The year started with a need to step into a forest to feel grounded and material. As I type this, my mind goes back a few years, to Medvednica (the forested mountain overlooking Zagreb), a sudden downpour making everything feel dangerous and alive. Forests under rain’s onslaught, terrifying as they can be, are a wondrous sight.
The year also wanted me to initiate gardening on a serious enough scale, so I could test-grow various Latin American vegetables. Things I’ve been wanting to taste and cook with, like tomatillo or ají dulce. In Zagreb 😅. With its short summers prone to extreme heatwaves, sandwiched between unpredictable shoulder-season frosts.
More than anything, the year yearned for turquoise waters, and greenery, and waterfalls turning into clouds.
After 4 years of Esphera work, events and journeys, including my own deep dives into places… I needed somewhere small, calm, watery, and alive to hear the now muffled beat of the Call to Art. I needed a long-overdue, proper Artist Date, in the Julia Cameron sense.
Thus in early April’s spring, I found myself descending the trail to Kuda’s Bridge alongside a companion. The bridge is this little man-made curiosity, possibly romance-borne, nestled in a beautiful green canyon carved by the Krupa River. Rushing waters and waterfall mist all around, few tourists this time of year, and copious amounts of delicious, wild river mint. And while Julia may argue the Date should be solitary, every introvert knows well there are people in this world whose presence stokes and protects tender inner flames.
Best decision ever!
Just basking there for hours, lazily wandering around, sitting in the sunny grass, soaking feet in Krupa’s freezing cold waters. All that invigorated me to the core. The day inspired joy, moved stale emotional energy, and greased the creative wheels.
No wonder, then, that the year progressed into numerous spring asparagus hunts, snake encounters, and frequent dips in the cold Adriatic. Before June and its crowds. By the end of May I’d had several ‘seaside vacations’, enjoying the empty beaches and refreshing waters of Zadar, Rovinj and Split. All of which, blessed by sunny weather, felt far superior to any possible summer.
Summer, though, was marked by gardening, which I started indoors at the end of winter, utilizing some old, dust-gathering but fully functional CFLs. I built a ghetto-style grow box made out of ‘em, stray cardboard and cables. I planted oddball pepper and tomato cultivars uncommon in Europe, tomatillos, caigua, and a few things more (culantro, my love). Ended up with 20-ish large plants, which, while not quite ‘serious enough’ scale-wise, were plenty to learn from during what turned out to be a heatwave-struck summer of 2026.
And now, as the year rushes to its ending, I return to Soča Valley in the fall. Well, tomorrow. I’ve visited in summer, then spring, before. Fell in love with it, in my way, even put ‘her’ in a poem.
This time, the visit will be short, with some exploration of Idrija and Kamnik en route. But my mind is on the valley, and a return to the rivers Soča and Lepena, to Kozjak waterfall… as the leaves turn and the waters grow more inhospitable.
If I were more intimately familiar with the Soča Valley and the Alps surrounding it, I’d be out foraging it myself, then retreating into some hut to have fun in the kitchen. Instead, I’m immensely looking forward to finally visiting Hiša Franko, and letting someone who knows the valley intimately show me how it tastes. The restaurant has been on my mind for years, but now feels particularly fitting. Especially since Ana Roš seems as enamored with Istria as I am, and it’s truffle season.
More importantly, I’m curious about food as an art medium. I’ve always enjoyed food as hospitality and even theater, but since Enigma in Barcelona I’ve been thinking about it differently. We were there shortly before it got its second Michelin star, and I ‘hated’ that particular experience. Cold, detached, almost aggressively inhospitable, tired staff, overwhelmingly choreographed service, 40+ courses, slime and air on every plate… yet it was fascinating. I can’t help but wonder if discomfort and repulsivity were the point, as a deliberate puncture in the machinery of fine dining? Or was the excess merely another manifestation of the machinery, in which case its artistic merit is uninteresting to me… Alas, I do not know.
With Hiša Franko, I’m hoping to be given a painting, rendered through the palate, of a nurturing-yet-severe place I love. We’ll be there for breakfast as well. I really want to experience the place beyond its renowned dinner.
It also ties in with my reorientation to plant-forward eating. Something that resonated strongly during a recent Darko Rundek concert, where between songs he spoke passionately about reducing meat consumption and ending factory farming. Though this time, I’ve no interest in strict veganism.
The year is ending as it started, between the sleeps of winter, yearning to Art. Whatever that means. 4 years have passed since last I touched anything creatively-demanding-but-personal (which isn’t a poem, or a quick photo snap-n-edit).
I started this here site in 2022, mere months before I switched gears into Esphera. On the verge of a gamedev burnout, after years of being consumed by the development of Solomeow’s Magic Blast. Unable to watch the site go stale so early, I’ve kept it in maintenance mode since. Now it’s time to wake it, restructure, and carry on with it.
And if someone dares accuse me of LLMing my internal LLM too much, at least I have two surviving articles from 2022 that say: “I’ve been writing since before the dawn of GPT3 and modern AI. I’ve used em-dashes before they were slop. I’ve done this semi-anachronistic, clinical-yet-poetic, compressed register before, too. I swear.”
Soča
Kiss the eddies of her silent form
Blessed, washed in the cold
Life bursts out of every pore
Ever flowing, rushing, descending
Until life’s all drowned
