Dear Readers,
Thank you for popping to Postcards Without Stamps and for sharing in thoughts and experiences. I hope that you have had a wonderful Christmas break and that the New Year 2018 will be magical for you!
Sending you a multitude of good thoughts and loads of good energy!
With love,
Alicja
There was a time in my life that nothing could have made me jump out of bed more than the promise of reading a blog that one wonderful woman was writing on the other side of the globe. I have never read or seen anything that would create such a strong reaction in me and was really never as compelled by someone’s writing as much as I was then. The words were cutting right through to the heart and the mind, giving me the education that I needed and reaching me where I was in my life at the time. At times I gasped in awe, and totally puzzled, I stammered in disbelief: How… how on Earth does she know how to meet me there? How on Earth does she know that I need to read what I am reading to transform? At times I was so spooked that I honestly looked around my own room in search of surveillance cameras feeling oddly exposed but at the same time totally understood in someone else’s writing. Have you ever experienced anything similar? Have you ever felt like that? Strangely capable of seeing yourself in other people’s experiences?
When Autumn ends, when the golden colours disappear and the grey and dullness start to seep in, I crave for inspiration, but what is truer is that I crave to be assured that the beauty will return, that the sun will shine strong again – and this is perhaps what inspiration does to our internal landscapes – it’s the sun that lights up our grey surroundings. It’s the sun that lights up the whole of you and it may come from outside but I have now learnt that it may come from within too. It’s almost a decision, or a pact with oneself, that even if there is nothing that inspires me now I will walk in its way… I will walk where the light is.
The blog that inspired me so much was Inked in Colour. Go and visit the site.
“Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world.” Joel Barker
A couple of years ago I wouldn’t have even dreamt of writing this text. My English was bad and broken and I did not have much confidence in stringing sentences together. Now I am cherishing every single free hour that I can dedicate to creating the content for this blog and to communicating what has been happening in my ‘bowl of cherries’. My son is a great teacher when it comes to showing me that skills and habits emerge through repetition over time. And so does our confidence in having them. There is no other answer to solving many of life’s problems and completing what we have started than: Stick at it. Stick at it.
This blog is still a wonder space for me. My vision for it crystallizes slowly and I know that if I want to make it happen and contribute something meaningful, I ought to do some work on myself first. I notice this to be true in so many other areas of my life too. Even at home. In my marriage. If I spend my day proactively, our dinner conversations are much more lively. There is just more to say. More to share. All members of the family are enriched by individual member’s pursuits. Of course, we’re enriched through togetherness too. Just differently.
The photos that I have chosen for this post were taken a few weeks ago in my dad’s orchard in Poland. My dad is a great visionary. He makes things happen and tends to his projects very well. Throughout the summer he’s been waking up 4am every day to see to the orchard before the afternoon heatwave commences. This June and July I’ve been really admiring his commitment to helping the cherries be the best – it was so hot that he was watering them every day. Not giving in to the drought. He just knows that a vision can materialize through purposeful repetitions of our efforts.
It’s the only legitimate way to success.
I wish for this blog to be a very meaningful space. Space where you’ll find comfort and inspiration. Space where you find a bit of yourself too. I have spent quite a few years stuck in silence because of my underdeveloped language skills. Learning a foreign language is a great lesson in perseverance. It’s a great opportunity to cater for the visionary in you. There are so many fabulous speakers and writers around. They can be a great source of vision. It’s really empowering to be able to write and to say to the whole world what you are about. Your vision can slowly emerge in your voice and you can sing your song. Louder and Louder.
After a long period of silence, it’s nice to be loud.
You’ve got the words to change a nation
But you’re biting your tongue
You’ve spent a life time stuck in silence
Afraid you’ll say something wrong
If no one ever hears it how we gonna learn your song?
(…) We’re all wonderful, wonderful people
So when did we all get so fearful?
And now we’re finally finding our voices
Just take a chance, come help me sing this
I wanna sing, I wanna shout
I wanna scream ’til the words dry out…
~Emeli Sandé, Read All About It (The song is here)
I’ve gone a bit mad on measuring over the last few weeks. Measuring time, to be precise. The findings of my experiment did not surprise me but confirmed my assumption that at this particular moment in time I cannot do everything that ideally I would like to do.
Of course, I have again questioned the existence of this blog and the time that I spent recording and documenting my thoughts and experiences and I have realised that I am not documenting what I want to document and I am not writing the blog that I would like to write. Mainly because I haven’t developed an angle yet and because the things that I want to do just take much more time than I can realistically offer now. So I have decided I will be taking a longer break from writing and photographing this year so that I can invest my time and efforts into other things and develop a stronger understanding of what I want this blog to represent and how I want to run it.
Samuel Johnson declared once: “What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.”
This is year I am hoping to make a lot of effort offline so that you can find my writing pleasurable next year.
To a good year Friends!
Alicja
Although I do enjoy spending time online, when I spend far too much time it makes me feel numb. I don’t know what it is, maybe information overload, but there is something desensitizing about the Internet. Of course there are texts, articles and talks that enrich, entertain or provoke us in some manner, where their content stays and grows with us for weeks. However, while reading them it’s really easy to click on those other links that just take up time. I notice that the more I stay online, the more my body and my spirit suffers and I suspect that it’s partially because of this ‘extra’ time of mine that I allow the Internet to rob me of… the time that makes me more detached than it makes me feel connected.
Someone told me once that a good start for regaining balance is to say to yourself ‘I am here’. I am here [breathe]. I am here [look around]. I am here [notice how you feel]. I am here [notice your body]. I am here… Who am I? Where am I going? What have I stopped doing? What am I looking for?
‘I am here’ is for many a start of a prayer or meditation. It allows us to take stock of our physical and metaphysical reality. It brings us back to our homes and personal realities that the Internet so eagerly detaches us from.
I am here, writing these words for you while I contemplate the future of this blog, of its value to you, to me and to my family. Part of me feels that the “I am” in “I am here” wouldn’t be me without writing and photographing… but I also wonder who I would be or become if the time that I spend on writing and documenting life would be spent on other things? I guess that my house would be cleaner… or maybe it wouldn’t.
Postcards Without Stamps 