Worduuup, Masada (2026)

20/05/2021

More I think about it more I realize that Home has really less to do with a piece of soil but more with a piece of soul. If somebody suddenly asked me where is your home I think about my friends, my soul mates, my faith, books I read or the songs that travel with me wherever I happen to be. And it always felt this way. My home would have to be whatever I carried around inside me.

Many years of travels helped me to understand that the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new sights but in looking with new eyes. And once you have new eyes even the old sights, old thoughts, memories, knowledge, even your home becomes something different. Where you come from now is much less important than where you are going. More and more of us are routed in the future or the present tense as much as in the past. And home we know is not just the place where you happened to be born, it is a place where you become yourself.

Recently I stepped out of my life and the world so I could see what I most deeply care about and find a Home. Traveling is a fantastic privilege and it allows us to do so much that our grandparents could never of dreamt of doing. But traveling ultimately only has a meaning if you have a home to go back to. And home in the end is, of course, not just a place where you sleep; it’s a place where you stand.

And today I stand with Israel. @ Masada, Israel

20/05/2021

I’m very proud of all the people I’m surrounded with today. I’m very proud of you. And I want to thank everyone for every single warm and caring word I receive because without it I’d have no strength to keep going.

Some of you became a part of my community because of my travel experience, some of you are inspired by how I picture the world, some care about things I care much about and believe in things I deeply believe in. Some became my true friends.

Sometimes you agree with me and probably that’s why you’re here. But sometimes you don’t and I sincerely appreciate that you’re still here and that we can have real and thoughtful conversations that help us all learn and grow. At least for me it’s tremendously important. You teach me a lot!

I’m happy to see I was able to build a community of so many wise and empathetic human beings with such beautiful minds.

I have a feeling that life is spinning faster and faster every single day now, gaining incomprehensible speed and pressure and my universe is about to explode. The last two weeks have added even more horror and fear for myself, for my family and friends, and, frankly, for the whole world.

It feels much worse and way more dangerous than before. It feels like during this whole year many of us were sitting inside our houses generating hate. And today we have released it all into the atmosphere and I don’t know how our poor planet will handle it. How I can handle it.

I know you feel the same. It’s hard but please don’t feed into fear. Once you see, you can’t unsee, so I think today it’s also about learning the art of seeing and keeping your heart open and your energy high.

Remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been wars, tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall.
Think of it — always.

I wish I was a superwoman who could take on all the world's issues by myself. But I’m not, I’m a very small girl, with a pretty horrible past still believing in Tikkun Olam and with your huge and invaluable support doing my best to make this world a better place. I can never thank you enough. But this is a start.

17/05/2021

I'm telling you — be PRO Human. And in response I hear that if I am an Israeli, then I cannot be pro human by definition. Are you out of your mind or something?

I want you to realize the amount of messages, the amount of hate and the amount of anxiety I got after posting about Israel this Saturday. I do not think I deserve all the hate you showed me and all the rudeness I faced. I think that even if you deeply believe in something you shouldn’t turn someone else’s life into hell just because you think they believe in something different. And here what I believe in.

I think there is no right side in this conflict any more. All these stories about who started this conflict, who did not start it, who’s the first, who’s the second, who benefits, who does not benefit — these are all some particulars that are secondary and that my tired heart is no longer able to withstand. And it is definitely not smart and even wild to think in these categories in the middle of the 21st century. We have to move on. We must be wiser and be pro human first. Because in this new century we finally agreed to move towards equality and human rights.

I carry an Israeli passport and I’m not sorry for that. I haven’t done anything wrong.

Both countries whose passports I have are going through some horrible s**t these days. You can’t even imagine how hard it is to live in Israel or in Belarus today. And it breaks my heart. And it ruins my family and friends lives and I’m sorry but I care about them a lot. They didn’t do anything wrong. They just live their lives and do some pretty crazy cool stuff actually that helps to make this world a better place.

➡️➡️➡️ @ Masada, Israel

16/05/2021

There're so many people who daydream about the life they aren't living and the places they aren't seeing. But we're not getting any younger. Life is short. And life — is huge. You can't breathe it, you can't touch it, you can't soak it up with your skin if you are wasting your time at home.

Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sea, sky, dreams — all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it. At some point you stop feeling the ground, your everyday experience turns into a big number of stories, your life — into a virtual book you keep writing in your mind.

But once you make your first step — all the roads are open, where hungry hands are squeezing the thin waists in the reckless dance under the clouds.

After all, the very basic core of our living spirit is our passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.

In the difficult days, when you feel like your life's not complete, when the sky topples from your hands, when fate ties into tight sea knots salted with troubles, when there is no more strength to open your eyes and see all the same, you’ve lost something in your life or you're at that point in your life when you're trying to figure out how to bring it to the next level. Travel.

Travel is the discovery of truth about the world, about yourself; a proof of the promise that humankind is far more beautiful than it is flawed. With each journey comes a new optimism that whatever hardships and despair you're going through in life, there are ideas and people just waiting for you to help you to turn your world around, to inspire you, to make a difference for good. Each journey becomes a part of you, changes you, because in the long run the main journey — is traveling deep inside yourself.

The world has changed. But, I hope that soon we will be back in the same state of open roads and open souls.

05/04/2021

🎼 If you could make a soundtrack to your life, what songs would you put on it?

10/09/2020

BELARUSIAN PROTEST. CHRONICLE OF THE FIRST MONTH.

In Belarus, massive protests against a rigged presidential election have continued despite violent reprisals from riot police loyal to ex-president Lukashenko.

The present selfless struggle has already turned into a huge civil confrontation against the dictatorship. The monstrous tortures in the Okrestina detention center, the hunt for people, hematomas on the bodies that have become newspaper covers, the r**e of women and the brutal humiliation of men — all this has not yet broken people down, but only multiplied us on the streets.

On the international stage, Lukashenko has always looked like an extravagant but harmless beggar. In real life, this is a person who has proved that he has no human feelings. He doesn't know empathy. Distinguishes only signs of strength and degree of power. The danger of the moment is that he really has nothing to lose: his life is equal to his power and he takes parting with the latter literally as his physical death.

But let's sum up and see how Belarus lived this month:

1. August 9, Belarusian authorities announce that Lukashenko, who has been in power for a quarter-century, has won a landslide victory with 80% of the vote. This is widely understood to be a false claim.

2. August 9, at night, Belarusians take to the streets to defend the votes shamelessly stolen from us.

3. That night the authorities decided to use tear gas, rubber bullets, stun grenades and water cannons against all of us — peaceful people. Belarus has never seen such a harsh crackdown on protests.

4. The first 72 hours after the elections have already been called the Three Nights of Terror, because later it became known that the people detained on these days were kept in absolutely inhuman conditions: they were not allowed to drink or eat, they were constantly beaten, r**ed and tortured. They were gassed. It was no different from what the N***s did to us during the Holocaust.

5. At the first night of protests, a paddy wagon deliberately drove right into the crowd of protesters.

6. An unarmed protester Alyaksandr Taraikovsky was shot right in the chest by a unit officer.

➡️ Swipe to continue reading @ Minsk, Belarus

21/08/2020

I admire you — Belarasian people!
Admire your dignity, dedication and inner strength.

Admire everyone who fearlessly takes to the streets and enters into an unequal struggle with the armed to the teeth police.

Admire people who have endured medieval torture for their beliefs.

Admire everyone who collect money to support victims of this torture; doctors, lawyers, psychologists who provide free assistance to everyone who has suffered from the police lawlessness.

Admire our women who became a living and peaceful shield, joining hands, holding flowers and standing in long chains of solidarity.

Admire how we walk down the street in a crowd of thousands but do not enter the bike paths and stop at a red light.

Admire how we take off our shoes at peaceful protests before climbing onto a bench, how we hang up trash bags at rallies and clean up our cities before going home.

Admire how during all the days of the protests we have not smashed a single shop window, have not burned a single car or robbed a single store.

Admire the workers who go on strikes and take to the streets in thousands every day.

Admire those policemen who throw away their shoulder straps, burn their uniforms and resign because they no longer want to be the ones who shoot and cripple innocent people.

Admire the volunteers who carefully share water, food, medicine, internet and everything necessary without any help from the authorities. Contrary to the authorities.

Admire how in the midst of the pandemic we could help our doctors when the state forgot about us, how we isolated when we’re not asked to, but left our homes when we’re threatened with physical harm for just walking down the street.

And the world is silent.

The world doesn’t want to deal with a small country when dealing with the pandemic, the oil crisis and the restructuring of relations with Arab countries.

There are no oil fields, gas or strategic ports. But there are incredible people here the world is not interested in.

I admire you all and I believe we’ll defeat this dark power. Together and in spite of everything.

We’ll stand.

This hell will end and we’ll soon breathe freely.

Dear Belarusians, we’ve made History today. @ Minsk, Belarus

19/08/2020

The dictatorship in Belarus is over. Now the former president has to decide who he wanna be — Hosni Mubarak who stepped down, or Muammar Gaddafi who was finally left in a supermarket so that anyone could spit on him. From a historical perspective, there is no other scenario here.

Lukashenko proved that in order to sit on the throne and pass it on to his son, he is capable of killing innocent people.

For a long time Belarus held on to two consensus:

1️⃣ The majority supports Lukashenkо
2️⃣ Stability this majority believes in

Both consensus collapsed.

We saw that the majority was dissatisfied because Tikhanovskaya won the election.

Her victory is a fact for three reasons:

1️⃣ We created a website for online voting
2️⃣ We put on white ribbons to see each other
3️⃣ We rolled our ballots into tubules to see how many protest votes are in the ballot boxes

We saw the results of it.

But they falsified the election by early voting and twisted the voting results: we have video & audio confirmation of such a substitution.

All this led to a total protest.

The majority consensus fell apart — people saw that they were not in the minority.

The consensus on stability collapsed because people who believed in justice saw their opinions were ignored, their votes were stolen, their candidate was taken hostage and forced to read out a false appeal to the people, because they threatened to harm her husband and children and drove her out of the country.

Now. It should be understood that the Belarusian protest is not about Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. She became just a symbol.

Lukashenko made two big mistakes:

1️⃣ He underestimated Tikhanovskaya when he allowed a woman to run for president
2️⃣ He overestimated her when he decided that the day she’s out of the game the protest ends

Today we see the transformation of Lukashenko's regime from authoritarian literally to a fascist dictatorship. All the videos we see about police brutality are shocking. We've seen this in films about N**i Germany.

I ask that you help repost the information to raise awareness. Show Belarusians that you are with us. People need to be encouraged. Support and a sense of solidarity are very important. @ Minsk, Belarus

16/08/2020

Belarus has become the most important spot on the globe today. A drama of historical significance is played out here the ending of which is not yet clear.

What happened in Belarus since August 9 amazed everyone.

Belarus is indeed a very peaceful country. Belarusian protest is when you take off your shoes climbing onto a bench, occupy only half of the carriageway, stop at a red light and clean up the trash after.

But peaceful protest has been met with extreme police violence. As a result of the sadistic behavior thousands of people have been humiliated, beaten and sustained injuries, more than 6000 — detained and thrown into prisons. Alexander Taraikovsky and Alexander Vikhor were killed. More than 80 people are missing.

Hunting people here is no different from hunting animals: suddenly a police minivan appears from nowhere, they run out and beat innocent people, including women and teens.

This hunt went on for three days, everywhere — from the central regions to the outskirts, with shooting windows and balconies, throughout the whole country. All of Belarus suddenly turned into a battlefield between the police and civilians.

And then we learned how the detainees were brutally tortured. It was no different from torturing in the death camps during World War II.

Thousands of people still remain in prisons.

People are lying in their own blood, they are r**ed and stacked on top of each other. They are forced to crawl on their knees and sing the anthem. The police break fingers to get phone passcodes, torture with electroshock guns. They threaten women with gang r**e and tore their hair. People who are already caught are gassed. And this is in Belarus, in the most affected part of the world during the Holocaust!

For 26 years Belarus looked like a Soviet oasis — clean and quiet. But this is an illusion. Lukașescu was practicing killing his political opponents and now he ended up killing ordinary people.

Today the regime is based on violence and torture, an unacceptable choice between pain and life, between life and freedom, between family and political activity. And the police ready for anything is its main force.

In Europe, in 2020.

@ Minsk, Belarus

08/08/2020

You know what excites me the most about this whole situation around the presidential election in Belarus in 2020? To see how the current government kills itself with the archaic sexism it preaches.

Belarus is absolutely incredible today.

There is a triumph of feminism in local politics.

The whole country has turned into an action-packed gender thriller: the old mad man preventively jails all candidates. The wife of one of them – Svetlana Tikhanovskaya – takes the lead.

Belarusian women face discrimination within our own government that denies us gender equality. This old mad man on his potato throne still supports a misconception about the biological and mental difference and the concept of our determined gender roles given by default.

He believes a woman is not an equal human being. He broadcasts this idea of a woman who is maintaining the home, giving birth and cooking food. And can’t accomplish anything more than that.

Lukashenko has been living in self-isolation for years. He didn't make it to 2020 with us, to the world where we kinda agreed on at least some human rights versus discrimination and stereotyping based on sexual and gender characteristics. He doesn't know that achieving gender equality in political representation is essential to the functioning of democracy. Oh wait, he doesn't even know what democracy is.

There are 3 things you can watch forever: fire burning, water falling and the last dictator of Europe burying himself deeper and deeper by being wild, stupid and outdated as f**k.

He saw no threat. And then the unexpected happened – especially for such a sexist as Lukashenko. Tikhanovskaya united women from all other headquarters into a single campaign. Tikhanovskaya – just yesterday a housewife and mother of two – has transformed into a fiery Joan of Arc, people believe in her and see her as our new president.

Sexism is not modern. Sexism is stupid.

There are 3 women shining light on a system that is rife with sexism.

And I'm alarmed and proud at the same time.

Beautiful womentihanovskaya tsepkalo

Tomorrow we vote. August 10 will be an interesting day in Belarus.

@ Minsk, Belarus

28/06/2020

OUT, LOUD & PROUD
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the very First LGBT Pride March, which was held in New York City on June 28, 1970.

The Christopher Street Liberation Day March was as revolutionary and chaotic as everything they did that first year after the Stonewall riots. But that day they transformed a movement from a few ragtag militants to thousand strong — they went from the shadows to sunlight.

If you’re a white cisgender heterosexual man with a healthy metabolism thinking why after all these years the world still needs Pride, remember that straight, white and cisgender people are still the most visible people on planet earth. The level of our influence is not in sheer numbers but in freedom of representation, because our relationships, sexuality, and gender expressions are seen as the “normative” expressions, and therefore, uplifted and repeated in every community around the world. Straight, cisgender people hold hands as they walk down the street without fear of getting accosted. We watch television shows and movies, listen to music, and read books that center on our relationships and gender expression. The majority of advertisements on billboards, websites, and television center on heterosexual and cisgender people. And our governments are set up to privilege and favor heterosexual relationships above all others.

Straight people flaunt their straightness all day, every day, in every part of the world. And despite the far-right narrative that the “gays” are taking over, it is still incredibly uncomfortable at best and dangerous at worst to express yourself in ways that feel right and love who you can't help but love.

So, while we have seen tremendous progress in the fight for LGBTQ+ equality, inclusion, and rights since the Stonewall riots in 1969, the reality is that we are incredibly far from being fully equal in every realm of our society.

Pride is a crucial opportunity to reflect on the history of the movement and look ahead to the future.

And when all people are treated as equal, no matter who they are or whom they love, we are all more free.

That is the power of Pride, and that’s why pride month is so damn important!

@ Tbilisi, Georgia

26/06/2020

IF YOU’RE A WHITE CISGENDER HETEROSEXUAL MAN WITH A HEALTHY METABOLISM THINKING: “I’m okay with you all being gay, but why do you have to flaunt it in the streets? You don’t see straight people doing that!”

Though those Prides may look like giant parties, take a second and think that you get to live out and proud every single day without fear, without oppression, and without even thinking about it. That is a unique gift that majority of LGBTQ+ people have never gotten to experience.

THINK about the middle school kid for whom going to a Pride event is the only way to leave the closet, to find himself suddenly with a large tribe when previously he was lost, lonely and close to committing su***de.

THINK about all the children who still wonder if there is anyone else like them.

THINK about all of the teenagers who know they are qu**rs but cannot even begin to fathom coming out for fear of becoming homeless, for fear of abuse from their families, churches, or peers, who look out at those celebrating Pride and see a glimpse of hope that things can get better, and that they can be free, safe, and celebrated for who they are.

THINK about the old gay woman, who remembers the first riot on the Christopher Street and her friends she stood in picket lines with, fought with the police, and who are dead — for her Pride is a reminder of how far they've come.

THINK about people for whom Pride is the one time of the year that they can be out and proud of who they are. It’s the one time of the year that they can stand boldly in the streets with droves of other q***r individuals, saying that they are fully human and deserve to be celebrated and uplifted just like everyone else.

THINK about what it feels like to march through a city, freely holding hands with who you love without fearing that you’ll be accosted, abused, or mocked, to claim the streets just for one day, to demonstrate and revel in your own beauty and strength, to honor and celebrate your lives and, perhaps, with the numbers proclaim your value, to demand attention and insist on your right to exist.

THINK about all these people before you think solely about what Pride means to you.

Worduuup

20/05/2021

20/05/2021

17/05/2021

16/05/2021

05/04/2021

10/09/2020

21/08/2020

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