Today I met her again. The woman begging in my neighbourhood. 

I would most probably not notice her that much back home in our little Balkan country, where homeless people and professional beggars are sadly a very common sight. Children mutilated on purpose to make your heart skip a beat, old women sitting selling the first violets and frost flowers like in fairy tales at freezing temperatures… There is a limit to how many times someone's heart can break. Then comes apathy and a blind spot…

For a brief moment in time, I met my oldest brother. He made a series of beautiful portraits of me, sixteen years old back then, and just as he arrived into my life, he left again…

In one of those casual walks through our little city, my father announced to me that I had two older brothers. That moment in which the earth stops turning and the world disappears as you feel all the stars twinkle in your bloodstream, gave me an insight into new information that my mother wasn’t his first wife. She was the third. I was as well, the third child and not the one and only. I was the youngest one of three. The privileged one. That took a major adjusting of my lens and a river of questions… 

Last night, I saw her in a dream.

She smiled at me and invited me for an embrace.

No one else saw her standing next to me but they believed me as we stood in the circle having a pleasant chat.

Casually, they said I should enjoy her presence. It happens to them too sometimes they said. She comes and touches them with a moment of unthinkable love.

She is calm and she is seeing straight into me with the look in her eyes she always had. Joy and deep sadness in one expression, sparkling as if in feverish pain, kind and framed by long eyelashes.

She is smiling at me as the door of the time that lasts eternally opens for me and shows me that it is only our body that counts passing.

Nothing else ever does. Nothing else ever.

And that is a source of love and freedom which is just another word for nothing to lose.

Our family routine permitted us every year to spend more than a month at the seaside. One of my uncles had a beautiful house in a small place on the Adriatic Riviera and we would have the privilege of spontaneously melting into the scenery every summer.

It happened often enough to call It a habit that I would wake up before anyone else. I would love to wander in the garden in the silence of the morning. The sun would be still mellow but already strong enough to invite the little lizards to join me on the stairs and stone pavements. It would be my time to play with them while the rest of the family was still asleep. They would be so friendly to me and come into the palm of my hands so I could pet them on their head. They would close their eyes and seemingly smile. That connection and fascination with little lizards that started when I was two years old never left. I was known in the family as a lizard whisperer.

In a lifetime of playing the violin, the search for the right instrument, a 'partner in sound', is a quite demanding and sometimes nerve-wracking experience.

I remember the years I spent being unhappy about the type of sound that would come out of the various violins that passed through my hands. I was trying to make them sound different than what they were meant to and I didn’t have the talent to adapt or to make a compromise. Then, at some point, I got a beautiful violin to use, with the sound of butter, ultimately comfortable to touch. When the time came to return it, I was left with a feeling of tremendous loss.

Playing the violin for me was never a matter of sound only, but rather the physical feeling of what would be the dance and the limit where you touch the bottom of it. It is difficult to explain, but I never looked for the resonant, brilliant violinistic sound. I looked for something that even if you had no hearing you could feel. My ultimate goal was playing one note and make you deeply touched to tears.

About two years ago, I had a dream. I was driving on a highway to the airport in a faraway country on my way home. The road was blocked, as usual, overcrowded with cars and people going places, chasing time, passing too quickly, when a sight in the sky appeared. It was fast, it was bright and it had a tail of fire. As everyone stopped to get a better look, realising what was going on, there was an outburst of panic, followed by a sound you can only describe as an unquestionable power. People started running and screaming in panic. In all that cacophony of fright, I just had a thought that it would be such a silly thing to do, wasting this precious opportunity to understand and feel what exactly was happening. Look at the colours of this world, feel the vibrations of this life, stretch the last seconds and soak in this once in a lifetime experience of these unique moments before the unthinkable happens and it all turns blank…

After 23 years living in Holland, I have been reminded that I might share a story with the ones that we call refugees. Soul searching and trying to understand how all this makes any sense... good guys, bad guys, people that save you, perspective, and only questions left. Born a stranger, living as one, searching for a home but only finding a solution in adjusting the lens. All other ways lead to suffering…

As I am not high enough to reach the Petrof upright piano's keyboard, on which my father is searching for the combination of sounds that describe emotion and the story he wants to communicate to other people, I am as good as invisible. I am following the struggle and sound manifesting in his legs and toes while I stand still and wait for him to notice me and give me a moment of his attention. Interrupting him is not an option. Patience and bravery is the way to achieve my goal. Hopefully, he won’t get scared of me when he notices me, like the last time he did. I am too young to know that time is measured by a clock. As I am indulging in my own creative process of drawing on the floor, the tips of my colour pencils are the strokes of time. Now they are worn off and must be sharpened so I can go on not interrupting anybody again… 

This March, once again, we celebrated Woman’s Day. When I was a child, it was a sort of day where we made handy artwork for our mothers and gave a red flower to all our female teachers at school. Every year we listened to the stories about the brave Clara Zetkin and the political movement, which led us, women, to have the right to vote, work and be equal to men. All women at home, on the streets and most importantly at work, got a red carnation. The flower that represented the power of our ideology…

Time was never passing for me in a linear way, and my age did not follow the expected curve of life. In my small years, I was able to offer mature reactions as they were asked of me and I felt as if a grown-up person was living inside of me. Maybe this is just in general one of the qualities of time, but sometimes the feeling I have is as if living life backwards, going forward in time and age to be born again, while shedding more and more layers off the child within me.

From time to time, there are moments where I get overwhelmed by triggers that make me think about my roots, belonging and passions as driving forces towards that youthful eternity, moments like when someone dear passes away, moments in which I feel the reality is shifting… 

Ever since I was a small child, I liked sneaking away in my grandparents’ house into a not that much visited room full of unorganised bits and pieces of life and history. I loved to hide in there, connecting bits and pieces of objects, wondering where they came from, what they might have been used for, and who they belonged to in the past. It was a room full of stories, a lot of black and white photos, some torn in half, or with someone cut out, all over the drawers. I liked to try to find the missing pieces and put them together, wondering what could have happened to trigger that act of violence.

One of those fascinating things, inhabiting the drawers of the rarely visited room, were the red, round cartridges of a dangerous object hanging above my grandparents' bed, my grandfather’s hunting gun. 

When I emigrated to The Netherlands, I left my hometown in the middle of the night. It was not one of those nights when the streets were pitch dark and only the light of the moon was showing the silhouettes of the ghostly town. Not one of those nights you walked almost running, hoping you will soon find yourself in the safety of your home, passing the places known for hosting packs of street dogs or potential maniacs. At home, the candlelight would give a sense of comfort and warmth in the fascinating silence. Silence in which you don’t only experience the lack of sound, but also lack of vibrations. No waves of electricity. It is a silence in which your bones rest and which makes you whisper out of humble respect…

I am thinking, Love!

Remembering a long time ago dreamed dream… 

A seashore. A tiger. The most gorgeous mighty creature. Lying in the shallow water sunbathing. Me in his arms. The transparent water caressing our bodies.

The state of relaxation next to a source of power so clear that it is unquestionable. The power that can be fatal. The moment of trust. The kind of perfection possible only before the tipping point! The moment from which everything starts going backwards. Like a wave…

Nothing makes you start living your life like seeing a body lying in front of you without the person that inhabited it in it. Eyes from which the soul moved out. Motionless fragility decomposing in front of you.

My father was negotiating with the creator for a long time. Years were passing and he was proving again and again that he will win over death, over God. Operation after operation, less and less of his body was coming back home until one day several bags were hanging out of him to make it possible to have just a little more time. The last operation was experimental. No guarantee, no responsibilities. No care provided. The time he gained was spent in agonising pain, desperation and loneliness. I watched him having long silent conversations with God those days. His one and only bitter enemy...

When god was creating a life for me, for some reason, understandable only in a far future, he didn’t give me a burden of shame.

The feeling of privacy and shame was always a curious topic to me. A sense of protection built-in people from outside judgment and view. It can be associated with shyness and mistaken for integrity. For sure it is an easy way of dealing with the responsibility I thought. A responsibility to be the most honest version of oneself…

We called my paternal grandmother Ómama. That was a typical name for a grandmother in the families where both Hungarian and German languages were spoken. To me, she was a fascinating old woman, with steel character, always dressed in black, with a black scarf on her head, that carried in it the whole content of the bible. I was grateful to her stories which listened to with much curiosity and forever planted in me as an inspiration in a form of metaphorical wisdom.

Ómama was blessed with a very healthy long life, lived in a very peculiar way. 

Her life journey began at the end of the 19th century. Nobody ever really knew the exact year of her birth. It might have been 1892 or 1895. Being an orphan, a lot of questions stayed unanswered even to her… There was never really much fuss about that, because, back then the life of a person had so much less individual value… 

Of all the months of the year, as we count them, November is the one that calls me the most. Maybe it is something I inherited from my grandfather. The autumn blues… The calling of the ancestral wolf from the Carpathian Mountains.

They say that his beautiful dramatic tenor voice could be heard only on those dark, misty autumn hours. You could hear it through the village if you listened carefully, in the hours which don’t belong to the night, nor to the day, when even the dogs are asleep. In the cold, moist silence, a fiddle under his arm, on his way to the next wedding to enchant those celebrating with reckless melancholy. Joy and tragedy mirroring each other…

As I was brought up to believe that humans are the main protagonists in life, and animals are kept for their needs without a grain of doubt about that fact, I was an owner during my childhood, of a very sweet, depressed yellow canary bird in a cage, a couple of uncommunicative tiny fish in a round aquarium, and the sweetest turtle kidnapped from a seaside forest on the way back from one of our summer vacations.

I don’t remember what happened to the yellow bird, I remember that the fish ate each other, and the last golden one died of loneliness, and that my beloved turtle never woke up on one of the early spring days.

Encounters with the dogs which my grandparents kept in the village house were at the level of an annoyance since they were just kept to serve as a live alarm system, barking the whole day and night…

When God decided to challenge me, for some reason, understandable only in a far future, he introduced me to my husband on a mysterious November day. It was one of those days when life felt almost too vibrant to bare…

When God was creating a life for me, for some reason, understandable only in a far future, he gave me very slender and thin legs. Legs that almost don’t belong to the rest of my body, so it feels.

For a long time, the cult of being grounded created a lot of frustration for me. After years of practising yoga, trying and visualising, my thin legs still wouldn't stand the ground.

My bare feet feel uncomfortable touching soil, grass and this earth. The feeling of earth on which everything is built and everything grows on, is not given for me to walk on and enjoy it. It would make my soles filthy. It would root me into identity and limit my fluidity…