On:

I think it’s no news to any of my friends, that I would say I have too many things in my life and I refuse to give up any of them.

I’ve been home in Budapest since mid-October – started a part time job (the one I mentioned in my previous blogpost as one I probably didn’t get).
Now I have that 3 times a week and they just recently asked / offered a full time position (with a shift into a coordinator / project manager role). I’m not sure if I should go for a full time job or not…
Cause apart from that, I’m also a host at a co-working place which I really enjoy, it’s 2 shifts per week (4-5 hours/shift). By default it doesn’t pay, but grants me access to the space, the community though if I’m being honest I haven’t really been using those benefits all that much. But I take on extra shifts every so often and that pays, plus I adore the people I met there, it’s a really simple, low-pressure environment and I like that. I get to meet people I otherwise wouldn’t and I also got some work (art commission) through that gang.
Lately they half-seriously asked if I would be interested in actually working for them, running the place – funny enough that question came the same day when my workplace folks told me that they’d want me full time. Choices oh, choices.

Plus there’s the event organizing thing that’s been on my plate for awhile now and since I’m home I was trying to be more active – especially since so many people from the team became passive. If I had the will to pour more energy into that, I think we could start turning it into a business too, but right now, that’s pretty stagnant. It’s still experience on a few fields.

For the next few weeks I’m also helping out my drawing teacher on quite a few weekends, which is cool, cause otherwise I don’t really meet him, but the work itself doesn’t give me a lot of boost…
Aaand on top of that comes the fact, that I would be an artist or what. I usually don’t have a lot of mental capacity to learn and improve, though I really should be, cause my eye is so much better trained nowadays than my hands and it’s a really frustrating stage to be in. I’m not happy with the things I make most of the time, I see soooo many mistakes, but I’m not yet able to fix them. Gotta deal with that…

As for the job offers, I decided, that I wouldn’t make commitments before I come back from Bologna, since my mind was full of what I could potentially want to get out of the Bologna Children’s book fair. I got home yesterday.
The last thing I expected to happen during the event was the husband of my friend telling me that if I wanted to live in Portugal, I could work as a project manager at their company or if social media might interest me more, there’s room for that being a position too. 😀 But at least that’s an easy “no” at this moment. I’m settled in Hungary and for now I’m staying here. I need some stability, I’m finally starting to have my room set up well and I have a lot to learn in my current life. I’d only give this all up for a Good offer from something that is really appealing in both personal / career growth and money. I’m not running anywhere. I was wide open for options a couple of months ago,now at least the location is set, to make choices easier.

Anyway, after a week of whirlwind and runaround in Bologna I’m back to my little nest and I have no idea what I’m doing. I want to draw a hundred different things, I want to paint, I want to do nothing and everything. So many things are rushing around in my head that it’s hard to just start anything and stick to it.

I have a commission I should also be working on, but I couldn’t get in the mood of that piece the whole day, so I was messing around with other things…

But at least I started reworking my website, made progress with that. I’m more happy with the current setup even though there are still soooo many things that should be reworked and well, so many things I should be writing, scanning, editing, uploading, painting for it too.

One step at the time I guess.
For now, I’ll give myself an hour and put on some pain(t)ing music and get back to a weird, creepy unicorn painting I started yesterday evening.

Let’s see where that takes me…

On:

I think I always start writing posts with putting on some music (this time, it’s Radiohead) and starting typing anything that comes to mind… Writing doesn’t really start with what a post would start with, except for this one I guess -I don’t want to edit this out now for some reason. *shurgs*

I’m sitting in a cafe Nero in the southern part of London, sipping on my cappuchino, still savoring the last bites of my slice of lemon cake – the luxury of the week. It was not great.
I’m sitting beside a wall of carefully selected and arranged books. Whoever ordered these books, was fairly particular about what they wanted . books of similar size, with black cover and golden or silver typeface. For the color pop, you gotta have a few red books too though and then to make it look a little bit less forced, you can buy a couple of random ones, but make sure they are the same size. For I moment I wondered if they were real books at all… I’m one table apart from the wall so I won’t check – the question will be there, hanging in the air, unspoken, unexplored. Oh the great mysteries of life. 😀

I’ve been meaning to post something for way too long now. I have many ideas about well-constructed posts, with messages, advice, funny stories and many great things, but when I sit down and start to write, it becomes and endless rambling without any sort of structure. It’s more of a diary than a useful blog and a sloppy one from that category as well. Flow of consciousness. Random things….

Anyway, I decided that today I’ll not only get out of the house, but brink my laptop with me, find a cafe, sit down, start putting words after one another and here I am, doing so…

After spending around 2 month back home, I now came to the UK. I’m in the midway of a 2-week internship at an illustration agency, before I move on to meet up with some great friends and then with them, buzz around in Leeds for the Thought Bubble Festival. Good times!

The things I’m doing is a two week unpaid internship where I’m just helping out in the office doing whatever they need me to help out with. I get some travel and food costs covered at the end (hence my luxury day – yay!), so with that I can hopefully manage to get my 2-week time mostly free of cost. That is only possible, because of a friend that offered to host me who happens to live a 20 minute stroll away from the agency. I’m lucky in many ways and I feel incredibly grateful for that.

I haven’t made it to the city center this time either and I probably won’t do while I’m here. I have no reason to, unless some local friends want to meet up.
Funny how this is my 3rd time to London and I still barely did any of the touristy things. That’s just not how my travel works at the moment I guess. Nor what my wallet is prepared for…

But I totally act like a tourist in another sense – I walk around on my way to or from ‘work’ and I stare at the world around me with an awe and I take photos of pretty much every blade of grass. English houses amuse me so much. I love the bricks fences, the variation of doors, window types, the lush greenery in the front gardens. *Click* Photo taken of a patch of moss here *click* photo taken of cool-looking house number *click* a pretty flower *click* a porch… People on the street must think I’m totally crazy for stopping at every door and to be fair, they are probably right.

The weather has been really nice too, so I’ve been sketching outdoor every day since last Monday and I decided that I’ll keep this up for the rest of my time in town. I’m 6 drawings in and still happy with it. I’m not putting a lot of pressure on it – they are just 15-35 minute sketches with one marker (an a pencil undersketch if I feel like it) on a small, postcard sized paper. I think my marker will give up tomorrow though, so I’ll have to switch another one. I still don’t want to allow myself to buy art supplies so I’ll switch to one of the big permanent markers I have…

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What else is going on?

Well, a month before I came here, I applied for a job back home and they were supposed to get back to me at the end of August. I guess that means I’m not hired. In that case, the plan was, that after my trip to Poland, which wraps up after the first week of October, I was going to go home, find a place to stay, a job, and give myself half a year to breathe, build things, settle down a bit.

Yesterday it hit me that I’m not sure if that’s the right plan. Finding an affordable apartment back home is not easy. A random job I could probably find easily, but it probably wouldn’t be easy to put money together. Why do I want to go home?

Do I want to? It seemed like a good idea, but I’m not sure anymore. There are a couple of things that it would be worth being home for – there are many interesting, exciting things happening, projects building, friends getting closer, inspiring people popping up on my radar. I want to touch base with people, I want to nurture myself, learn new things and give myself the space to create. But these latter things I can do without settling home.

What made me start re-thinking this again was that I realized that if location didn’t really matter, than maybe I should be in a country that either pays me really well for a random job (to save up to buy myself flexible time afterwards), or has a good potential for appealing work opportunities or pays fine and allows me to gain language skills. Or somewhere where I Know, that Good, Inspiring friends are around. Surrounding myself with great people is still very high on the priority list – if any of such friends would say, let’s move together and support each other, building something up, I’d be very eager to make a move towards that…

On the top of the language list is spanish and french I think. I haven’t been to France yet though and I have no language base so I wouldn’t be confident in moving there straight away, cause I don’t have enought mone at hand I think I couldn’t find a job straight up…

Then would come portugues and italian. I’ve been meaning to really learn languages for so long now and I’ve made so little effort and progress on that field for a long time now it feels like I wasted something… I either need to make enough money to enroll in a course or put myself in a different language environment. Otherwise I won’t do it…

So yeah, there is that…

Where should I go? What should I do?

While pondering about these things I’m also trying to figure out my path with art. Next week, I’ll have a portfolio review with the manager of the agency I’m interning at, so yesterday I’ve been putting together a pdf with my images that I see as a potential fit for their company. I have a pile of questions swirling around in my head and I realised that I’m eager to hear what they think. That might help me pick a direction for now – maybe not a geographical one, but at least an artistic career path. We’ll see.

On:

There is this strange feeling when I change between places, groups of people or as I refer to them, different realities. Sometimes it’s exciting, sometimes draining, sometimes just odd and most of the time it goes completely unnoticed – just this familiar tingling sensation in the back of my mind. It depends on how familiar the environment is, I guess… the recent one is a bigger stretch, so I’m very glad that it worked out to have a week long ‘transition break’.

I was spending about a month and a half in a hostel in Zagreb which was a very interesting ride in and off itself. It was a fairly different type of hostel than what I’m used to, but it still had a pile of well-known scenarios so it felt both alien and familiar. Anyway, it was packed with experiences with intoxicated people,procrastination and casual travel-small talk. When I was talking about it I often said that it’s a roller-coaster realm for me – at certain times of the day I had a lot of fun, talking with interesting people, dancing, painting murals, and at other times I heard a voice in my head ‘What the hell am I doing here?’. It was crazyland. But I met many great people there (I believe I made a few friends) and I definitely have a pile of fun memories that I’ll carry with myself.  I wasn’t sad to leave the place, but I did wish I could have some of those people in my life a little longer.

I’ve been back home for a week – breathing out, catching up with a few friends, having some potential-work conversations and rearranging my travel gear for what comes next. Even within this ‘transition time’ period home, there are so many different environments – going for a coffee on a casual networking meetup with art friends is very different from having lunch with my brother, or grabbing a beer with a friend, popping in to my art school, having a chat with my Dad, finally having the chance to catch up online with friends who I haven’t had a proper conversation with for months. Different layers, tones, topics and level of honesty… With going through these usual rounds, in the familiar, but varied environments I kind of tuned back to myself I think, which I really needed. It would be great to also have the chance and the time to get into the creative and productive mode – painting and studying intensely for a set amount of time, but that shall come later…

Tomorrow I’m heading to the southern part of Czech Republic. I’m volunteering for a an event out in the nature with yoga/meditation every morning, workshops of movement, storytelling, crafts and many other things throughout the day and bonfire and music in the evening. A camp out event with no electricity and a ‘no drugs, no alcohol’ policy. I hope for a lot of stargazing, meaningful conversations and meeting inspiring and driven people that are leading interesting lives.

Soon enough, I’ll get to know what it actually is.
A week ago I felt frustrated, unwilling and lost – I was trying to come up with excuses so that I can get out of this deal, cause I was just exhausted and it is a bit outside my comfort zone (getting there with public transport from here seemed quite bothersome and being out in the nature with no urban comfort is not something I’ve done lately – I’m borrowing a yoga mat and a sleeping bag and it’s up to the organizer where I’ll sleep as I’m not bringing a tent).
But bit by bit I made the steps necessary and as things fell into place and I got some rest too, I am now excited to go. I’m still have concerns about discomforts I’m likely to face (oh hello allergies!), but I did everything I could to prepare and I’m going to jump in anyway. I love nature, I LOVE interesting people, I really miss sitting under a starry sky and staring into a fire until the dawn.

It will be great.

On:

First of all, happy St Patrick’s day to y’all! :))
Here’s some music for you that always fills me up with energy, makes me want to jump high and scream of enthusiasm.

 

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaahaw!

I should listen to this tomorrow morning too I guess.
Breathe in, breathe out… I set sail tomorrow – well to be more accurate, I fly away, but still. 🙂
I don’t know if this ever becomes easier… it’s still scary and just because I know that things will be alright it doesn’t mean that I don’t have this strange tension in my chest. Well, the trick is to do it anyway I guess.

So the current plan is to get to Bologna, where a friend is going to greet me at the airport (I’m looking forward to seeing his grinning face :))), then I find my host, who I found through Couchsurfing and who was kind enough to offer to host me for the full 2 weeks I intend to stay in Bologna.
I contacted a few other people who I met there (and stayed with) last year, so one of these days I should be grabbing a drink with them too, but we’ll see how that goes.

Then later comes the actual reason, I’m going to Italy, the Bologna Children’s book fair.
There I’m hoping to show around my portfolio, take notes on what publishers seem to like, dislike, get to know what publishers would I be a right fit for and hoping to gather contacts who I could submit my work to for getting illustration jobs.

After the event, there’ll be a few days of breathing time and then with a good friend, who is also coming to the event, we’ll fly to Cologne and then get to her place. She invited me to stay with her for April, so I’m crashing at her place for a few weeks, hoping that we can gather both our notes from the event and after the overwhelm have passed, we can make some plans on how to move forward with this quest. 🙂 Mutual support and butt-kicking is ought to happen. 😀 It could be also fun to come up with a project together, but we’ll see how things will pan out.

No exact plans are set for my stay in Germany, but in the meantime there are things in motion that are calling me to Ireland again (best thing to talk about on St Paddy’s, eh? :D) so if things go well, I’ll have to look at convenient flight options and find my way back there again. If that happens, I’ll be promptly looking for a job over there and hope for the best. Fingers crossed. 🙂

There are a few plans for the further future as well, but as last year had it as well, I have about 1-1,5 month worth of somewhat solid plan and then the rest will happen dependent on how things keep rolling. The control is not entirely in my hand and that’s fine – I move with the flow of things, see what comes up and what makes most sense at the time.

Thanks a lot for all the great people, friends and family, who support me and allow this to be possible! You are great! <3

Image result for hug

On:

Here we are again…
I’m going to set off 2 weeks from now and step into uncertainty. I have rough ideas about where I should be in the second half or March, probably in April, where would I want to be in the end of May and then the second half of September and early October.
If I go with these ideas, it seems like I’m not really sitting still again this year.

It’s still all too vague and doesn’t really include a clear plan about how on earth will I be making money, but just gotta keep going.
The good thing is, that lately there seem to be more and more opportunities arising. I didn’t manage to land a gig yet, but friends link me things they come across and I get connected to people who are looking for illustrations. Then some of these people actually contact me, which means my work seems to be ‘good enough’. Quoting a price is hard, but in the past few weeks I’ve been gaining some experience in that. No jobs so far, but I’m waiting to hear back on a couple of things. Hope one of them works out. It’d be good to kick in this freelancing thing.

I’m also veeeery slowly building a body of work that I hope to turn into something.
Last year before I was setting off I thought I’d make an exhibition when I come home from the works I did on the road.
I didn’t do that… Not yet anyway, but looking back on many of the travel sketches, I believe that to be fine. I made a fair amount of bad sketches…
There is a pile of works that I’m happy with or proud of, but I didn’t have the power, nor did I think it would be a good investment to organize an exhibition. Maybe a little bit later… I’m going to gather myself together. The thought that appeared in my head is that I’d probably organize something like that once I have a small space of my own, although I have no idea how does that has anything to do with this… I’m going to think about it further…

For now it’s prepwork for the first jump. This weekend I’m supposed to wrap up the portfolio I want to get printed for the Bologna Children’s book fair. I aim to send it off to be printed on Monday. We’ll see how that goes. Most of the material is done, but there’s quite some adjusting to be done and I want to finish a couple of more little paintings as well. We shall see. I’m not going to beat myself up if I push it back a day, but I want to get done with it as soon as possible, so I can move on with other things.

I have to put some of my stuff back in boxes, buy a couple of things for the road, tidy up my laptop, finish a painting for someone, meet quite a few people.
Just keep going.. one step after the other. You’ll get there, wherever that is.

On:

Hello 2018,

I still have no idea of what I’m doing, I’m still battling with crazy thoughts, indecisiveness, too many ideas, no commitment, fear of growing roots and all the other lovely things.

I’m still at home, less of a hermit these days – managed to catch up with some people and reach out to others – I’m trying to push myself to be productive as well as social.

So what comes next?
As usual, I’m juggling a few things, not committing 100% energy to anything (I’m not sure yet if that out of fear or if that’s just my wiring… we shall see), but at least now I sort of have a main focus. I booked a flight and arranged a host – I am going to Bologna again this year.
I’m going to attend the children’s book fair and I really hope that this time, being a bit more aware of how things work over there, I can perform a bit better. Right now the primary goal is to rework my portfolio for that event and I aim for contacting publishers with it before I get there.
Ideally I would be able to set up interviews with places that are interested in working with me and arrange the rest of my attendence around that. I don’t know what are my chances, but I’ll give it a go. If nothing works out, I can still just go, queue up for portfolio reviews, try to make connections.

This time I will hopefully be less overwhelmed to begin with – not having the pending issue of “where the hell do I sleep” that I had last year would be great. Fingers crossed.

The ticket I booked is one way only…

I don’t yet know if I’m staying longer, if I move on from there or come home. I contacted one person on Workaway to ask about their availability and also browsed around a bit for interesting projects in different parts of Europe as well as a few flight options. I don’t know what I’m up to yet…  Probably I should have a bit of “breathing time” after the event, organizing my notes, contacting the people I meet there, taking their advice and applying newfound knowledge, but doing so could be possible in a work-for-shelter environment as well if it’s the right one.

…

The other stable point of the year is that I want to go to Leeds again. I had such a blast at the Thought Bubble festival, that it is a MUST… I talked to a friend and we decided to apply together for a table to exhibit. In all honesty, I’m scared as hell.. I never did anything like that… But I applied and they shall decide if I’m a right fit for the event or not. If not, I’m going to be a jolly little volunteer again. And even if they accept it, I want to work on the setup and wrap up process – it was just too much fun not to do so… plus if I have to table, it will be great to take my mind off the stress of that with having things to do 😀
But I should know more about that sometime in February. Until then, that quest line is back in the shadows. 🙂 I’ll deal with it when it comes forward…

What else? Humm.. not sure.. I’m sketching, painting, getting in touch with fellow artists, try to poke both myself and other to stop overthinking everything, to dare to try and to start getting things done. It’s alright… we can do this! 🙂

Jump!

On:

 

Here I am, being back home, living mostly like a hermit – barely leaving the house. For now, I’m being quite okay with that to be honest.

I spend most of my time with being online, listening to music, while doing some remote work and painting. I feel like the days are rushing by incredibly fast, but that is the nature of things when the days are mostly uneventful.

There are things, plans and ideas swirling around as I’m catching up with people and we discuss the potentials of collaborating, living together or just shaping our lives in a way that it overlaps more. Nothing is set in stone, but many things seem to be slowly set in motion.

As many times before in my life, I feel like I’m vaguely presented options and everything comes down to if I’m willing to put energy in it or not – others don’t seem to push these things hard enough to set them in motion, but I know that if I dedicated my energy to it it could be something awesome. Now comes all the measuring of everything. How can I put my life together so that everything I want to fold into it, has it’s space?

The most frequent question I get from people is along the lines of ‘now what?’.

Of course. I’m still not sure.

Truth to be told, I can’t bear the thought of the hassle that finding an apartment would be. Figuring out where do I want to live for the next *insert long term stay duration* feels scarier than going back to a state of living where I constantly had to figure out my daily whereabouts. Having the life I had for most of the year was exhausting, but now those challenges are the familiar ones – growing roots is not something I’m used to doing. Siging rental contracts, moving and trying to build up my life is not something I feel ready for… Being on the road showed me that there is an amazing amount of things “out there” that I could be doing, learning, connecting with and being free to explore those options is amazing. It is extremely hard, especially since this year I’ve been living off my bank account, now it’d be time to earn money on the go as well and ideally not just get by but add to my savings. I can’t imagine it to be easy, but it would probably be worth it.

I feel the longing to have basecamp for myself and my mental image of an ideal home is slowly shaping in the back of my head, but it doesn’t have a weight to it yet, I don’t know if that’s due anytime soon…

There’s a conclusion I arrived to in the past few weeks – while this year was all about the ‘trust fall’ (with heart and mind open, I leaned back and the world caught me), next year I want to take an actual ‘leap of faith’. Not just allowing myself to fall and hoping for the wind, the flow to carry me, but taking action, aiming for something and gathering my strenght to go for it.

There are many things I could go for, many things I’m scared of, but I know they’d work…

Time to take action – Jump!

On:

So here it is… the first Week I started back home.

I got back home on Wednesday (which was Day 245 of the ‘living out of a backpack’ quest)

Many people asked how it is being back and most of the time my answer is, it’s odd.
It truly is… but the really weird thing is how it is completely normal.
Last week I was walking on the seaside in a sunny autumn day in Barcelona and yesterday I was walking around the neighborhood to stroll while it’s snowing, and it feels absolutely natural. Sure the most useful skillset I had during the trip was adjusting to the new scenes of my life very quickly, but still…
There are sooo many things that are different in this daily reality from the one I had on the go for most of the year and switching back to this makes the whole trip feel like a dream already. This is the 5th day since I’m back and it already feel like it was a long time ago… or rather, it wasn’t even true. THAT is weird.

Anyway… here I am now. Tomorrow I’ll be catching up with friends from here and reconnecting with many beloved people – I’m sure that meeting them will make me more grounded and I’ll be in the state of overflowing love just as much as I was on my farewell party. I’m grinning already just from the thought of hugging these folks again.
I’ve been a hermit in the past few days, just breathing, working on things, painting, reading, and reconnecting with people from other places over the web and trying to gather some of my ideas on the ‘now what’. I know that soon enough I’ll have to answer that question for myself. Others have started asking me that already and I’ve been asking myself as well… I have many ideas, many dream-bits, but no plans. There are a few things I’d need to know more about before I can pick a path. I want to talk to people and explore ideas further before I commit to anything.
I love the freedom of choice, but, man, when I have to make that choice I realize how much I struggle with making decisions. Haha 😀  Ohwell…

For now, one of my quests is to make sure that as I go on with my daily life, I identify the habits that are connected to this place, this reality. Habits that I managed to change when I was at other places, surrounded with different people. I catch myself falling back to bad habits and as I realize that I try to make a conscious effort to hold on to new ones or at least making a mental note to bring the new ones to this rhythm as well later on if I can.
There were some precious little rituals in my life that I grew to like a lot and there were things, that I experienced through living with certain people, things that I want to bring into the life I build for myself. For example having a daily routine that includes quiet time, eating better, going outside more even when I don’t have a “reason” to, approaching communication differently, develop a better sense of listening and building relationships in which I also feel heard.

The logistics of life will have to be put together as well of course – income, home and such quests, do I stay at home, do I look for opportunities elsewhere? Do I look for a job or do I try to build myself one? Do I look for an apartment here or in some other country? Do I want to set out travelling again? If so, would I do it the same way?  Many questions that I honestly don’t know the answer to yet…

Let’s just breathe and process things for another week, shall we?

On:

After weeks of  thinking and internal battles, I allowed myself to make the decision of changing plans and going home.

Yesterday I’ve felt particularly exhausted. As I was looking at flight ticket possibilities as I was still considering going with my original plan of going to London, but I realized that if I had the chance to book a direct flight from Palma to Budapest, I would book it without hesitation. If this is the case, why am I torturing myself with coming up with all the great excuses to still make it to London? I could list all the great reasons on why to do it, I know I could have greatly benefited from it, but the truth is I just couldn’t bare the thought of having to deal with an extra flight and the challenge of having to figure out my accomodation in London. Every inch of me was against having to pack my backpack one additional time. As I acknowledged that frustration I allowed myself to let the opportunities of that extra trip go and booked my way to get home. I am sure that if I would have pushed myself to do it, I could have come out just as happy with my decision, but I am content. Everybody who I talked to told me to follow my gut as I’ve been doing so before, so I did. It’s time to go home and breathe a bit.

Today, after getting over with the ‘stress’ of making a decision, finally having that off my chest, and after a long good night sleep it just feels weird.
It is really odd to know that a week and a half from now, I’ll be home. It’ll be cold and dark, I will unpack my backpack, Iwill not have to figure out my immediate future, and will not have my life depend on the kindness of strangers. I will be back in my known and familiar environment and soon enough I’ll face the challenge of how not to slip back into previous habits that were not at all good for me… That won’t be simple.
After a few days of gathering my thoughts I will catch up with many people and then will be probably get caught up in the craze of the holiday season, and in the meantime I will have the daunting pressure of having to figure out what comes next. Oh well…
That’s a challenge for 2 weeks from now.

Now I’m spending the last few days in Mallorca – tomorrow is my last full day, I’ll fly off on Wednesday (I’m heading to Barcelona for a week before I go home.)
I have a pile of work I owe to people, so today I tried to wrap most of that up, but I didn’t manage to get as much done as I wanted to, partly because some back-and-forth with who I was working for, made me have to scrap a few hours worth of work, but well… that’s life.
I’m playing ‘catch up’ with my tasks, and doing my best to learn the lessons that brings.
I have to learn how to set my own schedule, I’m trying to learn how to have a healthy pace of work, how to get as much done as I can, not get distracted, not hop around with tasks if I can, keep a clear list of priorities and do all this in a way that allows me to have a well-rounded day as well. It’s an interesting challenge. I’m getting used to monitoring my work hours – something, I never really had to do before but something that is definitely very helpful if I want to have a career as a freelancer.
While I’ve been working as a workawayer at different places I always adjusted to the daily pace of my hosts. As I’m travelling around this is the case no matter where I stay – adjusting to whoever is kind enough to host me – but I should slowly start building an effective pace of my own. Due to my randomness and my job before I never really had a schedule of life, which came in handy since during my trip I didn’t feel like I broke out of my natural cycle of habits (I didn’t have them), but now it’s soon time to build that up to boost my productivity.
Well, let’s see what the next chapter is about… 🙂

On:

Heeelllo World!

Sooo, here I am 10th November, day 226, I’m currently in a small town, called Sencelles – still Mallorca.

Right now I’m staying at the place of a very nice German artist and trying to help her out with various thing in exchange for staying at her home and sharing meals. She is a very kind soul, her house is amazing, her cats are adorable – I’m at a good place again, as that tends to be the case…

In my previous post I mentioned that I was soon on my way to my next host, a workawayer with whom I was gonna work on Etsy and online shops in general. That worked out really well and even though there were a couple of challenging moments it came to be that after the originally set 9 days or so I managed to stay there a bit longer, then take a couple of days off to wander back to Palma, return to him again for a week and now I’m going to head back there on Sunday.
That guy is really amazing, I enjoy our conversations a lot, I love his place, the calm and quiet of that home, the rhythm of his days, his bookshelf- I just want to read pretty much every book he has. 😀 I already finished 3 and lately started the 4th one, but damn, I could live off that bookshelf for a year, even though it’s not a wall-wide thing…

The funny bit is the roller-coaster ride that was leading up to me still being here. Even before I went to his place, I felt like I would want to stay longer  (I didn’t know why exactly, although I conjured explanations of course, I’m good at that), but I seemed to hit a wall, it seemed not to be possible. So there I was with a person with whom we were talking about the flow of things, meditation, the purpose of life, the path one’s supposed to walk and the hints, signs and brick walls the ‘Universe’ might throw your way – and as I was trying to plan my way off the island (I did not want to leave but it seemed like I have to) I ran into walls constantly. For a very long time certain websites simply wouldn’t load for me even though they worked perfectly for my friends and seemingly to everyone else on the internet… so I got a lesson of stay put, be present, be patient, let things go, let it unfold… At times I was very frustrated, after every random ‘lifelesson’ bit I would feel like a kid, shaking her fist at the skies, asking ‘okay, was this  the lesson? Can you let me off the hook now?’ or saying ‘C’mon, it’s not up to me, what am I supposed to do?’. Some moments I was really frustrated, some moments I had this deep trust that something will happen… something always would happen. If the control has been taken out of my hands, I can only wait with openness so when the solution arises I’m there. Slowly but surely, bit by bit things shifted, changedand formed – I stayed around for an extra week and a half, I was given the chance to book my flight to get off the island, but then things would become weird again and I was getting the hint that I should still stay around – and I wanted to as well… so here I was, with the desire to stay, the chance not being given, and the ‘universe’ playing along my side, simply not allowing me to look at flights or to check in to my flight…
As soon as we would agree that I might be able to stick around for another week (but I’d have to sort out a gap-week inbetween), the websites I was seemingly blocked from, started magically work again… thank you World. 😀 But even so, just leaving that small town when I was going to seemed to run into challenges – we wanted to drive to the trainstation in the next town so that I can get to Palma and low and behold, EVERY road was closed for just that time when we were trying to get there. Bicycle race… I couldn’t stop laughing in the car. We would wander off to small roads only to find every possible solution to be blocked for the next 2 hours…
I’m not in a storytelling mode, so I’m not giving you a great insight on how this whole thing felt, but maybe one day in another format, or over a beer. :))
Anyway, at some point I just said it out loud multiple times and I wrote it down as well – if I come across a nice place by the next day, that could host me  for the coming week I forget about my booked flight and I’ll take his offer for staying for one more week and then.. well then we’ll see what happens.
Next day, my life was sorted out for the coming 2 weeks, my host offered to pay the price of the lost flight, and well… here I am, still in Mallorca.

The current idea is that after I wrap up the next work-session with him I’d be flying off to Barcelona for a week, and then from there to London for the illustration fair, and then home, but if I’m completely honest with myself I really have no idea about what’s going on now… I’m completely open to trashing all those plans, let’s see what the world holds for me. I didn’t dare to book any flights yet.

 

So anyway, what I hope I’m learning about lately is being present. Also a lot about honest and open communication. Clear, to-the-bone-honest, but non-judgemental communication. Maneuvering various kinds of conversations in a way that everybody gets to express their feelings, needs and preferences without creating emotional baggage. There is a lot of room for improvement, but just by bringing it to the foreground of my mind and reading about it helped a lot already.
Book recommendation:  Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life

Another thing that was going on is Inktober, and people who follow me on social media probably ran into many posts with ink drawings – many plein air sketches. It was challenging at times, but then looking back it feels really great that I had such a productive month in October, finishing many drawings even if they were not huge, very creative pieces, but they are up to a level of finish, they are not just a pile of loose sketches. I should really try to build/keep the habit of getting things done day after day, cause apparently I am capable of doing so if I commit to it. There were a few days when I fell off schedule, there were about 2 days when I did not draw with ink and I think about 2 more when I didn’t finish the started pieces on the given day but I did make enough drawings for the days of the month plus I’ve made watercolor sketches as well. Also there was a day when I was really unhappy with my original sketch, so I just started over and made a new one from scratch. This is the album on my Fb page where I gathered the images that were dedicated to it.

Also I don’t think I’ve mentioned it over here, so shameless self-marketing time – I’ve opened a shop on society6 with a few designs, so Art prints, notebooks, T-shirts and such are available over there with a few of my artworks. There is many more I need to work on, and based on my newly found knowledge from the recent tasks I had there is an insane amount of things I’d need to do to be playing this online shop game properly, but for now it’s good. Designs are made available, and I’ve seen that they print well – the rest is marketing magic that I have to create headspace for. That is a quest for later.

FeleriSketches - deer - T-shirt
Head over to my shop to check out other designs (click on the image)

So anyway, I’m still here, still happy, still learning and I keep crossing path with amazing people.
I’m grateful for all the help and support of all the incredible people who are around throughout this trust-fall experiment of mine.

I love the whole world – boom de yada :))