KashiaExplores: Tales of Discovery

“Ważne są dni, których jeszcze nie znamy” — “Important are the days we do not know yet.”
I first heard Marek Grechuta’s voice drifting through a scene in Boys Don’t Cry. The melody stayed with me long after the film ended. There was something tender yet steady in the way Grechuta sang about time, loss, and resilience — as if he knew that sorrow, too, could be gentle if we let it. The song is about confronting tragedy, about the quiet art of continuing. It promises that even after everything breaks, the heart can still be warm — still hopeful.

Then came “Przez ile dróg,” the Polish version of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
I remember hearing it and recognizing, even as a child, that its questions reached far beyond translation. How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?
That was the first time I realized how often art travels unseen — borrowed, adapted, sometimes uncredited. Many of the songs I thought were Polish had been carried across borders, re-born in another language.

This one, though, had a special place in my childhood. It opened every new school year — a kind of anthem for beginnings. I can still hear it echoing through the school hall, soft and solemn, as we stood in rows with ribbons in our hair and new notebooks in our hands.

Later came The Beatles — “You Say Yes, I Say No” and “Yellow Submarine” — and “California Dreamin’” by The Mamas and the Papas.
Those songs arrived with my first English lessons, when I was thirteen. Our teacher believed music was the best way to learn a language, and she was right. She sang with us, taught us the rhythm of English through melody. She also led the school’s music club and shared stories of her own adventures — sailing through storms, learning sea shanties, collecting songs like postcards from faraway harbours. Her voice and her stories made me want to explore life in the same fearless way.

From there, the road led to Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison.
“Mercedes Benz” and “People Are Strange” were the first songs I learned by heart.
The first — a tongue-in-cheek prayer for comfort in a world obsessed with possessions — felt oddly familiar. I grew up with little, but never felt poor, because I had music and books.
The second became the anthem of my adolescence. I was sixteen, standing at my first punk concert, meeting Żaneta and Zuzanna. I had always felt like an outsider, awkward and unseen, and “People Are Strange” mirrored that feeling perfectly. It made loneliness sound like a song instead of a wound.

These songs — from Grechuta’s quiet hope to Joplin’s raw laughter — form a map of the inner places I’ve travelled.
Each melody is a compass point, each lyric a memory.
Together they tell the story of who I was becoming: a listener, a wanderer, a dreamer still learning to hum along to the rhythm of her own life.