also distilled from a home-grown plant under a mysterious sub-name of All Gas OG, I have had a subtle yet powerful realisation. We have just finished watching one of the episodes from the new season of The Bear, a show about transformation under distress, that of a regular sandwich shop, to the aspiring fine dining restaurant and their chefs, changing in a trajectory similar to their kitchen. In the episode I have just gobbled up, the main character was struggling with the inner perfectionist, pushing himself and everybody around him to their limits, through which he had expected to expand them bit by bit by bit. In the world where the smallest of actions matters, and every second counts, no grain of rice gets left behind on a bottom of a pot, a side of a spoon, or running down the sink trapped in soap bubbles, everything is made with a focus of a freshly sharped knife, and extreme dedication, devotion of all energy and other resources, including blood, sweat and tears. I got to cooking right after watching the episode and in the midst of the all gas mingling with my blood stream, I decided to enter that kind of a mindset while preparing the meal for myself and Argi, who got struck with covid and lied lifelessly in between pillows on the red couch. 

The joy of making a dish out of recently made, irregular and chaotic yet beautiful sheets of pasta, with a sauce mixed out of a bomb of flavours; that of carrots roasted with olive oil, salt and rosemary, blended with more olive oil, tahini, miso, lemon with the zest, yeast flakes, spicy, smoked paprika and freshly roasted sunflower seeds, topped with the fresh olive herb from our garden. When I served the dish, the pumpkin seeds on top were still scorching, popping and farting gingerly, like a ceramic piece weeks after being fired in the oven. 

It struck me there, in this simple and delicate moment, that I am searching for the one, specific thing to pour myself into and for it to define me, not only on the job market but in the eyes of people in general. But, in the middle of all the identity crisis thing going on, I forgot; what if I was to pour myself with such dedication (maybe not too extreme, I am eternally fond of balance in all I do) to every or any action taken, remembering to approach life itself with the sharp focus, curiosity of a child and letting myself be mesmerised in situations less trivial than a walk in the woods, or an evening in the garden. What if I looked at the place I'm in, the things I do already and the people I connect to, and found myself anew with what there is already, but on a much deeper, sharper level? 

I really want to try and turn that switch ON more often, not only under the influence of external substances. Some of the other thoughts I want to dwell on deeper include: the comeback of my fascination on how can a human see beyond the human format, with the use of the most powerful of tools, fiction. Working with human perception of their environment and advocating for shifting to non-human perspectives. Curating gardens and creating ecosystems that evolve over time, in a dance of death and rebirth. Gardens with plants, animals, and other organisms coexisting in a fixed setting, blurring the lines between art and ecology.

x ma

.

too bright to see .

I traced down the feeling of getting lost and becoming less interested and passionate about things I used to be driven by, to the time I met my partner, Konstantin. At first, a thought came, that it is because the love we generated from our sudden closeness had consumed my energy resources and attention so much, that there was little of it left for anything else. I am certain that it is partially true, we had been nesting together for a long time before we felt the pull towards entering the public eye again. But now, a few years later, I blamed this feeling of stagnation on myself, and the simple explanation that I lost the spark because I slowed down too much, that it is harder for me to get back to form, just like when exercising gets harder and harder the more you push it to another day. Again, I am sure it is also partially true, but one does not simply lose interest in things that they pursued for a long time because they fell in love and took some time off from actively working on generating new ideas and hands-on work.

Today, while reading a passage from a book by Maya Blackwell about permaculture, it struck me that I am simply in a long and deep process of cleansing and healing from patterns and habits that used to automatically override my actions and impulses. Konstantin has been my first partner with whom I felt loved completely, with whom I have cultivated open communication from the start, not restraining myself from the most intimate thoughts and feelings about the world. I am eternally grateful to have a teacher like him in my life. There were no big dramas, and if they occurred, it was only because I was reverting to what I had learned in my previous relationships with men - fear, jealousy, need for attention, these demons never realistically had rightful reasons to occur, they were all coming from the stories I carried within myself from past experiences.

I remember when we moved out from our completely remote meeting point in Portugal, where we lived during the COVID pandemic in 2020 with a few other humans, surrounded by nothing else but trees and clouds. I remember the feeling of entering a group of people after moving back to Iceland, and this realization that I don't look at them nor at myself in the same way anymore. The need to present myself as somebody or say something smart and funny at the same time, was (almost completely) gone. Huh, I thought, is it that easy, that I have satisfied my hunger for being loved and accepted with the beautiful attention this man showers me with every day now? I don't have to be the best, smartest, sexiest in the room anymore? Again, I believe that too is partially true, but I am onto something much deeper here.
Having Konstantin in my life has been a healing and turning point in my life, simply having a relationship with somebody which is so healthy and pure, poured over other areas of my being, not only social, but deeply personal, bodily and intellectual. The things that interested me mainly in theory, such as interspecies communication and the lives of non-humans, started to be much more interesting in practice. Going out on a walk with no destination became more interesting than researching a complex subject in a book or on my computer. Sharing openly my feelings, thoughts, discomforts, and pleasures with another human being was more nutritious than thousands of people looking at me with admiration from a distance or a screen of my phone.

And so, from this point of view, of a person who had been trapped in all those unfulfilled needs, searching for them in wrong places, I have FINALLY arrived at the point of feeling excited about being lost and seemingly losing purpose, because the dreams I had for a very long time do not fit my current reality. I can feel my spark coming back from somewhere very deep in my belly, but this time it feels different. I am excited to mindfully continue walking in this dark place towards a crack that just opened, a few minutes ago, when I sat on a bench in front of The Botanical Room in Kreuzberg, Berlin, reading a beautiful book. I know it is yet too bright for me to see what's on the other side, but I imagine it to be a garden full of living sculptures, studies of plants and other organisms and most importantly, getting to know them by their name.

I now see why Ficus entered our lives at this specific time and place, he is a walking representation of the biggest step I took on my processes of transformation and depression, when I decided to throw my fear of being responsible and committed for a living being away, and decided to have a best friend and a walking compass that brings me down to earth, to my body, for when I am drifting too far away into what was or that what should be. Slowing down when falling in love with Konstantin, learning to be more in touch with my body and the world around me, was and remains to be a completely chaotic and sometimes very scary place to be in, but this time I do not feel the angst anymore, I feel hope.

x ma

.

dear hair .

 I keep finding my long hair stretched across surfaces at home. 

I am sitting at the hairdressers; a young Japanese man cuts my hair and after each snap of carefully grown long strains, he puts the hair on my laps respectfully, with a silent gesture allowing me to farewell with a significant part of myself. I look down on my laps full of all these singular threads collectively called hair, which in my eyes become both, alive and dead. Cut from their mother they are taking on the new type of existence, and so am I. They will most probably land in a bin, mixed in a cocktail of genetic material, with shades of hair taken drastically in the swift motion from a boy with short brown hair just before me, and a young woman with long blond curls sitting next to me, and this tanned, tall man with his black hair hiding behind his ear, as if they knew soon their home, the head, will no longer be theirs. I on the other hand, am loosing all these years of wearing a specific look, being recognised as a woman whose hair are braided, soft and gentle, suddenly standing up in a chaotic, and what is considered to be more brave look. Last time I wore hair like this was back in Łódź, studying philosophy and going full-on blond, exploring my femininity - and before that in high school, desperately trying to get out of my teenage skin, proudly aiming for the never changing haircut of Johnny Greenwood. I am sitting on the hairdressers chair and shyly looking at myself in the mirror. Even though my shoulders are tense and I can feel the smell of my body sweating in distress, I am excited and thrilled to be effortlessly inhabiting a new role in this play I found myself directing.

Dear hair - I am intentionally trying to move my thoughts up to the bulbs of the hair still hanging on to me, hoping they receive the message - I say;

goodbye to the hair I lost, thank you and I wish you all best on your own journey of transformation. I hope you make new friends and won't hold grudges. And, hello to the baby hair, buckle up and get ready for the ride. Love,

x ma

.

on all fours .

 yesterday was a beautifully full day. 

I want to savour it, hoping there will be many more days like this coming, provoked by the sun shyly turning attention to our part of the globe. I started the day excited by the promise of a play date for both myself and Ficus - we were about to meet a Berlin-based ceramist Tiziana, who handcrafted my favourite cup with a blue whippet stretching across its surface (I had bought it thinking of Ficus with his, how we tend to call them "love-ears", the soft version of his pointy ears resting gently on his head while expressing affection). The inspiration behind the motif of the whippet were her own dogs, and so we had met in the park, joined by lovely Sam and her whippet Nela, ending up with the crew of the most adorable racing bullets running around us in circles. Afterwards we sat outside of a small Cafe, I had a black coffee half of which Ficus spilled all over my favourite pants - I keep loving him nevertheless.

coming back home I found Konstantin in the garden happily trimming our shrubs, collecting branches for the fence in making, which will primarily become a house for the insects, if they wish to move in and accept it as such. And so the rest of this beautiful day I have spent weaving our fence, laughing at Ficus being extremely tired and annoying (of course he wanted these specific sticks we were working with, and not the plenty hidden in the grass which he carefully selects to bring home from our daily walks), and seeing Konstantin clearly being in his element. 

a few days ago I was giving into the fantasy of living as a floral designer, working with freshly cut flowers and sculpting using those. I still feel the reminiscence of the idea we had with Argi at Studio Maixu, of working on living scenography, which would be arranged of an array of living things and thus possibly change in time, morphing into something else within moments, days, or seasons. Watching things change, transform and morph in time might be my favourite part of being alive. And what else grows so effortlessly and graciously but plants? I look at the trees outside of my window and I dream of going back in time, to the days when squirrels could travel across unimaginable distances never touching the ground, jumping from branch to branch of the elder, gentle giants known to us as trees.

during these moments of vacancies, empty spaces full of room to be furnished as I please, I often catch myself in need to ask a question "if I could instantly become an expert in something, what would that be?". I try to feel into this inquiry and see where do I sense the strongest pull is coming from. It is a bit like being in a big room with a delicate yet tangible draft, and with my eyes closed, I try to trace it to the slit where the air escapes outside. Before my potential life as a florist I fantasised about being an all-sniffing, well trained nose, just like Sissel Tolaas - the photos of her nose glued to different kinds of surfaces can be found all over the internet. I imagined training myself daily for many years, collecting scents and olfactory experiences with the big vacuum-cleaner like machine, composing new sensory experiences, as I explore our extinctive sense of smell and its direct highway to the memory centre of our brains. During the next days on walks with Ficus I observed him patiently, licking and sniffing the ground, reading information from our surrounding I can't even possibly try to grasp as a human being. One of the methods to try and imagine the unimaginable I reach for is reenacting being on psychedelics. I tap into the memories of what it feels like to take my reality for granted, and to suddenly have my sensory apparatus completely transformed, undermining everything I was sure I knew about myself and the capabilities of my body. At first very unpleasant realisation, followed by kind of a state of bliss, openness to loss of control and in this specific case, need to publicly stuff my nose in the folds of a bark of this majestic tree in front of me, or landing on all fours next to Ficus, checking what exactly made him so deaf to my request for going home. 

I am excited about all these possible futures and ways of being in the world, but still struggling too much with choosing one specific thing to do and being consistent about it. It all feels very tiring right now and I do hope this state will pass soon. Meanwhile I am heading to continue working on our garden, excited to start the sprouting of nasturtium today, it is one of my favourite plants to watch grow from a tiny wee seed. 

x ma

.

empty states .

I am starting this blog from a seemingly hopeless bottom of a pit. It is not an actual state of hopelessness, I am aware of the story I tell myself which drives me into these states, without it I would probably pursue any convenient job that would bring me some money and keep me busy. Instead, I decided to go deeper into the horrifying realisation that I don't know what to do with myself for the first time in my life. I am currently unemployed, in a few days turning 28, on the 28th of March. Unemployment did not bother me at first, I hoped that things will naturally turn around as they always did, but then I found myself without a job one year later and it does strike me as unusual, especially when moving around the people who travel in between places with a specific purpose of getting things done and keeping their hands full. What might strike some as unusual in what I wrote, is the fact that I trace this to be the first time in my life I lack a purpose, not knowing what to do with myself. You see, like many people in our shared reality, since I was small I had a very specific dream of working in the movies. First as an actress, shortly after deciding that the only thing that is interesting to me in acting is the joy and thrill of learning many crafts and being many people in one life through impersonation (here I am not sure if impersonation is a good word to describe acting craft, I feel conflicted about it being insufficient, but it will do for the purpose of this short writing form and improvised blogging). Then, as a director "enabling an audience to experience the world from a different point of view - to understand from the inside out what it might feel like to be (...)", as Agnès Varda once beautifully put it. Then as an animator, then as a DOP, to finally arrive to the point where I ended up as a prop maker and set dresser, hoping for it to be the start of my life-long dream of allowing these experiences of whats possible to come to life, and travelling there myself.


but, dreams, dreams, dreams...dreams are dangerous, ESPECIALLY the life long dreams which start to sprout early in our evolution, and haunt us through the coming of age. They are powerful dreams, for which one would move a mountain with their bare hands. They can be also extremely destructive, as the path to fulfilling those is covered with years of training and programming yourself, and the lingering need to success and to be the very best, to finally "make it". And letting go of these dreams...oh man, this one is by far the hardest! Allowing things to come naturally, freely changing directions and not clenching to the one specific dream you had been working on that started to constitute who you are in your own eyes, and of those around you...this is the stuff of nightmares. How can you feel lost after being so so driven for your whole life? And on the other side, how can feeling lost be actually a very good feeling, if you allow it to sink in on a deeper level?

a few years ago, during the covid pandemic 2020, when I first met my soon to be husband, stroked by love, I hit the break for the first time since I was 6. Let me wrap it up for myself real quick...at this young age of 6 my parents sent me to music school, and I have been growing up in between two schools, having little time to simply just be a kid. This most oppressive time of my life, of infamous puberty and monkey town of a high school, paradoxically resulted in the defence mechanism which forced me to be most free in active dreaming. The repetitive and inescapable routines of everyday life called for a necessary balancing force in a form of a vivid imagination and lucid, as well as woke, conscious dreaming, in search for a more exciting life. Walking the same streets every day, talking the same bus, seeing the same faces, repeating motifs of violin music countless amount of times, and imagining before closing my eyes in the very same bed every night - that one day somebody will come and rescue me, that one day I will be free. Of course, in time I have learned the timeless lesson, that nobody was coming for me, and in the right moment, I was to free myself - which I did at the age of 17, moving out from my parents house and moving in with my best friend, in the city of Łódź, where in time, I imagined I would study in a film school. Instead, I fell in love with a much older philosopher and theatre director, who had opened a new world for me, a world of philosophical investigations. At that time I have studied philosophy and experimented with a theatre, having a prospect in mind that I will move out from Poland and study film somewhere more exciting. Having the world full of potential schools, I chose Iceland, where I ended up studying design. At that time my intuition was already well trained and when I have found the description of the master program called "Explorations & Translations" on the website of Iceland University of the Arts, I knew this can only take me further on my journey of making and inhabiting new realities. And it did, I met my current collaborator with whom in time we formed a union and finally, started to work behind the scenes of movies and music videos. Shortly after finishing the master program I met my partner, with whom I fell in love and, nested in a village in Portugal far away from any city, surrounded by the hills covered in trees, for the first time I let go of control and let myself just be, be in love, do nothing for weeks. The process of letting go was very hard, slowing down took me into a state of lingering depression,  immediately I wanted to find something else to do, I just had to keep on going, keep myself busy. I realised that I am entering a common story of all the workaholics and over ambitious folk, and I did not like it at all. With the help of my new love, who was at that time training to be a coach of The Byron Katie method of working on "stories we tell ourselves" and thoughts that constitute our reality, I arrived to a place where the seemingly doing nothing was an exciting opportunity to check in with myself, after years of chasing an idea that sprouted in my early years of active dreaming. 

I have successfully slowed down, I started to feel and understand myself better, I was excited to forget my dreams and just devote myself to doing anything that I feel like doing right here and now. I devoted myself to taking care of plants, cooking amazing foods, going on walks with no destination and playing games with my closest chosen family members. It was easy and beautiful for some time, but then ta-daaaaah, I lost myself on the opposite side of the spectrum, I started doubting my dreams and therefore, doubting myself, lacking direction and self-nominated purpose, in a new city and entering a completely new chapter in my life. 

This blog is intended to help me to go through this process of being scattered and confused, wanting to do all the new things and nothing at all at the same time. I thought that this old-school and almost nostalgic form of a blog will help me to be most vulnerable, open and will be least stressful and curated, which easily happens on other online platforms like instagram, or often times pretentious, beautifully designed websites.

Here is my little dreaming helper and guardian, our dog Ficus who is now 9 months old and carefree. I keep learning from him and I am extremely privileged and happy that he is my companion on this journey of making new realities for myself and our little family. He has just woken up from his nap and is delicately poking my thigh with his nose, asking for attention. 

I will end todays post with the note on the early birthday gift I have received from my great friend, who had sent me a letter with a book of Dorota Kotas called "Pustostany" (I feel very lazy right now and would translate this quickly to something alongside the lines of empty states, vacancies). Thank you Piotr for this wonderfully fitting gift, for my journey through the vacancies, which are both empty and full of potential, ready to be furnished with something new. The first sentence on the back of the book starts with the following question:

"Is it possible to be unemployed for a year, even though the living is so uncomfortably expensive?"

well, I don't know about that, in my case it was possible with the help of German government :-P 

x ma

.