I’ve mastered the skill of escaping my own feelings.
If it’s not a matter of life and death—like it was with tuberculosis or depression causing tuberculosis—I’m so happy to escape from what’s inside.
I can still function, so why face what’s inside and figure out what to do with it?
🔴 But I still can’t avoid facing it. Again and again. We had quite a start to 2025—arriving in Batumi with only 5 dollars in the pocket, exactly the amount a taxi charged to drive us to the hotel we’d booked. No more money at all.
By some miracle—we found a good-hearted hostel owner. Again, we had only enough money to pay for the taxi to get us there. I sold some art supplies I no longer needed, having decided to end my art career—it just wasn’t me anymore.
Then the hostel owner trusted us, letting us stay and agreeing to let us pay later. I handed him my silver jewelry as collateral.
You know what happened next: I asked for help in the middle of an existential crisis, and the space—and you—supported me.
Then the Namkha Encyclopedia entered its new, full-capacity phase, and things started getting better.
Until.
🏔️🌨️ Until a severe, unexpected snowstorm hit Batumi for the first time in 40 years. Our Georgian neighbor, an old man named Aslan, said the last time it was this bad was in 1985.
How I managed to relocate to Batumi during the worst weather conditions is the theme of this post.
It wasn’t just the “snow.” Not just the “weather.” Everything got complicated again, but this time in a different way. The roads were cut off; we couldn’t get to the city to buy food. It became dangerous to go outside. Our only option was to stay without food for 7-10 days, waiting for the snow to melt.
Yesterday, we restored our food supplies, trudging through knee-deep—and sometimes hip-deep—snow, walking 3 kilometers to retrieve food the landlord had bought for us, and then returning the same distance.
It was incredibly difficult.
.
.
🔹 When I became a Buddhist, everything around me started manifesting as it was. Whatever was inside immediately began to show itself outside.
And while I’m a “kind-hearted Buddhist with good intentions and a mission,” I found that I hate living life and feel deeply upset. I’m not depressed anymore. I’m not ill. But I hate it. I hate life very much.
With all the expectations of immediate ease, relief, and even enlightenment—when I’m ready to spread the light and knowledge of transforming life—I still hate life. I purely, candidly hate it.
That’s what these gigantic, 1.6-meter-wide snowdrifts are all about. That’s why I feel so suffocated, drowning in the landscape of these emotions, as I was drowning in the snowdrifts today.
No ease. No revelation. No rapture. Just hatred—in high concentrations, right there inside me.
It’s not very Buddhist, what I’m writing here. It’s definitely not “spiritual.”
But here I am—extremely pissed off instead of, you know, whatever you (or even I) expect from a person who’s managed to bring major changes into their life.
I’m full of hatred for everything I’ve been forced to go through. Full of aversion. Full of ultimate rage toward everything that’s happened in nearly 36 years of this life.
And the most important thing now is—I can’t pretend I’m not anymore.
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