My lovely hosts 

Thanks to my lovely friend Moshe Robas and all the lovely queer commune "La Segera" around him:  Itai ,his son the amazing lovely dancer, Gracia , Alba & Johana, Rache, Wille , and Miriam.
not easy to find barbed wire in Barcelona, thanks for the help. Open hearts and lovely talks about solidarity.

Thanks to Alex whose house is open to activists of all kinds, but also to passivists like me. The house is on a stunning mountain near Portbou, a city on the border of Spain and France, through which refugees still pass, and some are still killed on land and at sea in the hope of finding a better place in central Europe. What sounded like the beginning of a joke: a Syrian, an Israeli, and Germans met on a balcony near the Walter Benjamin memorial, was actually a possibility. Together with Mary, Martin, and Alex from Germany and Mahmoud from Syria, I could ask questions again about refugees and solidarity. They know each other from volunteering in an organization that helps refugees in boats in the middle of the sea in the hope that they will not reach the shores of Europe as bodies. And this is their website. One never knows when one would become a refugee in the middle of the sea.

In Perpignan, small city in south of France, i found myself in a very sweet family they knew nothing about me and my strange knitting journey. And so they opened their door and their heart. Sophie repairs violins and Jolian builds them bows https://www.ekho-violins.com, with people of such soul i will give my instrument to be fix or by a bow to play on my strings, and they melted my heartstrings in a simple, generous, and sweet way,They and their children. I can't fully describe what it did to me, and what was there beyond a direct warm and sweet human encounter between people on the road in a world where the ground is burning underfoot - and there it is burning in very tangible sense - it hasn't rained in Perpignan for the last for 3 years. This year it was the first time it rained, for two weeks at the end of winter. The summer temps suddenly reach 40 degrees, and the fear of climate change migration is growing nearer

thank you Sophi & Julian for such blessing hospitality!

A big thanks again from the heart that cannot translate to words the simplicity of opens kindness and hospitality that Wanda Martinez and her children, Josef & Liila and Belttxa the dog in Castelnaudary gave me. Indeed, the verbal communication between us was a bit broken, but to integrate into the harmony and the love music of this sweet family was wonderful bath for the heart.

Some people don't "get into your heart". They have been there for years, but only now you suddenly meet. From the stacks of  books to the kind of mess - as soon as I entered Mark's house I met myself in it. He lives on the mountain near Zarautz in the Basak region. It’s green and very beautiful there. Mark was a kindergarten teacher, now he is a therapist. I know this life path well -the sense of meaning and also the exhaustion and the Sisyphean uncertainty of it. it's always nice to meet a fellow traveler with whom you share a sense of kinship on the road. And thanks to Amela, who generously gave me her room and her bed and trusted me from the very first minute. Is it because she was raised in a commune?

It took me a while to figure out why I run around in circles like a puppy before bed until I sit down to knit; What is so challenging about sitting in the street knitting on a wire?

The meetings at the transqueer commune, which generously hosted me in Porto, introduced me to the pain and courage it takes to move about in public with a combination of vulnerability and exposure, a combination of strength and gentleness that is sometimes revealed when we are emotionally naked.

It seems to me that beyond the reminder that non-binary people present - that we are all walking hormone labs and not some kind of male or female fiction, the presence of bodily and psychic fluidity in public is a brave act of vulnerability, usually reserved for moments of love making.

Instead of the gender divide, I propose a divide between those who only have sex and those who make or long to make love. That is, those who know how to dissolve boundaries and not just set them. I wish we would elect leaders who know how to make love rather than just fuck.

Thanks to Sandra for the warm invitation and thanks Pedro, Victoria, Nige and the cats on the couch in Porto. And thanks also to Mini, Toto and Amadeo who are their partners in the project “La Garla”, which tries to create a safe space for everyone there.

Thanks to Pedro also for his help in hanging the lattice on the bridge, and most especially thanks for reminding me more perspectives or awareness.

https://www.instagram.com/csa.a.gralha?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsh=ZDNlZDc0MzIxNw==

George and Jose have been living in Spain for 11 years. George is from New Jersey, Jose was born in El Salvador. They met in a community theater group and have been together ever since. 20 years. In Spain, they moved from Madrid to Malaga and from there to Valencia and it seems they still haven't found their home. But in the US it is not easy to survive even with a pension of an intensive care doctor and a teacher's salary, and right now they also can't imagine themselves returning to Trump's USA. The experience of foreignness, as well as racism, is not easy. At a late age it is difficult to integrate into a different culture and create circles of friends or a community. Refugeehood and migration do not require drought or war, and its seems that the world will offer plenty of those too.

Thanks to George and Jose who opened their door and also their hearts and accompanied me to my knitting at the city gate.

​

"If you're in Seville, you have to pass through Córdoba, there's the mosque that became a church and you can sleep at my parents’ house." I have known Louis for years from Berlin. I am a friend and witness of his journey - the transformation from engineer to tantra instructor, and to  sex therapist by touch. Probably the profession, which ultimately, and contrary to what people might think, requires the most developed ability to set boundaries - both internal and external. Gentle but clear. Louis lives in a threesome, maybe actually a fourthsome, depending on how you count. This too requires skill in transitions and boundaries.

Louis's father, a retired army man, was waiting in the kitchen with a smile. He made us a red Salmorejo - a traditional cold tomato dish they make in Córdoba.  Louis’s mother, Ina, is trying to learn English. There was something touching about this welcoming, their way of trying to be close to Louis, his way of life and the colorful friends he brings. It took time for the army man and the hospital nurse to embrace a life journey with no frames and uniforms.
Thank you to Louis the father and Louis the son and mother Ina - for the openness and the bed in Louis's childhood room in the city where Muslim, Christian, Jewish and all kinds of other children dreamed, played, ran away and died, in the name of God's nighnightmares.

It felt lovely and natural to get a loving reception from Cris and Maria in Sevilla (after all, it’s no coincidence that I earned the title of “honorary lesbian” - my love for and identification with lesbians are great and well known.

Maria grew up in a house that had a statue of Franco at the entrance and went to Catholic school until she left and became a DJ. Cris lived in a commune, then parted ways with boys and met Maria. Every LGBTQ person makes some kind of emigration. Today they are both social workers in women’s support organizations.

The three of us belong to the same tribe, with the same campy butch touch, and similar social-political beliefs. It’s as if I met old friends from Black Laundry for whom there will always be a huge place in my heart. Already then, in the early 2000s, we understood the ties between different oppressions, yet the chant “In Gaza and Sderot there are girls who want to live” got smothered by the national ossification of the heart.

I wish there would be more Palestinian flags in all demonstrations in Israel, if only to confound the settler-Hamas-anti-semite enemy whoever it is .

https://m.soundcloud.com/chocoteke...

​

Thanks to Yasir Islam, who liked my crocheted fence, invited me to stay with him, and was brave and curious enough to meet for a moment the mess I bring with me.

Even before we met ,we talked on the phone about boundaries. We don't know each other, and it was important for him to clarify the rules of the house - you enter without shoes, you are not allowed to smoke or bring guests, and more. Obviously, there were other concerns beforehand. We both came to the meeting with all the imagined emotional and mental charges - the inner ones, and especially those invented on each other.

When meeting strangers, especially if they host me, at first there is a kind of gentle passport control - until a common space is created where you can dance, in this case also physically, in the streets of Lisbon. It took me years to understand that precisely the game of boundaries, especially when done with gentelnes, is the opening to the possibility of closeness.

Somehow it is not surprising that precisely in Lisbon - which sometimes feels like the gateway to Europe and sometimes like a crossroads on the way to or from Africa or Brazil - I stayed with Yasir, who has already crossed several borders in his life: born in Congo to Indian parents, studied and lived in the United States, lived through Corona with his parents in London, and immigrated to Long time ago to Portugal. And he asked me: So where is home?

And maybe it's not surprising either, that in the midst of all this and precisely with him it was possible to talk about the historical press that crushes - probably not just me - between Auschwitz and Gaza.

​

There are some people which have an openness and can create a space which allow you to rest.

Albert and Marcus immigrated to Malaga from Antwerp. The word migrate within Europe may sound imprecise, harsh, but that's how it feels. Apparently, there are many types of migrations and immigrants. They renovated the house by themselves. Marcus collects the furniture while Albert renovates them and this house has enough rooms to accommodate guests - from radical Fairies to borederlineknitters. It might also be a way to grow the circle of friends while their hosting. It is not easy to create social network in Málaga, which although it has turned from a shabby and graceless city into a metropolis with a marina, it has remained conservative in its core.

Thanks to Albert and Markus for giving me a place to rest, and also coming to spend time with me in knitting shifts in Malaga’s Ibn Gvirol square , For a bourgeois nomad like me, the question of what makes a place into a home will probably remain always open.

Almost 30 years later, and in many houses in Bosnia the walls are still riddled with shrapnel. Dzemal, my host, believes is out of neglectness. I think that perhaps it is a way not to forget. At an intersection next to his house, he told me how he and his brother Kemal were miraculously saved from a shell while changing a tire. At another intersection he pointed out the spot where a Serbian tank barrel would occasionally pop up firing shells at the city and its citizens. Sarajevo was a shooting range, and as translator to the American journalists in the city, he saw and experienced a lot. In Sarajevo - the city, the hosting and the knitting got intertwined. Igor, a friend of Dzemal, explained to me in a bar, perhaps one of the most beautiful I've ever been to, that having lost so many friends, all the problems in life seem merely technical ones that can be solved. In a film about life in Sarajevo, screened at the war museum, a rock singer says that in Sarajevo people don't make surrealist art, because existence itself is surreal. On the day I knitted, kindergarten children came to the memorial for the children who were killed, and placed balloons and flowers. On October 7, at dinner, between pasta with fresh mushrooms picked in the woods nearby, and smoking cigarettes with local tobacco, when on the huge screen in the background, or in the foreground, Al-Jazeera was broadcasting a story about Israelis and the memorial ceremonies, I suddenly felt as though this lovely family was, in a way, sitting with me on the crocheted fence - empathetic and witnessing the horrors. Kemal said that following the war and the massacre -pogrom they underwent, he watched with a feeling of kinship a lot of movies about Jews and the Holocaust. "And now Gaza?" He asked me with innocent horror, "What am I supposed to think?" Big thanks to Dzemal, Kemal, Adisa and Amar who opened their home, their hearts, and their lives to me, and supported my surreal existence there with lots of love.

 I came to knit with the small Buddhas at Daishoin Temple on Itsukushima Island (Miyajima) .Just before the gate, there is a small café. We arrived just as they were about to close. With the coffee came warm smiles and questions about where we were from. Afterward, we marked our names in the atlas that the owner opened. I explained what I do on my journey. Yumiko, the owner, kindly invited me to knit in her beautiful rock garden, sensing the essence of my journey. Knitting in this garden, with her sweet and kind-hearted offer, became a small ceremony for me. Sometimes, you set out to knit with symbols of Buddhas, and instead, you meet a living Buddha—a human being who shines with love and hospitality, giving me even more reason to continue. Thank you, Yumiko Okita and Izumi Harada, for your open-hearted hospitality. If you’re ever near Hiroshima, don’t miss this island and its beautiful complex of shrines and temples. And don’t miss this lovely little café Hexsagon cafe with its garden of rocks and lovely hearts.

For some people, hospitality and meeting strangers is a way of life — it’s a way to make acquaintances, to get to know the world and gain perspectives about it.

Thank you to Filip, who not only hosted me in Warsaw but also helped me realize just how many layers of history every Pole carries within themselves, even the young ones.

To be born in the very days of Lech Wałęsa’s revolution, to parents born at the end of the war into a Poland that was nearly wiped out, and who then lived through the communist rule; To discover that the Majdanek concentration camp lies along your daily bike route to the office (at his previous job in Lublin); And to live through the country’s shift into the Eurozone.

Perhaps realizing you’re a pawn in a game played by great powers makes you stretch your own boundaries:

Hosting Russians, Israelis, and Swedes whose presence echoes your past from all sorts of directions;

Organizing hitchhiking competitions, renting a flat in the mountains for two months and opening it up to wanderers;

Even helping organize and taking part in an underground metal festival in Iran.

Maybe when you’re born into questions like: What is freedom? What is independence? Who rules and who is ruled? —

you come to understand that human encounters can unfold beneath the radar of righteous and murderous ideology.

Thanks you Filip Gowor for all this

On the windowsill in Martha’s house in Łódź, there’s a coiled metal spring wrapped in small plaster bandages. The resemblance to my barbed wire is surprising—the coil was made before we met, and I discovered it just before we parted. Maybe it’s thanks to that resemblance that she hosted, photographed, and accompanied me, recommended sites, translated, drove me, and even took over a short knitting shift at the market. In short, I found a friend. Martha grew up in a house with bourgeois leanings on one hand and hippie vibes on the other—this was her family’s way of resisting "communism.” She can remember her parents all dressed up, sneaking under the regime's radar to "American-style" parties. When she reached high school—at the time of Poland's liberation in the 1980s—joining the Church and praying had become the new symbol of anarchism. The Church, silenced under communist Poland, presented itself as the alternative and experienced a revival in liberated Poland. So liberated, in fact, that abortions are still banned here today. Martha keeps asking questions about regulation and control. Bartek—new to Martha and new to Łódź—joined us to film, play music, and listen, to discover things from another angle. He wants to work in art and with people, but once again, he was offered work with machines—and he took it. That’s where he has experience. It turns out rulers and ideologies change, but patterns of control and liberation—less so. Thank you, Marta and Bartek, for your devoted and loving companionship in Łódź.
 

​I met Szymon Bywalec at a modern music workshop. When he said he was from Katowice, I promised to come visit. The name "Katowice" evoked in me a scent of the past. Perhaps it’s the memory of the aftershave that Ilan, the history teacher, used to wear, whose odor would reach the last bench, mixed with the memory of that Jewish conference, that made me want to visit there. Shimon is a conductor and teacher at the Academy of Music. His wife, Dorota, is a teacher of harmony and music history in high school. Szymon and Dorota were born to parents who were born during the Russian occupation, right at the end of the war. In the shops of parents who did not belong to "the party", there were more lines than products on the shelves, and you had to get up early in the morning to get in line at the bakery. Their son, Piotr, an organist who is specializing in conducting, was born in an independent Poland, which was transitioning to the Euro; The youngest daughter, Marisia, plays the violin and studies together with Ukrainian refugees; Monika, the middle daughter, studies anthropology and ethnology in Krakow - someone needs distance and perspective. Monika, to judge by a brief meeting, already seems like a citizen of the new Europe, which is also changing a lot. Szymon's mother lives with them too. Thus, in one house, people live each of whom was born in a different Poland. On the way to the forest, Szymon tells me that once upon a time, Katowice had been Bohemia (the ancient Czech Republic), then Prussia, then Germany, Poland, and again Germany, and again Poland. Then the Russians came, gave the residents a language test, and murdered his grandparents who had survived the war, because their German was too fluent. Music is a universal language. May we succeed in learning to listen to all music, beyond the jumble of human languages that are made of definitions, and may become either fences or soft bridges between people. In the pics took early morning in the way to schools - Piotr was sleeping Monika in krakow all the other here . Thank you to Szymon Bywalec, Dorota Bywalec, Piotr Bywalec, Monika, and Marysia for opening your heart and home in Katowice.

 

In Krakow, Johanna left me her apartment for three days with simple generosity. She went to the countryside. We met briefly. She teaches German at a high school; most of the students are from India and Bangladesh. Her daughter, who studied for a degree in the Netherlands, is going away next semester to study in Singapore. Johanna lives right across from the Russian consulate, which has been closed. The new playground that opened across the street was named "Liberation of the Ukraine."

At the airport, I met a boy and his mother, Ukrainian refugees living in Poland. They were traveling for a vacation in Georgia where they were to meet the Russian grandparents coming from Moscow. I must knit to soften all the borders—and fast. Too many people are getting hurt.

I met Eliza and Dawid through Adi and Ruthie whom the "situation” has also turned into nomadic refugees. They told me that David was the son of a Holocaust survivor who lived in Lodz, and that Elisa was an interesting and involved woman. They promised I would have an interesting time with them in Lodz.

We arranged to meet for a beer in a restaurant, I with the knitting and they with their dog. I was expecting to meet an elderly couple, 60+, but I found myself in the company of two relatively young people (30-40) who ask many questions in a very involved way about how to belong and why. Dawid was born to a very elderly father, a survivor of the ghetto, and seems to be living the Lodz ghetto existence to this day. Eliza deals and works with issues of discrimination and cultural diversity, ( Diversity, Equity & Inclusion trainer ) and the meeting between them is also a struggle between past and present, with Elisa trying to mediate between the two. After a beer, knitting, and a not-so-simple conversation about "heritage," "belonging" and "identity," words that feel to me - and perhaps not only me - like a kind of burn or skin infection, they recommended that I visit the backyards of Lodge, on whose walls the present and the past are still in struggle. Dawid gave me a guided tour in the accursed and neglected courtyard of the ghetto, and before parting, Eliza said that she intends soon like to curate an exhibition about war and peace and that perhaps my knitting would fit in there. The exhibition opened the day before yesterday, so if you're in the Lodge in the next two months and you feel like knitting on barbed wire, I left enough wool and barbed wire there until the end of September. The exhibition also features a delicate, tragic, and intimate poem by Ruthie Stern with animation. One of the lines lingers with me:

"Love me as if you have never been hurt."

Barbara, one of the curators of the exhibitions in the Rhine Valley, invited me to stay at her home in Bregenz. She lives with Sylla , a refugee from Mali. Being with them felt like an infusion of humanity straight into my veins.

Barbara has worked for years at concentration camps' memorial sites: Dachau, Buchenwald, and others — doing research, guiding, curating, writing educational programs. The idea that someone gets up every morning to a job that consists of meeting, containing, remembering, and reminding others of atrocities unsettled me. When I asked her why she chose to work in this field, she said: “Maybe that way I could meet the Germans feeling and mourning.”

After many years, when she finally decided to take some distance and go on a vacation in India, she received an invitation she couldn’t refuse: from the memorial site and former torture camp S-21 in Cambodia. There too she spent six years with the team - organizing, documenting and publishing the horrors of others. It seems this will become a needed profession not only for the remnants of the 20th century.

Sylla, who lives with her, fled Mali after his father was murdered before his eyes by one of the Islamist groups fighting in the bloody wars there. He went through terrible things, was kidnapped and escaped. He doesn’t want to tell everything, but I saw the scars. I understood that he reached Europe through Iran. Under the pretense of rescuing him, he was offered a chance to leave Mali for another country. A police officer put him on a plane without a passport, and he landed in Iran, where another police officer handed him over to a man who bought him. Human trafficking, it seems, has not disappeared from the world.

At 17, without a passport, with no parents or relatives, he tried to find his way in the world. He fled through Turkey and refugee camps in Greece, saw women giving birth in tents and people dying along the way. To reach Austria, he bought a passport with the photo of someone who resembled him. When he landed in Vienna, a policeman and a policewoman stopped him. The policeman said: “This is not his passport.” The policewoman said: “It could be him,” and took him for questioning. He admitted it wasn’t his passport. Because he was young, she made sure he was placed in a suitable place. Now, after rehabilitation, he works, studies German, and begins to dream of a future. I wonder how a young man who has endured such painful and wounding experiences and is still tackling so many challenges, has managed to remain warm, open, and loving.

In the exhibition Barbara curated about the wartime border that passed through this region, there is a story of a Swiss policeman, Paul Grüninger, who saved some 2,000–3,000 Jewish refugees by forging visa dates and other documents to prove they had entered Switzerland during the brief period when legal entry was still possible. He was fired from the police without a pension and died in poverty in 1972. Before his death, he was recognized by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. Sometimes all it takes is a policeman — or a policewoman — with a heart.

For Sylla, it wasn't easy to find a room in Bregenz. With Barbara he found a home. The dynamic between these two wise human beings is something between friendship, partnership, parenthood, and a deep unspoken understanding. Everything is seasoned with laughter and tears, with food and walks in the mountains. After two days with them, I felt part of a family.

As a knitter, I had not yet stayed with Israelis abroad in this journey , but Sivan, a friend and a Feldenkrais colleague, wrote to me after seeing a post: "Come knit in Tbilisi, you have a place to stay, come." It took some time and finally I arrived. We met as Israelis meet - warmth and acceptance and love and simple hospitality, but also a lot of arguments, mainly about things that we agree on.

There are many ways to oppose a regime, and it seems that it must always be opposed. There are the direct, explicit ways; and there are acts of resistance performed under the radar - refusal in action, in deed, without a statement or declaration. In my view, this is how Shalva and Sivan saved their son, Adam, from serving in the army, they simply left the country before he was conscripted. Not everyone agrees, it takes time to understand, that every conscription, and certainly in sacrificing one's life, is also a kind of abandonment, of oneself and of the other.
"Dear, I am finally writing this post about you. What is your last name?"
"Absalom. By choice. The man who defied the king, his father."

Thanks to Sivan, Shalva, and Adam Avshalom for their generous, expansive, supportive, edifying, and delicious hospitality in Tbilis