Chapter 5 - The Greek Project
When a rabbit invites you to his rabbit business.
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
— Carl Jung
I decided to celebrate the New Year with Vasili by hosting our close friends for an intimate dinner. Vasili cooked lobster tails, crab legs and scallops and we drank good champagne. For dessert, we cut a Vasilopita, a traditional Greek cake that is served on New Year (also the namesday celebration for all named Vasili). Every year Vasili’s mom sends him a Vasilopita wherever he is in the world and he shares that with whoever he happens to be with. The cake cutting ritual is very cool because the 10 or so first slices are cut and set to the side to honor important Christian figures and Vasili’s family members who are not present.
The New Years celebration proved to be a threshold crossing in Vasili and I’s relationship. I think back to my time in Italy and how family dinners did wonders for cohesion and bonding and can’t help but think those same forces were at work on New Years between our entire dinner party, comprised of Vasili and I’s close friends. I say this because the day after New Years, Vasili asked if I would be interested in joining the project he and his friends were doing in Greece. I wasn’t surprised, because it had already crossed my mind and it potentially made a lot of sense, but I was nonetheless shocked in a way that made life feel like a dream. He was so nonchalant about the proposition too, Vasili is a trip like that.
Think back to chapters 2 and 3 where I was realizing what I wanted to do with my life and making plans how to accomplish it:
I would work toward existing both personally and professionally in the artistic spaces I had just left in Italy - regenerative farming and artist residencies. I knew for certain, and still do, that these were good for me. They were spaces that caught me on fire with inspiration and passion, that moved me to pursue excellence. These spaces also softened me, made me a better person, a more positive and understanding person, a slower and more deliberate person.
Chapter 3
Now this crazy rabbit boy was proposing I start an artist residency in the building that would be used as a hostel during the summer season on a Greek Island! I had a million questions, and Vasili was happy to answer them. It’s important to note here that while I believed Vasili up to this point, especially because I had met the friends he was doing these projects with, there was still a part of me that thought he was full of shit, or maybe even crazy. How many people do you causally meet who are up to the sorts of strange things Vasili is up to? Not many. Now how many of those are as nonchalant and carefree about this seemingly challenging project coming up in just a few months? None.
Vasili had spent the previous summer cycling across France with his friend, Jordan, en route to Greece, where they were scoping out areas to start a hostel. Apparently, 3 of them had found the beautiful island of Skiathos and decided that would be their hostel location. When I asked about the nuts and bolts of the plan, I was pleasantly surprised that it was solid. The rabbit was dead serious about his Greek plans, and they were good plans. He was offering me the opportunity to speed up the plans I had for myself and my life by 5 years, or maybe even a decade.
I am NOT a nonchalant rabbit. I am a rather hardworking and deliberate person. That’s not to say that Vasili isn’t, but when it comes to risk assessment, we are very different. It took a lot of courage to trust him in that moment, but I remember feeling very clearly that I should. After I said I was interested, he again, nonchalantly, stepped outside and made some phone calls. Within 10 minutes the rabbit reentered and matter of factly informed me that the group was excited to have me on board and very clearly made me understand that their enthusiasm had little to do with him asking on my behalf, but rather because they were impressed with me and confident that I had a lot to offer. That felt good.
Our human relationships are so interesting. We seem to go through bonding rituals together over time, each set of rituals existing in their own phase. As we progress through the phases, the relationship becomes richer and also expands beyond the two people originally involved. This is such a fascinating part of what we do with each other - the rules and parameters of relationships and networking strike me as almost choregraphed, or game like. After meeting person A, you can spend X amount of time with them to develop Y amount of trust. When you attain Y amount of trust, person A introduces you to person B, and you start a whole new dance with person B - replicate that a hundred times and you have a social group. A hundred simultaneous relationship dances - trust earned and lost, gifts given, secrets shared, perspective exchanged, experiences lived together, highs spent in collective effervescence, lows endured by way of gossip and social exclusion, revealing to each other what it means to be human and using each other gently in our becoming who we are.
My bonding rituals and resulting dance through the phases of human relationship with Vasili was very fun. Immediately following my invitation to what we started calling “The Greek Project”, our relationship became a partnership of creativity and purpose. All of a sudden, we were co-schemers for what felt like the most beautiful and important project in the world. Crazy how our relationships can evolve like that, from one moment to the next.
As we spent more and more time together, we came to understand what the other enjoyed most. Vasili has a deep and special relationship with perfume, it’s almost philosophical, I’d say. He also loves fashion. He has a really spectacular wardrobe of well-made garments in high quality natural materials that he has been creating over the last ten years. Much of our time was spent engaging in the worlds of fashion and perfumes, and for his birthday I decided I was going to take him to New York City, so that he could be fully immersed in these things he loved so much.
At first he refused, saying it was too great a gift. You may feel the same way he did, as we had only known each other for three months at this point. My response was adamant and two fold - I told him he deserved this gift, because he did, and I also told him to think about it as research and immersion into worlds that we would use in our work together for the Greek Project, which it was. You can’t gift people inspiration easily. Even harder to gift collaboration. Much of the value of the gift is determined by the receiver in these cases. Vasili made the gift easy and worthwhile - as soon as he brought himself to be able to accept the gift, he was lit aflame with a feverish excitement that when coupled with the lived experience in New York, would serve as a constant source of artistic energy for himself moving forward. Even today, a year later, I can see the impact of that trip together written all over him. New York is like that, if you do it right.
While Vasili had spent time in NYC before, he didn’t have the relationship I did with the center of the world. When I was 21 I spent an entire summer in Chelsea interning for two artists, Stephen and William Ladd. During that summer I helped create the Fabulous Phil mural, an enormous 40 by 40 mural made of over 35,000 handmade beads that lives in City Point in downtown Brooklyn. There were over 1000 participates creating beads for the mural. It was an amazing project and you can still see the mural there today!
During that special summer I lived in the Fashion Institute dorms and my roommate Carolina would end up becoming an amazing lifelong friend. We had a charmed summer. The picture of the skyline was the view from our dorm.
I am very grateful to have gotten to live and work in New York City for 3 months. The city has such a special place in my heart that bringing people there to experience it with me is maybe the best gift I can give someone, which I did.
Vasili and I arrived in New York the day before his birthday and stayed with Carolina and her husband Eddie. Turns out, Carolina flipped her internship into a career in New York City!
From here Vasili and I entered another new phase of our relationship - a phase where we sought out inspiration daily and together, lived the inspiration educationally and unpacked our collective growth and understanding within the context of our artistic collaboration - The Greek Project. In this phase, every experience had a different texture and air, bordering on profundity. For example, taking him to the Met Museum was us entering a treasure trove of ideas made manifest for us to peruse and sort through in or search for ideas regarding the collaboration.
Navigating the city with millions of others seamlessly and comfortably forces you to take notice of human sophistication and potential that can accurately be termed divine. Passing time at the unforgettable Cafe Sabarsky showed us what the top cafe experience in the world was like and beckoned us to consider what we could draw out from this masterpiece to inspire our own works. In our celebration of each other we dined at Cafe Gitane, a French Moroccan restaurant in NoLita, a place so good, yet so simple that it makes you feel like maybe this is how experiencing food felt like in a bygone era, one where we more grateful, or felt more deeply. We smelled all of the worlds perfumes, with talented perfumers personally taking our noses on a journey through a smellscape that felt infinitely larger than our own physical world. How can a smell you have no knowledge of transport you to a moment you have barely a memory of 20 years ago? How could that memory that barely existed now be MORE fleshed out and detailed than the moment lived just 5 minutes ago?
Our shared energy must have been apparent and available to our observers in the form of a clear aura, because every person we interacted with treated us like we were special, like we had known each other in meaningful ways for lifetimes. New York had welcomed us into its creative womb and was nurturing our minds and spirits. We ended his birthday night at an unmarked absinthe bar talking about the project and the future and after another day of exploring New York City, we returned home armed with the sort of inspiration needed to transform worlds.
The following weeks were full of creative endeavors pertaining to my business or the Greek Project and punctuated with education we sought out together. First, we took a metalsmithing workshop where we made rings, this was Vasili’s first try at this and he made something that once again confirmed the rabbit was an artistic rabbit.
Again, during a Shibori Dye class, he took an already cool vintage Abercrombie and Fitch oxford and turned it into this.
The creative momentum from New York was carrying us like a wave toward Greece, and we were riding it conspicuously, glowing and purring for the world to see.
In my dance through the phases of relationship with Vasili I met quite a few of his friends and associates. Eventually through the mad science of the choreographed networking I talked about above, I arrived at meeting Adam Jones. Adam is a famous character in Kansas City - he is known as an artist who collects old buildings, restores them to peak beauty and fills them with cool projects. On top of that, he is known for being genuine, warm, down for conversation and collaboration - dreaming up potential for the future, which is why he’s close friends with Vasili. A perfect example of what Adam does is the restaurant Vasili brought me for our first date, Clay & Fire, which Adam owns.
Anyway, when I met him and explained I was starting an art residency in the building that would double as a hostel in Greece with Vasili, his eyes lit up. Within days of meeting him, Adam had expressed interest in working with us on our Greek dreams. Another rabbit! Who are these people and how do they all find cool international projects to work on together?! How do they find each other?! Who better to get involved in the project than an artist who restores historic buildings?! Was I also a rabbit now?!
Vasili once again hopped on his phone for 10 minutes with other project members and casually informed us that everyone was excited about the new addition, but if we were going to do this, we were due for a group meeting to discuss the details. I thought, “great, it’d be so nice to talk as a group over zoom”.
Except, of course rabbits don’t use zoom.
“We’re all going to meet in Santa Barbara, it’s best we all meet in person and in a beautiful place, can you both come?”
We were going to Santa Barbara, California.
Rabbits def dont use zoom!! Glad to finally get around to reading this- great wordsmithing you wascals