On Passions, Poetry and Photography

“And it was at that age.. Poetry arrived

in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where

it came from, from winter or a river.

I don’t know how or when,

…

But from a street I was summoned

…

And something started in my soul,

fever or forgotten wings,

and I made my own way,

deciphering

that fire”

Pablo Neruda, Poetry

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.

Living well

“Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”
― Mary Oliver

Blends and mixes

“Everyone has a purpose in life and a unique talent to give to others. And when we blend this unique talent with service to others, we experience the ecstasy and exultation of own spirit, which is the ultimate goal of all goals.” Kallam Anji Reddy

I’ve been to a management course recently which really was a rather unusual thing for me to do but surprisingly after my initial shock related to its jargon, I started warming up to it and in the end I really enjoyed it. There was one particular thought or phrase within the language of management that really stuck to my mind and I thought I’ll share it with you here. This phrase, to my mind, is a wonderful alternative to the culture of ‘not-enoughness’ that is so typical of the world that we live in and I think can successfully guide us through life. That phrase was nothing else but ‘Realise the benefits’. You may not get as ecstatic about it but it really spoke to me. We do have an awful lot in our lives, our backgrounds, our cultures, our languages, our experiences, talents, and energy and it is our responsibility to realise for ourselves and others the benefits of it all. To mix it, to blend it into our personal concoction of magic-making potion.

Walking

“Go outside. Don’t tell anyone and don’t bring your phone. Start walking and keep walking until you no longer know the road like the palm of your hand, because we walk the same roads day in and day out, to the bus and back home and we cease to see. We walk in our sleep and teach our muscles to work without thinking and I dare you to walk where you have not yet walked and I dare you to notice. Don’t try to get anything out of it, because you won’t. Don’t try to make use of it, because you can’t. And that’s the point. Just walk, see, sit down if you like. And be. Just be, whatever you are with whatever you have, and realise that that is enough to be happy.
There’s a whole world out there, right outside your window. You’d be a fool to miss it.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors…disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

The sweet cloud

There is a very old poem written by a Polish author Julian Tuwim called ‘Dyzio Marzyciel’ – ‘Dyzio, the dreamer’. It is about a boy who imagines that clouds are different types of sweets and that he is able to reach for them while lying down on the grass. While I was reading it to my son the other day, he enthusistically exclaimed: ‘Mummy, I want to get inside this book!’ I laughed and I agreed with him that this would indeed be a pleasant state of affairs. I then forgot about this little conversation until I came across this thought put together by Barbara Kingsolver:

“The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.”

I really like this idea of ‘living inside our hope… under its roof’, about being surrounded with it. Perhaps, just like Dyzio was dreaming of clouds of sweets, we could imagine the clouds of hope that we could reach to just when the going gets a bit too hard. I know that clouds tend to signify oncoming gloom, but maybe they shouldn’t? Maybe next time when we look outside the window, when it will get darker, and cloudier, we could say ‘hope is coming.’

Hope is coming.