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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Sleep always played an important role in my life. I had all kinds of relationships with Morpheus. From when I was a small child, I had a strong sense that there is a parallel world I live in during the time of sleep. Awaking is a form of going back to sleep somewhere else… That's why my waking process is long every morning. I need time to adjust to the earthly frequency of living and taking my body with me into a new day...