Lithuania

I fell in love with Lithuania in 1988. Somehow Ingrida and I were able to cross the boarder without being turned back, separated, held, or made to pay a bribe larger than what we could afford. We had come to Lithuania to talk with folk artists and amber masters, to get amber crosses for the priests graduating from the seminary in Minnesota as per Grandmother’s wish, and to place our own family crosses at Krustu Kalns, Cross Hill, the Hill of Sorrow and Hope.

We were driving a Soviet red Lada car that had screw drivers stuck in the windows to hold them fully rolled up and to keeping them from falling outward or inward. The car had been broken into in Rezekne by young street kids who had simply pushed the windows in. The car of course was borrowed and Ingrida was the driver as she has always been, being better at jiggling the shift and hoping that it actually got into 1st, 2nd, 3rd and with God’s help, reverse. Sweet Ingrida had bought a motorcycle when she was old enough to drive one, a little Italian-made Harley Davidson dirt bike. When she was old enough not to break Grandfather and Grandmother’s heart, she pointed it outward and had been driving since.

Ingrida drove and we talked as we covered most of central Lithuania, going down its middle and turning east towards Vilnius. Everywhere was delight. I remember how organized the Lithuanian fields were, for the kolhozas in Latvia were sketchy on their care. If one walked them, it was ripe and waste. The waste was not created with ignorance for the land but rather it came from a tired, almost exhausted uncaring about the whole.

Here in Lietuva, was care, small measures of love made visible. Trees gently pruned. A hedge tended and cleaned of parasites. Rows of roses laid down for no reason at all but that they were beautiful. Even the ditch grasses were clean and ready to be cut for fodder.

I was moved by it. So it was most fitting that as we tried to not attract attention to ourselves I was given a five foot verba, a great Palm Sunday creation of broken flax, field crop, and grasses, that showed the Lithuanian “Tree of Life.”

No one that we passed by in crowded Vilnius did not stop to look. We were like a wave that created humor and sweet concern all about us, for Easter was a world away, and we were carrying an ancient national symbol through the streets of a difficult time… a western fool and the thin Latvian woman.

It was because I was Irish, not Lithuanian, an American who probably didn’t know anything about anything that it took us just 3 hours to cross over again at the boarder. The guards could have cared less about Limewood masks of Devils, flax constructs of wise horses and spiritual birds, or the gentle womens woven belts that blessed the basic ability of a Lithuanian woman to bear Lithuanian children. They passed us through with the 12 white amber crosses tied about my neck on a rough band of leather.

The verba, The Palm Sunday weaving that the Lithuanian’s make to commemorate Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, takes the place of split palm fronds which no common person in Eastern or Northern Europe had ever had. The one I carried then is still among the very small set of things that adorn my gentle apartment in Riga. Perhaps it is the greatest thing for it is the eldest in our history, Ingrida’s and mine, that has survived in a vagary of apartments and places to stay.

Looking at it, as the summer rains slash against our ancient wood windows, I am renewed with wonder about the heart that made it so purely. Here is love and an ancient faith that forms the common into beauty and tells again the story of a People. Thinking about my being then in Lietuva, to carry such a thing through the streets of Vilnius among the police and the soldiers, in a time of struggle, then I say that I could not think of a better thing to carry. For it was not a gun which the movies prefer, nor a slogan which is only politics, but a simple form of a profound spiritual belief about an eternal return, “cut the tree down and it will grow again.” Made through the will of an artist, it gives reverence for something that is “more” in the dark nights of the soul.