When I started writing Postcards Without Stamps I was following Inked in Colour and I was very inspired by Sash’s letters to her daughter that create a beautiful and thoughtful dialogue with Bo. Some of Sash’s photographs also stick in my mind till this day, especially the one of her daughter holding a feather as if giving a challenge to her mum to write for her (link to her post here). Of course, this is most likely my own projection onto the photo and a reveal of my own sub-conscious need to express love through writing which wants to be met here.
The post below is not a letter as such but perhaps a poem or a lyric to a song and it is just one of those things that wanted to be written.
There I will be
There are moments in life when past and present collapse into one.
When the future is impossible to predict and days impossible to plan,
when tomorrow seems too distant to arrive – in those days, my Princess,
there I will be
your Trust.
When your life will seem too much to handle, there I will be, my Princess, your Trust.
When the pain of regrets will swallow your courage, there I will be, my Princess, your Trust.
When your joys will dissipate and where the hopes will turn into ash, there I will stay my Princess,
It was already very late into the evening when we navigated through the German town of Stendhal last summer. When the telephone collapsed and the printed map, as if on purpose, showed us only the major streets and nothing nearby. No navigation. Both mobiles off. Just the drizzle and two small kids at the back of the car who really wanted to be stretching their feet in the warm beds after a long drive from Antwerp. We had one scare already when we got stuck in the queues for miles and after an hour our gears refused to cooperate and we were lucky to steer over to the hard shoulder of the motorway. My husband, unable to engage any gear at all and without any working phone, started to panic. Then he bent down and moved the clutch with his hand. This worked, but we were still scared as we carried on driving – confident at that stage that we would find our destination.
Stendhal greeted us with almost empty roads. No human in site, shops put to rest for the night, and no petrol station to stop by or a taxi driver to talk to and a detour around the city because of roadworks that completely took us off course and messed up the organization of the town that I had in my head. There must be a way of figuring out where we we staying, I thought to myself, trying not to lose hope just yet even though I was increasingly getting agitated and restless. The children’s tension mounted and then it broke out with joy as a Burger King stood there lit like a lighthouse in the stormy sea. We parked the car and checked if there was anyone in. We saw people moving but they could not see us. The doors were shut. We were searching for alternatives in our head. We had none. If it was about petrol, we could walk there. No problem. If it was about distance, we could call a taxi, but it was primarily about our lack of direction and no one who we could communicate with. There was no one to whom we could have talked to, until of course there was.
We spotted two people who had just walked out through the back door of the Burger King in a joyful and chatty mood. Did we just miss them? Were we too late? We ran to them for rescue and we explained our predicament. They glanced at our kids and willingly typed the address of our accommodation into their smartphones. We still couldn’t navigate it as all the mobiles seemed to refuse to cooperate with us that evening. As if we meant to talk for a bit longer and learn where we were all from. And so we’ve learnt that they were from Syria and they’ve been settling down there slowly, and they asked for our origin and whereabouts and we prayed together for the phone to give us the direction that it refused to give. Nothing was changing, the postcodes were not accepted, the network circulated in a loop. We grew in frustration and we almost resigned to spend the night at the carpark when all of a sudden a third person came out of the Burger King, attentive and quick, just in a few seconds asked us what has happened and without hesitation took the postcode and typed it into his car’s navigation. ‘No problem. I will drive you there.’ – he said. We couldn’t believe it. He was so quick to help. What’s your name, I asked: ‘Hadi’. He said. Where are you from? Syria. I smiled. A long time ago I was dreaming of taking a Syrian family to safety and it was a person from Syria who took us to safety. Maybe God takes into account good intentions, too, I thought to myself, while we reached our destination being guided by Hadi.
Sometimes we think that darkness is omnipresent because it it so close, but if we look at it from a distance we would notice that it is just a part of a larger view, larger composition that can only be revealed if we take a few steps back or a few steps forward. There is a certain amount of intelligence in darkness and a fair deal of stupidity too but the bird wears it gracefully and their feathers glisten when they pause to ponder. This makes me think that a bird in flight does not have much time for even being described as ‘graceful’ and thus for admiration. It is perhaps too purpose-driven to feed on vanity.
And there I was thinking that being quiet and sitting still will take me places. You too?
Photos taken at Bradgate Park, Leicestershire. Modified photos taken at Shining Cliff Woods, Ambergate, Derbyshire by me.
There is a huge amount of bravery involved in deciphering the fires that consume our lives and senses; the fires that render each available minute joyful or that turn each minute into ash. Our passions. We know them for their powers to make us feel alive and for their powers to contradict and challenge our other priorities and values. Passions when untamed can turn things into meaningless speckles of dust, they can suffocate our existence to such an extent that we just want to bury our faces in our palms and weep with dismay. For passions are sometimes too much to handle.
They are sometimes too overpowering, too enthralling, too sneaky in the way they operate, to even notice and to ask oneself: What is it that I am trying to cope with here? What is that force that gives me wings in one moment and crash-lands in the next, most likely with hundreds of flashing warning lights that I systematically and stubbornly ignore? What is that force that simultaneously suppresses and expands my skills for self-expression and permeates the scars and sensitivities of my chest, unobtrusively, and just to give an indecent exposure of my longings, misunderstandings, yearnings, cravings and appreciations to the outside world?
When photography arrived in search of me, I felt as if I had a swollen eye from the grasshopper’s bite and I could not quite lift my eyelid – as if part of life was too hard to see. The camera forces you to see what you might omit with one swollen eyelid (although ironically you take a photo with one eye closed), i.e. the evidence for shoddy or meticulous existence. The evidence for fondness, self-care or neglect. See or die, it says. See and never ever go to sleep again. It shakes you, it shakes your perception for as long as it takes for you to awaken to reality.
When we learn to live with passion, we learn to touch the peripheries of our capacity to feel excitement. Sometimes we define and circumscribe our powers to explore things so narrowly that our results are quiet and timid, other times we learn to roar. Passion will always give you a pat on your shoulder though, for the quiet and timid efforts and for the louder ones too. But if you are listening carefully, it will also ask you the big question: Is this sincerely truly, fully and factually what caught your heart and attention in the first place?
When photography is a visual response of the heart and mind to the outside world then it also forces us to rebel against accommodating disappointments in our personal, social or political spheres. A passion doesn’t want us to be docile. It asks us to match its energy and to prove to ourselves that we can handle it. Passions have got dialogical aims; they don’t like when you lapse into silence. With ease or dis-ease, but we must respond to them. That’s the deal, the eternal deal that we sign off for the continued experience of aliveness. ‘Work on me.’ – says passion, ‘this is how you’ll make your way to joy.’ It woos you, entices you and it hopes that you will put it to shape, that you will give it a character and you know you will, on one condition, that you will put it in service of the higher values, the higher purpose. And you agree, of course, there is no other choice for you to make, but now you have to train on both hands, lift them up in unison, the passion and the values and then you calm down because it all makes sense for once. You feel safe because you get your head straight and you came to your senses to understand that it is not the spirit that lives in the body but the body that lives in the spirit and now the bait is taken off your heart, you are no longer on a rod, you are no longer pushed and pulled. And passion writes all about it. And it is safe.
*photograph taken by Alicja Pyszka-Franceschini during a dance photography workshop with Paul Hill and Maria Falconer, Nottingham.
Postcards Without Stamps 