Thoughts on traveling during the pandemic and a year-long journey to getting back the enthusiasm to create and start anew.
“Offline” writing session at the Lviv Chocolate Factory in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine.
I write this soon after a very illuminating writing session at a café in Kryvyi Rih, a small town in Ukraine, were I have been for the last couple of months.
My last blog post was on May 4th, 2020, more than a year ago, along with most of my social media ‘presence’. This hiatus was not really planned. It started because of somewhat cliche, but very real reasons: lack of enthusiasm and belief in myself.
Before the pandemic hit, I had moved from Canada to the Ukraine with my wife in order to explore Europe and the Middle East in our projects. The goal was to do a year of travel around the region. As of March of last year, it became clear that my travel photo, video and music projects would be on pause for who knew how long.
Luckily, we kept being very productive as our online business grew. We had started in 2019 an online platform where my wife, Iana Komarnytska, shared her dance training. With the pandemic, the business grew and we focused on creating content for her expanding platform, the Iana Dance Club. I was happy to have that as a work focus during the pandemic, where I was able to still create photos, videos, texts and even do some drumming for her classes. I will share more about why that project is special to me on a future post.
In retrospect, I understand now that being at home and not able to travel or create art started eroding my enthusiasm, and around May/June I was focusing exclusively on our business together and had put all my own projects on the back burner.
PRAIA GRANDE, BRAZIL: With travel restrictions getting lifted a bit late in 2020, we decided to give back our rented apartment in Kiev and go spend some time near Vitoria, Brazil. Right before the pandemic started, my parents moved to a small beach town, and I felt that connecting with family and friends would be good for our spirits. Besides, we could create our video training projects in beautiful inspiring locations, part of the vision we had for Iana’s online training program, and grow our business even more. It was, of course, a way to be safely outside and start pursuing our original goals of travel and personal development. We rented a small house at a remote corner next to a deserted beach and close to my parents house, and began our explorations in November of 2020. We would stay there for 3 months. Not having our apartment in Kiev, a proper home of our own, was a bit scary. It was as if we were almost ‘homeless’ somehow, not having a place to go back to. But that actually turned out to be a very good idea for traveling, since we could always find an AirBnB apartment virtually anywhere in the world, at a fraction of the cost of a hotel. A vision began to form. We would develop projects for a few months at a time, relocating to different places, without the overhead of being ‘based’ in one specific place, one we had to get back to.
Shooting with Iana Komarnytska in Praia Grande, Brazil, on January 2021.
As I mentioned, I was still fully focused on our business together, even though Iana was always encouraging me to pursue my own projects as well. I just couldn’t do it, for some reason. Indulging in my own creative explorations without a tangible goal, seemed wrong to me. I decided not to ‘torture’ myself, and let inspiration come back at its own time. That was the plan. And I was happy to get some time with my parents and sisters, and be a positive presence in my nephews lives as they were home-bound during the pandemic. I’ve been out of Brazil for 12 years, only visiting for short periods of time and I always felt guilty for not being around my nephews, with whom I am very close to. It was a good time to try to be an inspiration for them and spend some quality time in my own country for the first time in a long time.
COVID: After a month there, my mom and dad got sick, and we took them to the hospital. They had Covid. My mom needed to be admitted to the hospital right away. My dad was in better shape, but still had to be in observation. In Brazil, people at my mom’s age had to have someone from the family accompanying them in the hospital, and I stayed there to take care of her. After 3 days she had to be admitted to the ICU, off limits to us, and I came back to our house. The next day I started having a fever, and it was obvious I had gotten Covid. My wife went to stay with my nephews, my sister took care of my dad at another place as he quarantined, and I stayed at the house, alone, waiting to be tested. I never get sick, so I thought this was Covid for sure. I was having high fevers every day, so whatever I had was contagious. I did a Covid test and it was negative. But I was still feeling weak and terrible, so I had to quarantine for 2 weeks. I had high fever every day for up to 10 hours a day. I moved slowly. I couldn’t focus. I had pneumonia, but the hospital said I was not at a level to be admitted. I know a lot of people got way worse than me (my mom and dad being the case), but I never felt this bad in my life. I ended up doing 3 Covid tests throughout that time. All negative. It was a very tough time, both physically and mentally. I couldn’t help anyone, my mom ended up staying in the ICU for 40 days, my dad ended up being admitted as well. Thankfully, even with problems that always come in these crisis, our family pulled together and we ended up beating this thing. Some time later, I did an antibody test which indicated that, indeed, I had had the damn disease. It could have been worse. My dad got better. My mom got better, but she needed physical therapy and recovery, so we stayed there taking care of her and my dad for a few weeks. When things got under control, it was already time to get back. But back where?
SHARM EL-SHEIKH, EGYPT: When going from Ukraine to Brazil we booked a round-trip ticket, so in any case we would have to get back. We considered going to Mexico, but it would be impossible to change tickets, so off we went to Kiev. We rented an AirBnB studio apartment for a couple of weeks. We needed to create content for Iana’s online courses before any trips, since new classes come out weekly. We also had packed for Summer in Brazil, and it was still Winter in Ukraine, so we had to get some clothes that we left in our storage locker. Basically all our stuff was put in a very inexpensive but highly secure and modern storage room in the outskirts of Kiev. Iana still wanted to go somewhere warm, and the closest option was Sharm El-Sheikh, in Egypt, which is a very popular location for Ukrainians. We decided to spend a month there, with the same goal as in Brazil: recharge, this time after Covid, and create content and focus on our business.
I was still not very inspired for any of my own projects, but happy to travel and be productive. I’ve been meaning to resume learning the oud, one of my favorite instruments. I decided to leave my drum behind and try to focus on some learning just for pleasure. So off we went to Egypt to spend the whole month of February.
Iana Komarnytska, photographed at the Salam Mosque in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.
Iana at the Ras Mohamed Park in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.
Sharm El-Sheikh has some of the most beautiful seas I have ever seen. We were there to relax by the water, so that was perfect. It is, however, a tourist town. It doesn’t have Pyramids or big museums, and it is filled with resorts back-to-back. If you want to go to the Sinai region, which is beautiful, you need to go with local guides. Even with all that, it was a real taste of Egypt, one of the places I always wanted to visit, and it prepared and inspired us for the next time we go there (probably July of this year).
I was not inspired to create exactly, but I did get the spark of travel and adventure. I also got a chance to do some creative photo shoots with Iana around our common interest in ancient places and fashion. The photos above show a couple of my explorations. I thought I was not creating. But in a way, without realizing, I had started to get back to my own photography, my own vision, with the help of Iana as a model. I simply did not know that just yet. Soon enough it was time to go away from Egypt, but we decided go back during the Summer, this time in Cairo. We got back to Kiev (another cheaper round-trip ticket) and spent a week figuring out our next destination.
KRYVYI RIH, UKRAINE: Before our next big trip to Egypt, I really wanted to focus within. Get a small place somewhere where I could get back to exercising, writing and actually planning what I wanted to be doing. Would I get back to fashion shoots for my portfolio? Creating drumming compositions and world music? Get back to podcasting? I did not have the slightest idea. But I did know I wanted a simple quiet place, and some sort of routine.
As part of our travel aspirations, we wanted to find not only cool places, but inspiring people to collaborate with and learn from. I was not ready for that just yet, but Iana wanted to learn from a fantastic Ukrainian dancer, Alex Delora. When not traveling for teaching and performing, Alex is based in a small town in Ukraine called Kryvyi Rih. As an industrial city, Kryvyi Rih was hardly a touristic destination. It did, however, have all the infrastructure we needed. And it was very affordable, even for Ukrainian standards. We found a great 3-bedroom place on AirBnB and got a 40% discount for a month-long stay. Iana would focus on her training, and I would focus on myself. We also found great dance studios to record our classes, and I got inspired to do some drumming.
I have been a musician for a decade, and I was very active in Toronto with the Blue Dot Ensemble, my world music and dance group. Before the pandemic, I was teaching and performing in Ukraine, but with the lockdowns all our drumming/dancing trips (about 10) got canceled. I would play occasionally, just to practice and keep my skills, but I was not creating. I felt that urge to play coming back. Iana and I recorded a course about drum solos together, and it was very nice to pick up the drum again.
It so happens that Alex Delora is a world class belly dancer, and she specializing in drum solos (for the kind of instrument I play, the tabla, also know as darbuka). She also does very cool photoshoots as a model. So it ended up that we started collaborating in drumming, and doing a photo shoot together.
Shooting with dancer Alex Delora in Kryivi Rih, Ukraine, on April 2021.
To be honest, I had forgotten how much I love being in studio, creating. That little shoot served as a spark to get some actual thinking and deciding going. In Kryvyi Rih, I also got back to one of my passions, one I put off for almost a decade: playing tennis. When I lived in Brasilia in my late 20s, I fell in love with tennis, but since moving to Canada and then to the Ukraine, I never allowed myself to ‘indulge’ in the sport consistently. This time, I booked some private classes and got back to my training. I also enrolled in a nice gym and started exercising again. I hadn’t really trained consistently for many years, but for some reason, as the days went by in Kryvyi Rih, I got into a groove, started losing weight, going to the gym regularly, even when I didn’t feel like it. When I skipped a day, I didn’t beat myself up too much, and just went the next day. We found a nice rhythm, and ended up extending our stay. We’ve been here for 2 months already, and will be here for a few more weeks.
“You have to be willing to start from scratch. You have to be willing to hit reset and go back to zero.”
With this new routine, I also explored some books and lectures, which allowed myself to get in touch with my passions, and rethink my projects with a fresh look. This quote by Naval Ravikant about starting from zero had been on my mind for a long time, but I never fully bought into it. I always thought your past, your previous decisions, your failures, the things left undone, would always color your future decisions. But I think, in the end, Naval was right. This year, so many people lost their lives and livelihoods. I got lucky. I got a chance to start again. But for a fresh start, you have to get back to zero. It is a gift you can always give to yourself, if you are brave enough.
Photo by Iana Komarnytska, taken February 2021 at the Salam Mosque in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.
Throughout this year, and honestly for way longer than that, I have been longing for a way to reinvent and rediscover myself. Through stagnation in the lockdowns in Kiev, crisis and Covid in Brazil, a taste of adventure in Egypt, and a reconnecting with myself in a small studio in Kryvyi Rih, I began a process of getting my enthusiasm for creating back. Most of all, with the help of Iana, my wife and artistic partner, I actually started believing in myself again, perhaps for the first time since my teen years, which is why I wanted to share this story with you today.
There is an old feeling springing back, a calm excitement to start anew. Like when I was a young boy drawing comic books, a teen that was an actor and loved movies, a student who fell in love with Astronomy, the young man who rediscovered his passion for photography, the 30-something-year-old that gave up everything to be with the love of his life.
Unbound by judgment for the past or lofty purposes for the future, for now, my goal is simple. I am an artist. I want to create things I think are cool and share them with folks that may be inspired by them. And enjoy the process of making.
I want to close this ‘I-am-back-post’ by thanking you for reading this far, for sharing this new beginning with me, and I hope this little tale of three countries can serve as inspiration on your own journey.
Stay tuned for more. Much more :)
“Beginnings are always ripe with possibilities, for they hold the promise of completion. Through love we imagine a new way of being.”
