The Gifts of Summer

Life, they say, is what you make of it.

This year, after a long period of hustling, I finally feel that I am choosing what is best for me, with self-love, with the full knowledge that my choices and approach to work and life in general, although desired by many, are not particularly popular, except perhaps among digital nomads and here and there the intrepid self-employed like myself.

Yes, I am more of a nomad this summer than ever before. For me, breaking away from absolute identification with work gives me freedom, which is a path to enrichment, charging, expanding horizons, exploring the world, gaining another perspective on myself.

…I look at the people around me – everyone is endlessly busy… They even compete to see who is the busiest. And I’m not interested in that anymore. I’m not just my work (although traveling doesn’t mean I don’t work at all, on the contrary), I’m far from just being an artist, I’m tons of other things bubbling like sparkling wine inside and wanting their joyful manifestation.

Actually, yes, as you approach your 50s, if you are aware and ready for such a thing, you begin to appreciate the slow life, the not-filled-to-the-full life, in which there are moments of doing nothing, of contemplation, of floating , of dreaming… (It breaks my heart that the current generation does not even know what this is and that there is an irretrievable loss of poetry and romance in this…)

So, after a month and a half of traveling through Greece and Spain, we are spending July and August in the Bulgarian countryside. Here I alternate between weeding and watering the garden in the relentless heat with painting six small canvases – the Summer Series landscape paintings and the ping-pong of my site’s (SEO) optimization, which has been flowing slowly and steadily for months now.

I am infinitely grateful for the opportunity to be out of the city and follow this slower pace, drink my morning coffee in the garden, listen to the roosters crow, feed the cat, look at the stars, melt at the concert of crickets… Simple, rural life. And the priceless gifts of summer.

Here is the video – it took only a month to edit it :)) But – totally worth it: