Daniela Drtinová: Jewellery carries us to the stars

Journalist and presenter Daniela Drtinová has a strong intuition, and this is one of the best prerequisites for her work. She can tell if the words spoken are in line with the person saying them. She likes to ask questions in such a way as to get deep and to the core at the same time.

Where do you get your strength?
In silence and solitude. It's where I'm most 'at home.' It's also the greatest luxury for me, given that city life is accompanied by noises even at night. Fortunately, there is an 'inner silence' that can be accessed through prayer or meditation. Without that option, I wouldn't be able to exist at all. And because of this, I also have the strength and energy to function in the mundane during the day. And of course the absolutely brilliant thing is sleep.

What values do you follow in your life and work?
What I follow in my life are universally valid values, such as love, truth, harmony, compassion, inner order... Everything else derives from them, even the virtues, which, although we are not able to master perfectly due to human weakness, we should constantly relate to them. I try to be in harmony with all this in my daily life. In fact, my whole spiritual journey is based on this.

Which women in your environment do you admire? Which ones are an inspiration to you?
The women who are and have been my inspiration in life have unfortunately passed away from this world. Libuše Šafránková, my godmother, my mystical path guide and my best friend. She not only led me to my baptism, but also guided me along the 'path of the heart,' showing me that this is where the Way leads. The second woman who transformed my life left this world in the 16th century. St. Teresa of Avila. Spanish mystic and reformer of the Carmelite Order. Everything I know about prayer, I know from her.

What do you think is the essential characteristic of journalism?
What is its function, meaning and importance today?
Its function should be sorting, uncovering and cleaning.In today's flood of information, a journalist should be able to distinguish essential from non-essential information, to redact it but not to censor it, to put it in context, to sort it, to analyse it.I am convinced that the current information chaos, where no one edits information from the networks in advance, does not sort it, does not distinguish between ballast and lies, is causing a division of society and an unprecedented toxic build-up.There has never been so much nonsense in the public space as there is today, people do not know what to believe, and our tolerance for uncertainty is decreasing.Society is mentally ill.Because it is insecure and full of fears and anxieties.Our brains are not evolutionarily prepared for such an onslaught of ballast, lies, fabricated information and hatred, such as that pouring from the networks, and it is questionable whether we will ever be able to adapt in this sense.
In my profession, I would divide my work into two parts. In terms of political
as a political moderator, I'm a janitor. I clean up and sort out information, point out the dirt, contradict it, open up the closed wounds and the hidden things that are in them that can be harmful. I'm kind of an information garbage man and I take that role seriously.
In other topics, non-political, I try to bring out the beautiful, inspiring, enriching and profound.

A fundamental pillar of your profession is the art of asking questions. What question has resonated strongly with you recently?
A question that resonates strongly with me every day is my daughter's question, "What's for dinner tonight?"

Do you have a favourite piece of jewellery that you use as a talisman or to give yourself courage or strength?
Yes, I do, it's my grandmother's aquamarine ring. It's over a hundred years old and thanks to it I know that even gold as a precious metal 'fades' over time, gradually getting thinner with use. Everything passes, nothing lasts forever in this world...

How do you perceive the power of jewellery?
The power that jewellery carries for me is beauty. As a category. Something that takes us out of the mundane, the ordinary. When I look at a beautiful piece of jewellery, I feel immediately how I suddenly perceive differently, it takes me out of the stereotypical frame of thinking, I feel joy, a special kind of satisfaction. My happiness is that I don't have to own things to enjoy them. The power of jewellery, in my opinion, also lies in the fact that the personality, the soul of the person-jeweller is imprinted in the creative process. In something as seemingly 'useless' as jewellery, which we don't need to survive.Yet someone invests so much work and energy into creating it, and another will buy it, even if the money could buy something more practical.We need beauty to live, jewellery carries us to the stars.

How would you describe Janja's work?
What fascinates me about Janja is how she works with the archetype. As something that is just universally valid, but it doesn't have one specific, fixed, concrete form. People then give the archetype a partial form in art through their imagination, their fantasy. And the way Janja sees and represents archetypes is beautiful and very close to my heart. Like the Sacred Heart...