Kalameny, the Thermal Spring Way

It’s the end of June. The first wave of the coronavirus epidemic is slowly declining. Thanks to the strain of the previous months, the school holidays start a week earlier. I’m looking forward to them more than ever. We are generally exhausted. Home school, online teaching, an endless string of diseases, the rapid rise in prices of basic foodstuffs have taken us by surprise. And as if that weren’t enough, at the same time we were quite desperate to buy a new house. The burn of the hand of our ten-month-old Tobias and my back pain, which eventually ended in hospital and the subsequent inability to do anything for several weeks, were added to it. Terezka doesn’t sleep for a long time at night for two hours at a time, Tobík won’t let her. During the day she is exhausted and nervous. But Tobik´s weaning from breast-feeding for at least the night defending. This year, after seventeen years, it really seems that our literary-art workshops Ars Poetica – the poet’s spiritual path, will disappear. Almost all the lecturers who prepared it were completely paralyzed by the coronavirus crisis, and decided to give up their participation and the obligations associated with it. For two months, we tried to maintain hope and, after the restrictive measures restricting mass action had subsided, to blow up the faded zeal or at least the belief that it made sense to try it at least. We need to breathe, fall out of the circles we’re trapped in. And so we set out on the next journey. The goal is somewhat blurred – the thermal springs of Kalamena in Slovakia. The rest will tell itself the way.