Thoughts of the Moment! First Public Share!

I Wanted to Write Something Profound and All-Encompassing for my First Entry ... and Wrote This Instead!

A Thought or Two of the Moment!

It’s 3:35 A.M. and I just want to sleep! I haven’t for the last two nights – and this has become abnormal for me lately; after more than two decades of unbelievable, extreme not just difficulty sleeping but near-complete inability to sleep, or just being good at staying up for days or weeks at a time without trying … I am cured! Ha ha! At least seemingly so, at least largely so! Why? Because of my Ukrainian lessons! Because my BRAIN has something to do – instead of being told to turn off, to stop thinking, to not think, to go by intuition, to not worry, to give it over to God, etc., I now have someone drilling me, quizzing me, testing me, teaching me – and very much expecting and even requiring me to think! It’s the first time in over two decades that I have been in such a situation …. All the healing by which I mean ‘healing’ has hurt me so much! It’s all in a context; that context is cultural. That context is cultural is denied and that is un-be-lieve-able! Now that I am in touch with my culture that I didn’t know I had – I am alive! If you’ve never suffered from not knowing your cultural or ancestral or familial background, then wow are you lucky! I’d say that means most of the world is largely lucky … in ways in which I never was and now, it’s only because of the invasion of Ukraine that I am finally getting to know about this heretofore unknown to me gem that is explaining my life to me! When I see a video of a solider dancing, I think it looks just like Israel! I show it to my mom and she says she thought it was in Israel! She says ‘That’s because we all come from there!’ Maybe if you’re outside the situation you – oh so painfully to me and that’s because it’s probably quite derisive on your part! – think it’s obvious! If so, good for you! No need to gloat or brag about it! I don’t need to hear it, thank you very much! I’m just so relieved to have this connection now …. It’s weird to think I could call myself ¼ Ukrainian all of a sudden when my grandmother who was born there – or in that area, anyway! – called herself Russian and me Russian and I’ve been told all my life I’m 100% Russian, but that’s because when my grandmother was born and was growing up there it was a part of the USSR, and her family apparently spoke Russian and the truth is I don’t suppose I will ever fully understand or be able to understand it but I am so much closer now! I always tried to connect with my heritage – my Russian heritage – by doing Russian types of things such as watching Russian television shows, for instance … but Ukrainian things feel so much closer to home for me and I never knew they would or could because I don’t think I even knew or at least remembered the name of this country until the invasion! It was only when it became important to the newscasters that I could ‘get’ it, that I could finally grasp it and hone in and pay attention – and what a gem I’ve found! It was actually when I was looking for some new Russian cartoon to watch that I found instead … news of the invasion, and that became more interesting to me than anything I had seen in any media outlet since my arrival in (decidedly NOT ‘the!’) U.S.A. forty years – that is to say four decades previous …. Oh, the journey it has been for me lately! The Cyrillic is finally sticking this time – and my teacher is really the best ever! His name is Kyrill; I lost my singing teacher Jenessa from Canada the same day for some reason but it is worth it, although this loss has been ex-treme-ly pain-ful for me … ! OUCH! I finally went on a road trip two weeks ago because I could not just sit around anymore, I was in SO much PAIN … ! Ouch! On the way back I put one song – ‘Morituri te Solutant’/ ‘Those Who Are About to Die Salute You’ – on repeat for hours, hoping to learn it by the time I got home (I didn’t. I was way too tired for that, to be able to absorb it – and way too distracted, too …. ), and calling it ‘my getting over Jenessa’ song …. Well, it’s a great song! I’m glad I learned it! I also learned a Ukrainian song – or at least the first verse of it, that is! – called ‘Oy u Luzi Chervona Kalyna’/ ‘In the Meadow, a Red Viburnum’ – and am ready for another, perhaps the National Anthem or something …. It has become a part of my life, absorbing these things that are so familiar – and finally understanding why I had such trouble learning to write in English; I just had a problem with the letters! I thought the M should go down all the way in the middle and be even, and the E should also be all even without the middle line being shorter than the two others … but it’s only now that I’ve reached my half-century mark that I am seeing where my own aesthetic ideas and ideas about what is right and wrong have come from! It’s unbelievable to me that no one listened when I told them what was wrong with English … no one cared. As someone pointed out to me, it’s wrong but sometimes people just don’t listen to children … ! OUCH! Anyway, I wanted to say that a gem is the only way I can describe Ukraine for me but actually, it is a treasure trove! I am angry, though, at the limitations of what was offered to me in high school language-learning-wise and otherwise but now that I think about it, maybe I’m too busy to be angry! The thing I found with so-called ‘therapy’ and also yoga and Ayurveda and living in an ashram and studying ‘healing’ and Kung Fu is all these situations wanted me to be less, not more and not even anywhere near equal to who and what and how or even just plain who or what or how I already was …. They wanted to take away, make me less, and rob me – and rob me they DID indeed do! Now, studying Ukrainian, I am able to be me in a way I wasn’t allowed to be my whole life; I cannot explain how deep and profound and meaningful it is for me. I cannot believe I had a college advisor whose advice was to not watch the news! It’s so … interesting if not really sad and weird that I had to leave school to learn! I have been learning both about and how to do the painting style known as Samchykivka, as well as all kinds of things about the history, culture, and of course language! My teacher was impressed with me knowing my colours today – I have only had eight lessons so far, but I can read at least a few words and today I caught my teacher’s spelling mistake, ha ha! It is just what my brain needed; I can’t believe that a healing teacher and school thought it was appropriate to get me to not only think less, but potentially not think at all … or at least not go by my thoughts but rather by intuition at a time when I had consciously and purposely decided not to do that, knowing it would endanger my life to do so. My intuition would’ve led me away from all the protocols such as staying home to stay safe if I’d followed it! I KNEW that listening to that urge, that intuition, that ‘instinct’ or whatever you want to call it could lead me to danger and I fought it hard at the beginning of the pandemic, set as I was to go on a trip the very day they shut everything down! I had to fight that intuition of mine that said I’d be safe no matter what anyone said …. I wasn’t afraid! Of what? I know I’m healthy! I’ve got great immunity! I know how to take care of myself! It’s just that I’m thankfully intelligent enough – you know, because I THINK!!!!!!!!!! – to know that just a tiny little lapse in anything could lead to disastrous consequences and I did NOT want to take that chance! So I stayed at home or ‘home’ here with my mom, angry and sad and bereft and left and stuck and trapped and unhappy and grateful and joyous and knowing I’m lucky and all this stuff – and then sometime (my GOD!) about a half-year into it, this woman-I-don’t-know starts telling me in front of other people how to live my life, creating this impossible situation for me by telling me I had to talk more slowly but not telling me that I had time to do so! Who DOES that?! Anyway …. I know I’m a MUCH better healer than she is BUT I cannot get into that school now … shunned as I am by them, and stunned as I am by them as well!

Well, I am feeling relaxed. The visions of beautiful Petrykivka art and letters I can finally read in a way that I think will stick – unlike the Mongolian lessons and class I took and my learning Russian Cyrillic on my own made me feel! – for the first time, now that I have a teacher who UNDERSTANDS and clearly CARES and listened to me while I told him my difficulties with Cyrillic based on (Ooh, I’m pausing here because this is hard to write or think about, or feel I mean … and you can’t see the pause on the page when you read. The time it takes me to stop and stare between one sentence and another isn’t there when you look so I am telling you, there was a pause!) the ways I know people such as myself as in maybe my family and/ but definitely Jews more recently like after, since my family left … the discrimination, the hatred, the graffiti I saw written in Cyrillic that well just kind of haunted me for decades. I mean, this is all in high, stark, clearly-defined contrast to my living-in-Germany Mongolian teacher who told me my so-called (according to him – and totally untrue!) ‘ideology’ about Cyrillic was racist, that they (Mongolians) had also suffered at the hands of the Russians but that I couldn’t blame the script! I was just like ‘What the hell?’ and dropped the class …. What a way to treat someone talking about trauma! I do wish I’d gone or been able to go to the class one more time but it was a truly terrible class for me, anyway … and I got my money back, so I guess thank God for that! I tried to go back to my private Mongolian lessons after that but not only were they boring, rather useless and not at all right for my needs, their schedule really filled up with the pandemic going on, so … I switched to other things besides language for a while until this invasion, when I decided to learn Ukrainian because I wanted to sing the national anthem – the one I re-thought learning for a while since I started learning the language, thinking maybe it wasn’t or wouldn’t be quite right for me to learn it just yet …. All I know is, nothing compares or has compared to all this! I have also been learning the cooking, as well. Mmm! Of course, there are plenty of recipes I will not make! I am a kosher Jewisher goylee, after all! I can’t be all taken in by all that Christianity over there, or anything! I do see it as a much better type or form or kind or style of Christianity than I hear and see being practiced here in the United States, though! That J.P. Sears publicly talks about Satan I mean – weird! Ooh, how can I write about this without it descending into something about how I hate America?!

Oh, I’m tired now! Oh, I’m relaxed! Oh, I feel like me kinda-sorta! Except, I should be doing so much more physically-speaking … and living somewhere else, and having an entirely different life! Still, I am much happier to be here where I am since I started studying Ukrainian and my mind has something to do besides maybe trying to watch itself die as I kill it with meditation or something … ! Yes, mind! I am here for you! You were always here for me! THANK YOU!

My First Samchykivka — Linden Leaf! (Thank you, Iryna of UAmaze on Etsy for the downloadable, self-paced art lessons!) Note: Samchyky is the place where this art originated and is practiced … and Petryky is where Petrykivka painting is done! Doing this knowing it was once painted as protection makes it feel so much more meaningful!

Here is a link to me singing the aforementioned ‘Oy u Luzi Chervona Kalyna’/ ‘In the Meadow, a Red Viburnum’ — I published it to YouTube just for you!

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© Ashira Malka 4:20 A.M. EDT, 11th June, 2022

Rock-it-ville, Merry-land, U.S. Yay, Okay!