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Welcome to my blog. This is a place where I think out loud, show you what I’m up to in the studio, share impressions of inspiring events or everyday moments that moved me. Some entries are carefully curated essays, others are just a few thoughts, sometimes written in English and sometimes in German.

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Thoughts Nora Kovats Thoughts Nora Kovats

My Otherbirthday

To say that those initial six months changed me is a gross understatement. The experience distilled my life in an instant, it filtered out a lot of bullshit. It is the single best thing that has ever happened to me in my life so far.

I think for my tenth anniversary it’s worth delving into the details of what this experience brought to life, got rid of, and how it has shaped my life for the better. Here are some of the thoughts I became aware of, as I dug deeper, and some of the learnings I took from it.

2020. Beginning of the Corona pandemic and first nationwide lockdown. Confronting cynicism within yourself is much harder than in the outside world; it creeps into your soul as humour, which is fantastic as a tool, but then transforms into something…

My Otherbirthday

Today I am celebrating my tenth otherbirthday. A day that’s been a silent private celebration up to now. It’s probably more important than my conception or my actual birthday, when I came into being, because out of this experience I am beginning to extract my purpose.

Written in English.

Today I am celebrating my tenth otherbirthday. A day that’s been a silent private celebration up to now. It’s probably more important than my conception or my actual birthday, when I came into being, because out of this experience I am beginning to extract my purpose. Despite its significance, I have never written about my otherbirthday in much detail publicly.

 To be honest, I never had the right words to write about it. I’m not sure I have them now, but the time feels appropriate to share something so personal. We don’t only need to allow more emotion into our worlds, we need to learn to hold our emotions, those of others, to open up, and allow ourselves to be changed and weathered by our circumstances. To me, those who have lost their ability to be moved in life are somehow calcified by bitterness and disappointment, and need a good rinse of joy, like my coffee machine every couple of months.

 On this day, ten years ago, I woke up in an ICU ward with no less than seven tubes stuck in my body. As I slowly drifted into consciousness, I became aware that I was incredibly thirsty; there was nothing but thirst, my world was thirst, the scratchiest sand-paper deepest desert thirst you can imagine, but I couldn’t make a single sound to cry out for water because there was a tube stuck down my throat as well.

 I was edging back into a kind of awareness of my surroundings, although my vision was blurry with morphine. Ever so slowly, fragments of memory returned. I was waking up from an eight hour shoulder surgery, where an expert team of doctors had cut out my entire left shoulder joint and part of my left humerus, along with a sizeable tumour that had been growing there. They had replaced the bone with an artificial titanium shoulder joint. As I learned later, the procedure had been a little more complicated than anticipated (which was difficult enough); three separate lung emboli had forced the doctors to resuscitate me repeatedly, while I was losing grotesque amounts of blood. It must have been a serious eight-hour battle for those doctors to keep me alive, and I’m grateful to have been unconscious.

 Before the operation, I had collected blood from seven different friends and family members who happened to share my blood type: Altogether 5,5 litres of that ultimate talisman, that mythical life force which I imagined flooding my body with their will-power, their strength, their tenacity, their complex love for me.

February 2011, the night of my twentieth birthday. A preciously fierce snapshot showing next to one of the kindest and most beautifully brittle souls I know, dear Louis.

February 2011, the night of my twentieth birthday. A preciously fierce snapshot showing next to one of the kindest and most beautifully brittle souls I know, dear Louis.

 About three months before, in November, just days after my last exam marking the end of my first year at university, I had been diagnosed with an aggressive, fast-growing type of bone cancer in my left shoulder joint and upper arm. An invasion of needles, medicines, poisons, facts, fears, fictions, hopes and strange odours followed. The boundaries between “good” and “bad”, and between “mine” and “not mine” dissolved quickly; the chemotherapy was good because it killed those rampant cells mercilessly, but it was also killing other fast-growing cells. “Cytotoxic,” it said on neon yellow stickers on each gelatinous bag dangling from my drip stand. I lost my hair. It didn’t matter. I lost my teen chubbiness, fifteen kilos in two months, which felt fantastic. I lost my appetite for food, my ability to concentrate, to work towards a larger goal. I lived day by day, eternally grateful for the neat slicing of time into mornings and afternoons and evenings, marked by sunrises and sunsets; a light-filled morning offers a new opportunity, every time. Was I fighting a grand fight? Was I fuelled by anger and a sort of combat-energy? Not really, no. It didn’t feel like fighting anything at all, simply because almost everything took an indescribable amount of effort. To concentrate on a book was an effort, to will myself to be interested in the interestingness of life, to watch a movie, to have a meaningful conversation. I was certainly not joy-less in that time, but filling my day with anything at all was exhausting. Everything was an act of rebellion.

 It was both a time of intense aloneness, because I was living through experiences I struggled to articulate to others, and also a time of the sincerest and most intimate companionship I had ever experienced. The fragility you inhabit in such a situation allows for the greatest intimacy imaginable. When you allow others to see you in that bare, broken state, that moment of trembling weakness transforms into sheer strength: When you mobilise yourself to get up from your hospital bed for a bathroom trip, drip stand in tow, and two metres across the room transform into an arduous journey, an adventure almost, stretched over long minutes, and you let someone bear witness to that struggle. I remember feeling a new sense of precious connectivity with my mother, coming back and being a child again, being cared for with so much love, after having spread my wings at university for a year.

 The operation to remove the by now grape-fruit-sized tumour was scheduled for the 11th of February. A period of convalescence followed, along with a second cluster of three rounds of chemotherapy. Since 2011, I have had another three shoulder surgeries, each improving on the previous model.

 To say that those initial six months changed me is a gross understatement. The experience distilled my life in an instant, it filtered out a lot of bullshit.

It is the single best thing that has ever happened to me in my life so far.

I think for my tenth anniversary it’s worth delving into the details of what this experience brought to life, got rid of, and how it has shaped my life for the better. Here are some of the thoughts I became aware of, as I dug deeper, and some of the learnings I took from it:

2011. A snapshot at my mother’s house, one of those peaceful afternoons, about two months post-op.

2011. A snapshot at my mother’s house, one of those peaceful afternoons, about two months post-op.

 1.     I learned about facing my fear of pain and of death.

 I believe our society (at least in predominantly Western cultures) has unlearned dealing with our own deaths well. We don’t speak about it, so the subject becomes unspeakable. We are all the more afraid of it because of its namelessness. Of course, losing someone isn’t made any less emotional if death is no longer euphemized; on the contrary. But one hopes that because the tempestuous force of death is acknowledged, one is perhaps a little better equipped to face the loss of loved ones and eventually one’s own departure.

Facing my own mortality in such a drastic way mostly killed my own fear of death. The idea of losing yourself, losing that conscious thinking inner voice, of dissolving into particles, can be absolutely terrifying. Something shifted there for me which is almost impossible to articulate. It is as if an impending sense of loneliness and lostness crystallized into a feeling of belonging and togetherness, ever so gently, a feeling of being caught, cradled, and embraced by the world, a feeling of porousness where I realize that the boundaries of my conscious self and my body might not be as real as I thought.

In my life now, I don’t evade the idea of dying, and it doesn’t make me uncomfortable anymore. Death, to me, now, will be like going home. It will happen eventually, maybe sooner or maybe later, when this journey has come to its end. And I hope that it will be okay.

For many, the fear of dying is tethered to the fear of pain. We tend to be very, very afraid of pain – with good reason from an evolutionary perspective, and we do all kinds of things to avoid pain. Yet, in my experience, our fear of pain is often much more magnified than the pain itself, once we brace ourselves.

There was pain too in my post-operation experience: The kind of incredible, breath-taking pain that really taught me how powerful my mind was, that became so much part of me that I had no idea where my body ended and the pain began. I remember the first night I was truly conscious after my operation, not being able to sleep at all, spending six hours inhaling waves of pain and releasing them out my back, making myself permeable, talking to the pain, being humbled by it and awed, imagining an endless ebb and flow, a sinus wave of pain, and eventually falling into a powerful trance where I was riding these waves triumphantly. I came to conclude that there is nothing more powerful than mastering pain; it removes most fears in life.

Childhood memories, escaping into inner worlds of infinite brightness. Watercolour and ink on paper.

Childhood memories, escaping into inner worlds of infinite brightness. Watercolour and ink on paper.

 2.     I learned how to unearth adolescent shame, and to let it go.

 What this experience really did was to eradicate my shame almost completely. To understand this, I had to delve a little deeper, further back into my growing up: My late childhood and early adolescence was profoundly marked by shame – a deep, irrational, shuddering sense of shame. Not even shame about things I did, although behaviour naturally adds another layer, but shame about the way I was. Like I had somehow become this never-good-enough, squishy disgusting thing that wasn’t worth the love and attention of others.

There is no rational explanation of this; it’s just the way I began to feel about myself around the age of 11 well until I was finishing school. I was ashamed of my un-slender body and my looks, I was ashamed of being too clumsy, too greedy, ashamed of any kind of desire I might have, ashamed of being unfashionable and ashamed of my love for fashion at the same time (secretly pouring over women’s magazines), I was ashamed of how little I knew about men and love, and at the same time afraid of being “improper” if I knew more. I was ashamed of bodily things like sneezes or teary emotional breakdowns in violin lessons, which originated from the shame of not having practised enough the week before. If someone complimented me, I would find a way of being ashamed too. It was a vicious spiral trap that sucked me into ever more ridiculous cycles of self-loathing and bouts of triumphant spitefulness. Mostly, I was also ashamed of my shame.

 I found solace in literature and my school work, which was interesting and offered countless alternative worlds, and which I could excel at. Above all, I found safety in my scintillating internal world, brought to life with watercolours and inks and paintbrushes, and populated by wild and colourful characters.

 After my experience of facing my mortality, my trapped-ness in that sense of shame shattered like a frozen lake bombarded with rocks. It’s difficult to untangle what exactly caused that change, but I believe it brought me to the brink of humanness, a place of utter helplessness and fragility, of inner and outer limits, a place of nakedness that does not stop at your skin level but penetrates even deeper, a place of bodily fluids and tubes in weird places and strange odours that had nothing to do with me, and at the same time, everything to do with me.

The thought of having something foreign growing within me left me in an ambivalent state where I was feeding friend and enemy cells alike with every bite I took, with every ounce of willpower I mustered. The enemy was undiscernible, it was part of me.

 I believe you probably have two different options in that situation.

Either you turn on your own body, you make the entirety of it your enemy, you hate yourself, you distance yourself, you feel contaminated or dirty or broken and eventually disassociate from yourself so much that you somehow give up on yourself.

Or, and this was my story, you embrace that badness in your body. Because I was able to believe – miraculously – that none of this was my fault, I was able to learn to tolerate and live with those “evil” cancerous cells. I felt a kind of empathy for my failing immune system and my own limits, my fragility and my humanity, for my breathlessness as I was climbing stairs and for my bouts of nausea. And every bit of creative work I could do became the biggest gift. By extension, I had to embrace my entire other shadow side too. I developed a strange sense of compassion for my younger self, I wanted to go back in time and hug that poor trembling-little-bird-version of my inner self and tell her how strong and beautiful she could become. And, I learned to accept limitations in others too.

 I think this attitude has made all the difference – in a much more impactful way than I could have guessed at the time. I’m not suggesting that you think away your cancer. But you have to start somewhere.

2015. A search for colour, for life, for small amulets stolen from then colourful internal paradise. Photograph of my LeafEater jewellery by Lydia Schröder.

2015. A search for colour, for life, for small amulets stolen from then colourful internal paradise. Photograph of my LeafEater jewellery by Lydia Schröder.

 3.     I learned to search for Eros.

 My desire to die well implies a desire for living well too, and this question has caused me to seek out the kind of life and the kind of relationships I want to pursue. Questions and answers around what it means to lead a meaningful life have presented themselves in turn, causing me to think, rethink and revise my life on a regular basis.

 Above all, I want my life to be in search of Eros – in its full, all-encompassing original meaning: life energy and vitality in all its facets. I want to feel with all my heart, I want to dance, to fill my world with vivid colour and smiles and tears; I want flowers, I want fantastic food, music, exquisite art, I want beautiful hand-crafted things to surround me, I want books filled with secret yearnings und shadowy fantasies, I want feasts and chocolate and red shoes, I want champagne and lacy underwear. I want to be in Nature and watch her petals unfurl and flourish and decay again with the seasons. I want to see achingly beautiful sunsets on my evening walks, I want to see my paintbrush dip and twirl, I want to watch my enamels melt in glorious mottled patterns. I want to write letters to people and capture a bit of that by-gone preciousness. I want gold, and delicious deep-sea-coloured gemstones and ancient myths in my life. I want to work hard and be tired at the end of my day, I want to sweat, and laugh until my sides hurt.

 With my partner, I get to pursue a precious romantic partnership where we both truly own our desire for each other: It’s a multi-faceted bouquet of love, made of stability but also adventure, of caring tenderness and wild passion, of freedom and security, of familiarity and surprise. Sexual desire is stripped of its poisonous shame and self-deprecation that trickled through the cultural cracks of my childhood, stealthily und unnamed, and instead, imbued with a sacred energy. In my ideal world, sex energy is transformed into a life force that becomes fuel for the creative and the magical in us, in me and in the way I live.

My pursuit of the good things in life has lead to a great enthusiasm for flavours and cooking. It’s another type of alchemy. Here, at university, one of the many meals I shared with Nicola Fouché - lover of herbs, maker of exquisite art books, illus…

My pursuit of the good things in life has lead to a great enthusiasm for flavours and cooking. It’s another type of alchemy. Here, at university, one of the many meals I shared with Nicola Fouché - lover of herbs, maker of exquisite art books, illustrator of stories, painter of emotions and grower of unconditional friendships.

 4.     I learned about the vital importance of relationships and friendships.

 This experience has really taught me the importance of relationships. Of giving, and above all, taking. Taking from others is incredibly difficult for me because somehow, I felt, it implied that I couldn’t do things myself, that I was weak, broken, insufficient, or pitiable. But – inevitably – life has taught me the opposite: The more I was able to open myself, reveal my humanity, and to accept help from others, the deeper our connection would grow. My experience broke down protective barriers and taught me to hold my own emotions and those of others much more gracefully. Still, emotions – and living in and with them – are quite messy, there is no such thing as “handling” them, although I believe we can always learn to experience our emotional lives in a richer, more nuanced way.

 I imagine our social selves like vast, glistening networks of possibilities, glued together by gooey emotion synapses, centres of shared experiences that touch us in a deeper, more archetypal way. Simple gestures can open the floodgates of emotional tenderness, strengthening these connections in a way that adds meaning to the existing and the doing we busy ourselves with here on earth.

I remember, shortly after being diagnosed with cancer, having my over-seas uncle on the phone. He asked me if I needed him to fly over to South Africa and sit by my side to hold an umbrella open above my bed to shield me. I find this powerful image of an imaginary protective umbrella so moving, startling almost, that my eyes well up at the thought every time. It’s just a fantasy, just words, but it’s a human connection that touched something deep and therefore eternal.

Since then, I have had the privilege of meeting many wonderful people all over the world, and often, these lessons of learning to show my humanness, of being unembarrassed about my shortcomings, of being unmasked, yet hopefully not brazenly impolite, have served me extremely well. Building relationships well is hard work; it’s never easy, and it’s differently defined for each individual person. But it is something I aspire to and therefore want to prioritise in my life.

2018, in my Berlin studio. For a time, not only my future in general was threatened, but also more specifically my future as a jewellery designer. I had to face the question if and how I could continue working with my hands in such an active, taxing…

2018, in my Berlin studio. For a time, not only my future in general was threatened, but also more specifically my future as a jewellery designer. I had to face the question if and how I could continue working with my hands in such an active, taxing way as is required for jewellery making. What if I survived but had to have my arm amputated? Of course, I questioned my career choice, but then doubled down pursuing it after my convalescence. Photograph by Roberto Ferraz.

5.     I learned to fight cynicism and meaninglessness wherever I encounter it (including in myself).

 Coming out of such an experience has truly taught me the value of meaning-making. Telling stories about ourselves, our lives, our environments and our fellow humans colours the world and justifies our existence. Telling stories shapes our own futures.

 A life stripped bare of meaning and made barren with cynical snarls and nihilistic shoulder shrugs is a poor, pale, fruitless life. Often, people who have trapped themselves in a place devoid of any deeper meaning tend to fall into a type of victimhood, where life happens to them, runs over them, crushes them. Things turn sour. Others are always the lucky ones. Sometimes, the only way to respond to such a dark world is to become caught up in an inner goldrush of egotistical consuming, taking, taking, taking, because none of it will matter anyway afterwards. Other times, a response is to give up on yourself completely and surrender all responsibility. This type of person, often without meaning any harm, can suck the light and laughter and optimism from their environment, until only bitterness, scorn, resentment, complaining and ultimately despair remain. That, to me, is true hell – not death or pain or loss or grief, but the idea of losing the ability to truly live.

 I want to strive to oppose this attitude wherever I find it, including in myself on sombre days, and to counter cynicism with a bright and unbridled enthusiasm for life.

The garden is both dark and light. Darkflock, a wearable fragment of that garden hand crafted from blackened sterling silver and freshwater pearls.

The garden is both dark and light. Darkflock, a wearable fragment of that garden hand crafted from blackened sterling silver and freshwater pearls.

6.     I learned o stand for the power to create meaning; to flavour life with love, light, compassion, kindness, and a quest for beauty. I learned that gardening is the ultimate metaphor for life. 

To be against something is only helpful if you have something else to replace it with. To tear down a structure is a destructive act. It would be much better to grow a garden around it, until the garden has all but swallowed the structure with its winding branches and ever-evolving floral meanderings.

 I see myself as a gardener of sorts; a grower of things. This reflects my view of myself and my life as a dynamic and ever-evolving process of becoming, and encompasses my interdisciplinary way of working, weaving together the fields of jewellery making, sculpture, watercolour illustration, drawing, writing and storytelling.

 Gardens can be metaphors for identities too, always growing, evolving, spilling over their boundaries. The image of the garden unites the desire to organize and discipline nature – that need for clean borders – with the equally human urge to be unconstrained, free, to break through boundaries.

 A garden needs tending, it needs constant attention, love and gentle curation. A garden isn’t killed if individual plants die or are cut back – on the contrary, new plants only have space to grow if old ones give way. A garden is never right or wrong, but it is simultaneously dark and light. It’s both the seen and the unseen – worlds of microbes, tiny insects and vast mycelial networks that escape our notice. In a garden, everything is connected to everything else: It’s a composition of giving and taking, an eternal cycle of birth and death, of new hopes and failed ideas, of losses and grieving and jubilant new arrivals.

 Being so acutely aware of how few days I have left to live (exactly 18 253 days if I’m lucky enough to turn eighty), I want to garden my life with an intense purpose, doing it fully and wholly with my entire being, and planting seeds of light, of joy, of surprise, of kindness and of beauty.

2020. A garden is born onto the page.

2020. A garden is born onto the page.

February 2021. A life awaits.

February 2021. A life awaits.

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Thoughts, Inspiring Travel Nora Kovats Thoughts, Inspiring Travel Nora Kovats

Finding Solitary Safe Spaces

I’ve chanced upon another safe space for my treasury. I collect them like other people collect film posters from the nineties or vintage toy cars. As far back as I remember, I’ve always had these safe spaces; as a child, they were small and cave-like, or up on my favourite climbing tree.

A magnolia tree, ancient walls, and a decorative Baroque bell tower.

A magnolia tree, ancient walls, and a decorative Baroque bell tower.

The stone archways are shady and pleasantly cool after my brisk walk in the sun. They seem to swallow all sound; the outside world is shut out completely except for the cooing of pigeons in the rafters and the call of a bird that might be a hawk high above. I’m breathing the quiet air of a square church courtyard with a perfect row of sturdy rough-stone pillars forming a cloister around a fairly simple garden. A white magnolia tree in full bloom and a statue of Mother Mary balancing on a sickle moon are at its centre.

 I’ve chanced upon another safe space for my treasury. I collect them like other people collect film posters from the nineties or vintage toy cars. As far back as I remember, I’ve always had these safe spaces; as a child, they were small and cave-like, or up on my favourite climbing tree. Now they tend to be wider, often on hills or high vantage points. In a world that requires so much of my energy and attention, I need them. These are spaces where I feel confident that I am enough, right now. For my own sanity, to be at peace in my body and in harmony with the world around me, I seek them out and visit them regularly. I can highly recommend this practice to all of you.

 This particular courtyard belongs to a small church in Hildesheim, perched on a hill, called St. Mauritius. According to findings from archaeological excavations, it might have been a pre-Christian place of worship before the area was colonized by the Franconian Empire. St. Mauritius’ ancient Romanesque walls, built between 1058 and 1072, were added onto the foundations of an even earlier chapel commissioned by Bishop Godehard, or Gotthard of Hildesheim, in 1024. This very chapel, under the walls of St Mauritius, is the spot where the famous bishop - one of the most significant medieval Catholic saints - chose to die as he felt the end of his life approaching in 1038.

The courtyard at St. Mauritius: a simple garden of box hedges and trees.

The courtyard at St. Mauritius: a simple garden of box hedges and trees.

 All of these historical layers I researched only later, at home. But back in the courtyard, I was struck by a sense of presence and peace and solitude that cocooned me in cold eternal stone, despite my current (future-oriented) insecurities, and rendered my fears ludicrous. I felt invited to linger, to sit, to sit with myself and my fears and my accomplishments and my strangeness and my love and my weaknesses.

 What makes a safe space safe? And I mean safe for yourself, not necessarily safe with regards to interacting with others (that’s a whole different story). I spent some time pondering this since that day on the hill at St. Mauritius. Of course, that depends on the country you are in, it depends on your personal needs and preferences, and on your intuition. But here’s what characterizes a safe space for me:

 

Energy

 The most important attribute of a safe space is its energy. Plainly put, it needs to feel right. This is quite difficult to articulate, and if I were a physicist I’d feel confident enough to explain the complex workings of magnetic fields and electric charges to you, how they build up and, most importantly, interact, around all kinds of things made up of particles – which is literally everything around us, including us. But since I’m not, I’m simply going to say that some places have invisible charges, which we can feel and measure but not really grasp or see. I think this is what gives a place a mood, a meditative friendliness or a menacing aura, a sense of being welcomed or not. I feel safe in places with energy fields that embrace me in my imagination, beckon me, invite me to stay and wait and listen to the world.


Solitude

 I feel safe in spaces where I can go alone to gather myself as a human and reassemble all the bits that have fallen into disarray. Even though I am a very social being, I recognize that my energy field is different when I am alone. Large groups of people are not conducive to the kind of contemplation you expect to find in a safe space – their energy fields would start interacting with each other, multiplying each other to create a sense of directed (at)tension. This might be wonderful at a musical concert, but less so when I want to be undisturbed.

 

Silence

 This does not mean no sounds at all, it means the right kind of sounds, pleasant and unobtrusive sounds that allow us to listen to our own thoughts. Sounds such as birdsong, distant music, bells clanging, laughter drifting on a breeze. Away from the clutter and bustle and noisy traffic of everyday life, away from profit-hungry business dealings and the clack-clack of high heels on marble and the sound of souls drowning their own guilt and shame in productivity. Perhaps we find sounds pleasant that wake a sense of nostalgia in our depths and remind us of a mythical lost Golden Age, when things were in harmony.

Trees are these magical beings outside of human time, to me.

Trees are these magical beings outside of human time, to me.

 Agelessness

 Quite often, safe spaces have an ageless, eternal feel to me, or at the very least ancient – marked by structures that have been there for generations like a thousand-year-old stone wall, or trees that might have been saplings at the time of the French Revolution (I had a tree measuring phase not too long ago, where I would measure the circumference of particularly large trees I came upon to calculate their age with a species-specific formula[1]). These structures are often something large to lean against, to lean into. Often, I find there is this sense of something so huge and incredibly ancient and unfathomable that I feel awed by it. Put in my spot as a speck in the universe, not meaningless, but just very, very tiny and rather insignificant. There is a sense of continuity, of stone walls having watched people giving birth and dying, loving and aching, over and over and over again. A feeling of solidity and stability in all this dynamic change. And a sense of belonging, despite my insignificance - a sense of owning my place in this long chain of events that is part of a larger web.

 

Peacefulness

 Above the silence and solitude, you need to be able to actually feel safe in a space like this. There needs to be a sense of peacefulness in its truest meaning, a deep knowledge and trust in the world that no-one can come here to harm you. As if a safe space like this is also sacred, to be left clean and unsullied by malicious thoughts, so awe-inspiring that even ill-minded beings sense its sanctity and enter a kind of truce with the world here. I need this space to be so safe enough for me to dig into my own shadows and bare my own faults to myself, a space where I can be vulnerable and weak – and I can only do that if I can let down my guard in a physical sense as well. It’s difficult to find a physical safe space in countries that are collectively traumatized by crime or war.

 

Rhythm

 Lastly, I often find that safe spaces have a kind of meditative rhythm or monotony about them, like a visual pattern of archways in regular intervals, or a sound like ocean waves crashing on rocks, the tugging of the wind at tall trees, an endless horizon, the flickering of a candle flame or open fire. We as humans have an affinity for pattern and rhythm, we like repetition because it creates a sense of harmony. It soothes us.

Ancient stones have a unique capacity to store history inside themselves, like sponges of layered meaning. There is something powerful about a road built by the Romans two millennia ago.

Ancient stones have a unique capacity to store history inside themselves, like sponges of layered meaning. There is something powerful about a road built by the Romans two millennia ago.

 Of course, these traits of what makes a safe space overlap and interweave and influence each other; it’s difficult to pick them apart or discuss them individually. Often, I don’t have time to go out and actually visit a physical safe space – as might be the case with all of you in different lockdown situations now. Obviously, it’s possible to recreate these spaces in your mind.

 I’ve had an imaginary safe space, my ultimate safest of all safe spaces, in my mind for years now. It’s a garden – sursprise!! – on top of an ancient stone tower, with a vast and spectacular view of an untamed and unfarmed circular horizon of hills. This place is a refuge, a source of energy, a space so intimate and private and sacred to me that I will never take anyone with me there in my process of imagining it. There are other imaginary gardens and spaces for social encounters. This is mine alone, in my very centre. A space where I can only reach on my own, which no-one could ever find, not if they could enter my mind, and not in all the parallel worlds of all universes, because I have to travel through myself to get there.

 You can have your own physical and imaginary safe spaces too. A space where you recharge your batteries, where you learn to breathe until that knot in the pit of your stomach slowly unclenches. A place outside of time or space, where you sit with your vices and virtues, where you get the energy to decide to make something meaningful out of your life.





All illustrations and photographs by Nora Kovats ©.

[1] This is a great site for European trees: https://www.baumportal.de/baumalter-schaetz-o-meter.

 

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