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

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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

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