Every journey to Northern and Eastern Europe brings its own, singular, time of discovery and reflection. For thirty years Ingrida and I have journeyed across Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Germany and Poland talking with folk artists, collecting folk tales and studying culture. In the small markets and festivals, in out of the way little stores, in barns and granaries we’ve purchase folk art. Among gracious masters of their craft we have purchased amber.
Together Ingrida and I have born testament to such fragile things as the thin trees that rise from the little islands in Swedish waters. Together Ingrida and I have watched some of them fall to bones. Yet the rocks that the trees grew upon will be there for our children.
Together, in a world of change, we have watched borders open that once were closed, great cities rise like slumbering giants out of a forced stagnation. Though every harbor that we knew has changed, we can still feel the same tension that we felt thirty years ago in those who travel along side us and whom like us are coming home after a distance of time and place.
These lands, waters, skies, and languages have shaped us. We in turn have marked their history with personal memory. Such history is a foundation that new memories should be built on. In moment upon moment we bind again our souls with the land, the sky, the sea, the ancient 3 elements, and to the common people who still hold these elements dear in the vast room of their hearts.
A journal is but a record of when a soul has time for words. It is a wonderful little, as changeable as the soul is changeable, and as limited as to what quiet one may find in a day or a night. So here dear reader is the little, done with love, made to make the quiet, sleepy moment, more, in those delicious long lasting lights, which spread out through the day and seem to ask great night not to come so quickly, which is the joy of Northern European summers.
Swedish Waters
Together Ingrida and I have born testament to such fragile things as the thin trees that rise from the little islands in Swedish waters. Together Ingrida and I have watched some of them fall to bones. Yet the rocks that the trees grew upon will be there for our children.
Together, in a world of change, we have watched borders open that once were closed, great cities rise like slumbering giants out of a forced stagnation. Though every harbor that we knew has changed, we can still feel the same tension that we felt thirty years ago in those who travel along side us and whom like us are coming home after a distance of time and place.
These lands, waters, skies, and languages have shaped us. We in turn have marked their history with personal memory. Such history is a foundation that new memories should be built on. In moment upon moment we bind again our souls with the land, the sky, the sea, the ancient 3 elements, and to the common people who still hold these elements dear in the vast room of their hearts.
A journal is but a record of when a soul has time for words. It is a wonderful little, as changeable as the soul is changeable, and as limited as to what quiet one may find in a day or a night. So here dear reader is the little, done with love, made to make the quiet, sleepy moment, more, in those delicious long lasting lights, which spread out through the day and seem to ask great night not to come so quickly, which is the joy of Northern European summers.
Swedish Waters
One of the most beautiful parts of a voyage from Sweden to Tallinn or Riga is the long quiet sail from Stockholm through the archipelago of islands to the open sea. For those who know the unpredictable Baltic, it is a time of gentle waters before the rough and tumble of open sea waves. Ingrida and I use it as a time of rest, a time of romance, where we may sit as a couple softly before a window and mark together the islands of our past and present.
Tallinn Harbor, Estonia
My wedding ring fell off my finger as we sailed from Tallinn to Helsinki on a Russian ship 30 years ago. It was a simple pounded circle of bronze two sizes too big which the extended family that had been left in Latvia was happy to get at all. Ingrida was weeping then as the spires of Tallinn were receding and the Russian soldiers were yelling for us all to get inside so we wouldn’t see what military ships were in the harbor. As I comforted and then gently tried to move her away from the badly painted railing to the deck door, the perfect ring slid off and fell cleanly into the rolling waters. Its loss made Ingrida cry the more as we were shoved through the door into the ship’s barren center room by the soldiers with rifles and the shades on the few windows were pulled down and guarded.
I always see the little ring in my mind, the holy bronze buffed as golden as the female sun, when ever we sail into Eesti’s great harbor and the spires of her ancient churches rise up into the light. I kept telling Ingrida then, those many years ago, as we leaned together on thin plastic chairs taking what comfort we could from the warmth of each other, that we hadn’t really lost the little ring. It was there, in the sea, guarding a gate to an older world which we had just joined; an older world that somehow was still surviving by a simplicity of faith and an idea of promise… the faith which we had just pledged, the promise which we had vowed to struggle to keep.
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