From My Heart

From My Heart

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From My Heart
From My Heart
Defiant spring

Defiant spring

Spring in the paintings of Ukrainian artists, a new poem, and a story about a stork couple in love.

Darya Zorka's avatar
Darya Zorka
Apr 12, 2025
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From My Heart
From My Heart
Defiant spring
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From My Heart is a newsletter about Eastern Europe, Ukraine, Belarus, and living in challenging times. Your support allows me to share the culture, history, recipes, and stories from Eastern Europe with the world.

“Gardens started to bloom in Ukraine,” Volodymyr Sydoruk (1925-1997)

Spring has fully arrived in my town, and every time I look at bright green leaves and flowers, I feel how my body fills with warmth and joy. These days, I try to breathe deeper, notice every little petal, pause to listen to bird songs, and absorb every moment of quiet happiness. Despite everything happening in the world, far and near, flowers still bloom, new leaves emerge, birds come back, and hope, frozen and forgotten, rises anew. After all, hope is like spring – it arrives when it seems that it will never come again.

A poem I wrote this week:

***

All the icy armor 
built around my heart 
melts away in spring sunlight.

All my fears disappear 
in the sea of green leaves
and never return.

Every spring, I realize
that I don’t need 
any fortifications

when my heart is covered in flowers
and shines with the sun.

In Ukraine, spring comes with the arrival of white storks. In Ukrainian, stork is “leleka.” White storks usually mate for life and return each year to the same nest from their yearly migration to Africa, which a stork couple does separately. While Ukraine has thousands of storks, people follow the life of one particular couple: Hrytsko and Odarka. It is always a nervous moment when the male stork arrives, but the female still hasn’t, as the migration journey is full of dangers. People watch the live stream camera daily to catch the moment when the storks are reunited again.

The camera was installed by the stork’s nest in the village of Lelyaky, near the Pyryatynskyi National Park, in 2023. It was supposed to be installed in spring 2022, but Russians invaded Ukraine and surrounded Kharkiv, where the park workers lived and the camera equipment was stored. The workers later said that when they learned that the storks arrived in March 2022 despite the war, it gave them hope to survive.

This year, Hrytsko and Odarka have already returned to Ukraine. Despite the unexpected April snow, spring and hope have come with the storks' arrival.

Watch the live stream camera of the stork’s nest here


I will finish this letter with the paintings of spring through the eyes of the Ukrainian artists:

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