Once I knew a girl
A story written once reflecting over my past self and the relationship I have with her today. Maybe you would like to meet her too. It is a good way to introduce myself in this space, too.
Once I knew a girl from a European city quite near the mountains. Shy, dreamy but always quite stubborn and brave. She used to go for long mountain hikes with her father, which she really enjoyed. But beneath, she has been developing a sense of an obligation to prove her strength which would mean value.
Once a kid she has been claiming she would become a painter and a traveller. As she really enjoyed mountain tracks with a mud, the way her feet slowly and softly sank in a wet ground, she used to say, laughing, she would become a “mudologist”, too.
But slowly, she was turning her creative fire into an obligation to prove. She used her art to create a mask of someone who was never meant to exist ~ someone she believed was perfect. She kept travelling the world, learnt to spoke few foreign languages, studied a prestigious art degree and had the opinion of an original, for some maybe perfect person. But she didn’t even realised how much she had been detached from her deepest authenticity. How much suffering was present, because she had lost the keys to the secret garden of her sacred art. She kept being strong staying outside it, pursuing the freelance career of graphic design. It felt more safe, still keeping her image “pretty cool”.
And slowly her body started to speak its truth. Started with a brain fog and a sense of fatigue. The indications from doctors did not help and she was too busy with constructing her perfect life to pay more attention. Then happened an accident. When she was lying on the ground in the city centre, and was carried to the ambulance, she actually felt relieved. Because only in this state the immense pressure that has been gradually inhabiting her body could occur to her. But even that could not stop her, she continued to run. After 2 or 3 years it were the sleepless nights that started to began to rob her from the last resources of already fractured energy.
She felt like a zombie, her eyes dry like desert. Besides some hours of work a week she was not able to do hardly anything. The little girl from the past started to emerge. Wanting to take off the heavy hiking backpack. Longing for something that could never been for her before, the mother’s arms, that could sooth her anxiety like the rhythm of oceans waves. And desire led her to come from the high mountains to the shore. She has started to meet people and even animals that took her into the sea of feeling, that she even did not know that existed on her map. They learnt her how to swim in rivers of her emotions. So she could finally mother herself back to her home, which was her body.
And from that place, she was finally able to find the missing key to enter the garden of her creativity. The beginning was hard, as she did not know how to start, everything was dead dry and muddy, it was hard to envision anything. But as she liked the sensation of feet in a wet and pure ground, she kept digging. In herself, in her mind, in her past, her courage from conquering the mountains from the past helped her this time to go through the darkness, dirt and shadow. She excavated many believes and codes that had kept her running all her past and buried her creative fire.
And so now she is the painter, the traveller, the mudologist. She loves not only the visual but above all the TRUE beauty. Which she finds while exploring the oceans of embodied feeling and digging in the mud and dirt to reveal the hidden truths and lies that protect them… Where that will guide her next? The body will tell, which she can hear coming to the shore inside her daily. Taking in her hand a seashell and listening to the quiet voice of her body whispering the next step each day…