A wiser choice to make

A wiser choice to make

I travelled to my country of origin for a funeral. A family member died.

An ice-cube formed inside me and there is no one to argue with about this turn of events.

And the screaming about it also feels wrong at this stage.

But I feel I need to talk about it as otherwise my internal timeline or calendar will start ripping and I would have gaps in memory rather than the lived experience so let me talk about it in a manner that is as shallow and as deep as I possibly can at this stage.

I do not want to have memory losses.

I want to own my timeline.

So let me speak…

Ironically, my daughter is sitting right next to me right now and is watching You Tube shorts on endangered animals. These losses we can still prevent.

I flew from Birmingham to Warsaw Modlin in Poland. A friend accommodated me, gave me a warm meal and a warm breakfast, took me to a florist in the morning and dropped me to the little village near Warsaw where the funeral took place and where my family was waiting.

The night before the funeral I wrote a message to the President of Warsaw enumerating all the good things my auntie and her husband did for the city of Warsaw hoping that a bench with a plaque on with their surname would never make her and her husband vanish from memory and then I deleted the message remembering that my aunty liked being a private person, so she would probably not appreciate me butting in in that way. She liked the Moon more than park benches and I do not quite know how to honour her interest in it yet.

Grief hardly ever makes us holy. We know that. It pulls our teeth out making us restless and faithless as denial wraps around a belief like a frost around an unsealed shoe. It is trying to be pally where honesty would be more appropriate: I have taken from you your beloved and I am not willing to return them to you in any other form than a chain of complex emotions that you would need to learn to handle by not acknowledging that you do have a heart.

Life is giving me a workshop in distress tolerance.

Cheers.

Thank you.

It seems to be my staple at the moment.

My kid had altercation with another student on a bus. Now, I am taking him to school in the morning. The daily early morning car chat is what we both need, it seems to me. The teenage world is not easy to enter or navigate. I feel at times I do not have the necessary graces to guide my son through it.

I decided to be a friend to myself though and I signed up for a short online course in Creative Writing run by Falmouth University. It is delivered by Jamie Popowich and I feel very supported by his delivery and demeanor so far. I like his energy. I know that this is me being a good friend to myself and I also know that being a very good friend would mean doing filming or cinematography course too but I have not figured out the way forward with this yet. Things are not getting any cheaper year by year and I am not getting any younger so I figured that it is the right time for me to cover that gap in learning. I did my first degree in English, Spanish and American Studies but I always felt very deprived of the creative writing edge that would come with Creative Writing degree.

But maybe everything gives us an edge. Just the fact of being on the edge of our own life experiences makes our edge uniquely edgy.

Turning sour now.

Too much salt.

It’s been a week too hard to handle, in all honesty. And I wish I could cry but my left eye duct is blocked so even that in not possible now.

I’m turning sour now, where caring would be a wiser choice to make.

Stay or move in grace.

Lots of love, A.

Below Grief and Anger, drawn by me.

Cloud formations

forever stretched by paper

cloudy

imprecise

care without a blank space

is neither supreme nor wise

Text and photographs: Alicja Pyszka-Franceschini, 2026

Welcome back after holiday, Darlings. How was your Summer?

Ordinary technological cosy homelife

‘Mum, when I was smaller I was so happy playing with my brother but then the computer came and everything changed.’ My daughter complained at the dinner table.

Complaint noted. It takes time and effort to redress issues and create healthy love patterns, doesn’t it? The modern mum is a facilitator of those patterns and a pioneer too as she deals with issues unknown to her own mother and so there are no recipe books on this yet. How well do you think we are all doing here in this regard? Where could we find solutions?

Walking is probably the most natural facilitator for conversations and being together. I’d like to do a series of photographic posts on the importance of walking for the individual and for family life but then I am afraid that the series will finish like this (see the photo below) and I will not address the problem by blogging about it. :) I often wonder what problems can we realistically solve by blogging about them and I am not trying to criticize myself for blogging. This I think would be somewhat cruel to the part in me that likes to reach out to people in that manner but a lonely writer in an AI world feels more and more abandoned and threatened by the things that technology grabs from them without perceived and/or real returns.

I’ll leave the topic open as I feel the discussion is endless.

Till next time. x

When ego bursts…

(...)
When ego bursts
It makes space
For the other...

Alicja Pyszka-Franceschini, Autumn 2024

From the anthology On Immaturity (not yet published) by Alicja Pyszka-Franceschini
Photograph: Alicja Pyszka-Franceschini, Ambergate, The Birches, Derbyshire, UK

Thankful Tuesday: Being flamboyant about my gratitudes

Irrespective if you are someone flamboyant about your gratitudes or modest in expressing them, Tuesdays seem to be the right day to create a list of blessings and positive experiences. To ward off the anxieties that might be resurfacing midweek and to keep our mind calm and to make our heart palpitate gladly.

The Life with The Crew started The Thankful Tuesdays. I want to cultivate this blogging custom. I believe it serves us all well. Do you want to join in?

Here I go with mine. Today I am grateful for:

– the snow, the snow, the snow… that did not melt too quickly and the fox that appeared in our garden just after midday

– my friend’s successful knee operation and his quick recovery and our chat over a cup of coffee and his sharing of insights and wisdom from life

– for a very considerate friend who dropped Castor oil at my doorstep to improve blood circulation in the shoulders

– a husband who made a lovely Mediterranean style lentil dish with leek and green pumpkin and parsley (on the blog soon)

– translators who translate children’s stories and allow us to move between languages but within the same storytelling sphere: Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson, La Strega Rosella – translated by the incredbly skilled Laura Pelaschiar, and the Polish version entitled ‘Miejsce na Miotle’ by translated by the excellent Michał Rusinek

– Jodie Wilson from Practising Simplicity for encouraging Yoga as a gentle exercise for busy lives, very useful for frozen shoulders too and any problems with posture that result from attached monkeys to our hips (be it kids or cameras) and also for her indirect encouragement to contact blog readers

– for Adam Phillips’ book On Getting Better and his ability to put into words what we tend to hide from ourselves, i.e. that our transferences and regressions intensify with our resistance :)

– for our daughter who said today that she wants to do her homework on her own and allowed me to load the dishwasher in the meantime

– for the recent Outdoor Photography Magazine and the glorious portfolio review by Massimo Leotardi and their reminder that we are soon going into a National Tree Week that is uniting all the tree lovers in the UK (see treecouncil.org.uk). This is one of our favourite magazines at home and we like to have a conversation over the photographs in the morning either by exiling tensions over the landscape photographs or by giggling and wowing over aquatic creatures or mice hiding in a hollow apple

– our morning routine that has just greatly improved due to a managerial trick, i.e. a checklist with all that needs to be taken to schools. Seriously, we need it. Our working memory is only capable of remembering six items at once. Everything else is an excess. We also use a simple linguistic change of words. Instead of saying ‘Speed up’, we say ‘Focus on buttoning up your shirt’, etc. So we focus on the actual activity that we want the children to complete and use the verb ‘focus on’. In that way, the morning routine is smoother for all of us and we have nicer starts to the day.

– for a glorious Journey Through Time and Light event at Crich Tramway Village that has put us in a festive mood and brought a huge anticipation of joy for the coming Christmas season

– for finding ways of preparing our son for his weekly Polish dictation tests at his Saturday School.. gosh this was a hard nut to crack..

What would you put on your list?