How Music Saves our Souls

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
Friedrich Nietzsche

By definition, music is organized sound.
However, what is the hidden source of music’s supreme power? There is something deeply mysterious about the sounds of music.
How does it influence our emotions, take us to a deep world, helps us heal and creates a world of art.

Plato’s reflection on the relationship between soul and body has attracted scholars’ attention since antiquity. Along with that, not less worthy attention were Plato’s thoughts on music and its effects on human beings.

 “Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, and life to everything. It is the essence of order, and leads to all that is good, just and beautiful, of which it is the invisible, but nevertheless dazzling, passionate, and eternal form”.

So often, we connect through music, to people, to entire communities, we fall in love, through music. Sometimes melodies touch us so deeply, that no more words are necessary.
Significant people in our lives give more meaning to certain songs, and music gives so many memories and meaning, to significant people.

 “If you want to measure the spiritual depth of society, make sure to mark its music”.

“Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.”

“If music be the food of love, play on”.
William Shakespeare

With Love,

Yana

When life gives you lemons – make lemonade!

Well, sometimes, some days, some months and can be some years, life will keep on giving us lemons. The most bitter type ones. I say, what can you do? The lemons come in bulks, how can you make the best out of it? Of course! Make lemonade!
One thing is sure- it is refreshing.

We hear, read, and absorb, a big amount of positive phrases and stories of how other people deal with difficult situations in their life. However, sometimes, when it comes to us, our mind becomes dark and before we even realize, the smile is off our faces and the days become less shiny.

The thing is, life is here and NOW, whether your life is full of lemons or not. And mine tends to throw quite a few at me, but here is what I choose to do. Stand still, smile at life and the lemons, and catch as many of them as I can. To make as much as possible lemonade!
Because not letting negativity getting into you, keeping the smile on the face and sticking to your goals, with full faith and belief is the strongest tool we can use. So why not make the bad days good and the good days even better?

“Some days there won’t be a song in your heart. Sing anyway”.
-Emory Austin

With Love,

Yana

Zanele Muholi’s Documentation of the Painful Journey of Black life

     The South African visual activist and creative, her identity as a female, lesbian and how photography saved her life.

Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness exhibition by Zanele Muholi

South Africa, 1948 to 1991. A codified system of racial segregation dictates the rules of day-to-day life.
“There is a clear intent in this project,” the South-African-based visual activist says, placing noted emphasis on the words ‘clear’ and ‘intent’, as she speaks on her ongoing self-portrait series, Somnyama Ngonyama. “It’s all about representation. I’m confronting the politics of race and representation in South Africa and beyond the South African borders in the most natural way I can – by presenting my own Black body.”

Zanele Muholi was born in 1972 in Umlazi, Durban, and lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Muholi is a visual activist focusing mainly to effect social change. Among her many achievements, she co-founded the Forum of Empowerment of Women and she is an Honorary Professor at the University of the Arts Bremen. She became known globally with Faces and Phases, her portrait photography of the lesbian community in South Africa.

Somnyama Ngonyama, translated from Zulu as Hail The Dark Lioness, is an ongoing self-portrait series which is now presented in her solo exhibition in Autograph ABP Gallery, London, in which she expresses the confrontation with the politics of race.

‘Somnyama Ngonyama presents a compelling and visionary mosaic of identities, an exquisite empire of selves. Inviting us into a multi-layered conversation, each photograph in the series, each visual inscription, each confrontational narrative depicts a self in profound dialogue with countless others: implicitly gendered, culturally complex and historically grounded black bodies.’ Renée Mussai, ABP Gallery Exhibition Curator.

The settings of the portraits of Somnyama Ngonyama range from Africa and Europe to North America. There are more than 60 on display in the exhibition. The objects incorporated into the pieces become charged with meaning. The use of plastic materials enacts a commentary on environmental issues and excess waste production.

If you can’t make it to the exhibition, this is how Zanele Muholi tells about it in her own words.

“Somnyama Ngonyama is about self-representation. It’s me looking at particular political issues that still affect us as human beings and I’m drawing on very real historical events in South Africa, and beyond South African borders. I used my own body to speak on issues of race for instance and focused mainly on the importance of Blackness. What does it mean to be Black today? I explored that question through and through”.

Muholi describes the Somnyama Ngonyama project as the most painful one for her and explains why.

“In comparison to past projects, this one was especially painful. I didn’t want to expose another body to my own pain, even those people who might share the same experiences. Sometimes it wasn’t even physical pain, it was emotional and stress-induced…”
“It’s painful because all of this has happened before; grandmothers, mothers, people we all know have been subjected to this racial objectification. I often find myself thinking “this can’t be” and the images are a manifestation of that feeling that it is still very real. We now need to find different ways to articulate this pain. This is my take”.

“If my photos were transformed into music, they’d sound traditional”. Zanele Muholi

Muholi’s art aims to educate viewers about the past. About the violence of racism past and present, the conflict that has marked South Africa’s history and not only. 
The photographs that make up the artist’s series use her body as the canvas to tackle these questions of race, sexuality, gender and politics. In centering herself in Somnyama Ngonyama, she explains that she’s enacting a healing process. Documenting her body in defiance of forces that would rather see her erased, “I want to remember. I want to be remembered.”

Visibility and exposure have a cost.  LGBT people in South Africa are at risk of brutal beatings, “corrective rape” and murder for being themselves. But Muholi is fearless.
 In an interview with the Guardian, she stressed the urgency of her projects:

“This work needs to be shown, people need to be educated, people need to feel that there are possibilities.

“…We cannot be denied existence. This is about our lives, and if queer history, trans history, if politics of blackness and self-representation are so key in our lives, we just cannot sit down and not document and bring it forth.”

“Photography saved my life”. Zanele Muholi 

“The space is dark. The space is cold. As I entered those cells I knew that lives were lost there… The space is haunted, by the knowledge of people being brutalized, of blood being shed: you sense it. People were conditioned to live like animals, because of the color of their skin. It’s a space of brutality”.
From the exhibition, text by Zanele Muholi

“I’m reclaiming my blackness, which I feel is continuously performed by the privileged other. My reality is that I do not mimic being black; it is my skin, and the experience of being black is deeply entrenched in me. Just like our ancestors, we live as black people 365 days a year, and we should speak without fear.”
– Zanele Muholi

   “I’m scared. But this work needs to be shown”. Zanele Muholi 

Reasons to Be Happy

I have always been a big believer in “Be happy”; I do my best to follow it all the time and never forget. 
Along my way, I met many different people, from different cultures, countries, cities, religions and lives. All of them had reasons to be happy, but were most of them happy? Probably not.

This year I met Johnathan, he is 68, highly intelligent, clever, mannered, with a great sense of humor and depressed. 
It has been 16 years now that he lives on anti-depressants, spends most of his time at home, in bed. His mood goes radically up and down, and sometimes he really loses it. What is the reason for his depression? Loneliness. Severe loneliness. 
He lives alone in his flat, in which there are not many colors of life, he is divorced and his only daughter comes to see him quite rarely.

Once we had a conversation, and I said something he found funny, he smiled and said, “I can’t laugh, it will break my depression”. 
It made me smile because he knows he is making a choice to be depressed.
As we all, we make choices daily.

I asked myself, does Johnathan have reasons to be happy? Yes, he does.
The same way as we all do.

After meeting him, I have realized there is a bit of “Johnathan”, in all of us, not matter who we are, where we live, how we live, or what we have. 
What matters is whether we choose to be happy and live as fully as we can.

“Life loves the liver of it. You must live and life will be good to you”. 
–  Maya Angelou

With Love,

Yana

Lost Identities

A recent visit to my favorite gallery in central London made me wonder even more than always about the question of an identity. As a person who traveled the world and lived in different countries, I can clearly say that my identity has not been always obvious for me. The need to understand where is home, after all, has been a constant question in my mind.

The exhibition, created by a young Muslim guy, born and raised in London, who raises up uneasy questions and daily battles of our society and us as individuals living in it.

“I see how things are getting out of hand. A lot of children – the younger generation- are going to struggle with their identity. They are not going to know what they are, to be honest with you. But I don’t really see it as a problem because obviously, we’re technically living in a multicultural society.” 

“I feel unwanted. You are born here, but people still say, “Go back to where you are from. You are not from here.”
But when you are born here, you can’t really say that I am not, because, you know… When someone tells me to go back home, I think my home is here.” 

I was standing in the gallery hall reading these lines and felt how hundreds of words, thoughts, and images are crossing my mind. This is true, I thought. Is it true only in London? Such a melting pot. Maybe it is not a good idea, after all, to mix so many cultures together. But wait, look how people learn to get along, how much peace and understanding there is, how much social awareness. How much tolerance and patience. No, no. Multicultural society it is the key. Because sadly enough, the same quotes are relevant in Russia, in Israel, and even on the other part of the globe, in Singapore. So why won’t we live all together?

I wish to each one of us to be right there, where it feels home.  

With Love,

Yana

The Geography of Happiness

In the past ten years, I was fortunate to have the chance to travel the world and live in different countries. Experience different cultures and mentalities. Practice different languages and the most important, study the human mindset and try to understand what makes a person happy. Alternatively, unhappy.

I hear the same question from people again and again, “So, where is the best place to be happy at?”
Truth is, there is no such thing as the best place that brings you happiness. The happiness is inside of me. Every place that I lived in left a stamp on me, taught me something new and influenced my personality. I kept wondering around until I found a place, which satisfied all my requirements and needs but that does not make other places less good. I was happy in all of them; I just did not want to stay. I felt that I have to keep walking.

As Leo Tolstoy said, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”.

The Israeli writer Eric Weiner paraphrased it in his book, into, “All miserable countries are similar; all the happy ones, are happy in their own way”.

Weiner describes in his book his travels around the world, searching for the happiest places in the world. He describes happiness in Holland as a number. In Sweden, happiness is a bore. In Qatar, happiness is winning the lottery. According to his observation, happiness in Moldova is in another place. In Thailand, happiness is not thinking. And so the list goes on.

The countries happiness descriptions are a mirror of many people’s inner feeling.

I will just say wherever you are. Be happy. 
Happiness is just inside of us, and it is a choice.

With Love,

Yana

Escape from Freedom

Sometimes life brings us to a point when we feel completely lost, aimless, confused.

Wondering where was it that we were going, or planning to get. Somehow, it did not happen.

We walk around busy cities and see empty from visions eyes. We were all born with a dream, weren’t we?

Well, think about it. What did you want to be when you were young? At a very young age, I wanted to be a teacher, a bit later, a translator, and then the dream to be helping people came and joined the others, all together creating a not letting go vision.

What happens to so many of us losing the child in them, the child with the sparkling eyes, full of faith and happiness? I believe nothing happens to that child. That child stays there forever. That child simply becomes a bit faded, tired, covered with must does and tasks, obligations, a routine he is sucked into before even noticing surround by information and people he was never searching for or ever wanted to be around. Somehow, without asking or wanting, we end up spending so much time around people that mean nothing to us, and so little time, with the people that are everything for us.

Without even realizing, we become slaves of rules, slaves of rights and wrongs, slaves of societies, religions, races, structures. We are taught what to do and what not to do. What to eat, what to wear, how to talk, what to say, and what to keep unsaid in the stomach. Even if we want to shout it out.

With the years, we know so well our imaginary limits that we are even scared to live outside of them, what do we do without them? We become scared of freedom.

Erich Fromm, who was significantly ahead of his time, wrote his book Escape from Freedom, which was first published in 1941. Moreover, it is relevant more than ever to our society and the world we live in. Here are deeply truthful quotes from his book.

“Most people are convinced that as long as they are not overtly forced to do something by an outside power, their decisions are theirs, and that if they want something, it is they who want it. But this is one of the great illusions we have about ourselves. A great number of our decisions are not really our own but are suggested to us from the outside; we have succeeded in persuading ourselves that it is we who have made the decision, whereas we have actually conformed with expectations of others, driven by the fear of isolation and by more direct threats to our life, freedom, and comfort.”

― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom

“The frightened individual seeks for somebody or something to tie his self to; he cannot bear to be his own individual self any longer, and he tries frantically to get rid of it and to feel security again by the elimination of this burden: the self.”

― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom

To sum up, I have said that before and I will keep repeating it all my life.

Do not be afraid to shine, because all limitations are illusions.

With Love,

Yana

The Path is Guided

Our path is guided. When I first let myself see that, I started observing more.
Once I allowed myself to see the signs and follow them, I learned that life becomes so much easier, calmer and full of answers. I learned that there is no need to try to understand everything, there is no need to worry, hurry or delay anything. Because all the answers are within us. We just need to observe deeper into ourselves and listen to what life is telling us.

In many cases we doubt ourselves, we lack confidence and we wonder why certain things happen to us. I believe that all the answers we need to know are already inside of us. All we need to do is to allow ourselves see them and observe where our path is leading us.

Each one of us has a way, a path to walk. Patience is an important key in this, learning to be patient is an essential part of learning how to walk our path calmly. Moreover, once we learn how to practice patience, there is nothing in the world we cannot achieve. This is right then when we become able to believe in our way, in ourselves and in the fact that our path has all the guidance we need. All we have to do is allow ourselves see it and follow it.

With Love,

Yana

Agape

When I discovered the term agape for the first time, I realized that it is the best way to describe the way I feel about the world and people I meet every day.

I think that at a certain point, I taught myself to see the soul in every person and this became my life.

Agape (Ancient Greek) is love: the highest form of love, charity; agape embraces a universal, unconditional love that transcends, that serves regardless of circumstances.

The best explanation of the term Agape given by Dr. Martin Luther King:
“Agape means understanding, redeeming good will for all men. It is an
overflowing love which is purely spontaneous, unmotivated, groundless,
and creative. It is not set in motion by any quality or function of
its object… Agape is disinterested love. It is a love in which the
individual seeks not his own good, but the good of his neighbor. Agape
does not begin by discriminating between worthy and unworthy people,
or any qualities people possess. It begins by loving others for their
sake.
Agape is not a weak, passive love. It is love in action… Agape is a
willingness to go to any length to restore community… It is a
willingness to forgive, not seven times, but seventy times seven to
restore community…. If I respond to hate with a reciprocal hate I do
nothing but intensify the cleavage in broken community. I can only
close the gap in broken community by meeting hate with love”.

 

With Love,

Yana

Remembering Martin Luther King Jr.

Now, more than ever, when the terror is celebrating its presence on the streets, in big cities, in small towns. Entire populations are limited in their freedom and rights to exist in peace.

The speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. are more relevant than ever. Sadly, it is the reality of our world. Violence, hatred, discrimination, are taking more and more place in our world.
Where are we going?

“Only a refusal to hate or kill can put an end to the chain of violence in the world and lead us toward a community where men can live together without fear”. 
From: 
“I have a dream”- Martin Luther King Jr.

Millions of people have fought thousands of battles to enlarge my freedom; restricted as it still is, progress has been made. Why is the issue of equality still so far from a solution?” 
From: 
“A Testament of Hope” (1969) – Martin Luther King Jr.

“People are often surprised to learn that I am an optimist”. 
From: 
“A Testament of Hope” (1969) – Martin Luther King Jr.

With Love,

Yana