In July, I presented preliminary research on Estonian folklore and depth psychology using the work of James Hillman and Mary Watkins at the Fates and Graces Mythologium.
Thanks to the wonders of modern technology you can watch the presentation. I would love feedback, comments, criticisms, etc.. Let’s start a conversation. I recommend you set the speed to 1.25 or 1.5 instead of normal speed.
I will be presenting at the Fates and Graces Mythologium on Friday, July 28 at 2:00 PM. My presentation is called “The Forest as Cultural Heart of Estonians.”
The Mushroom King from Estonian Folklore
In Estonian folklore, the forest forms an integral cultural theme that serves as an anchor for “Estonianness,” culture creation, and nation building as outlined by Atko Remmel and Tõnno Jonuks. However, due to historical and linguistic challenges, Estonian folklore has been underrepresented in mythology studies in the USA. Read more here.
There are three days of amazing presentations by mythologists from around the globe. Registration to stream the event live closes on July 25th. Want to learn more about his amazing conference taking place in Southern California and on-line? Then check out the Fates & Graces Mythologium program and all the amazing mythologists who will be presenting.
Image by Henri Apell from Pixabay
The net of colonialism is wide with tiny openings from which almost no one escapes. Growing up in the USA I learned that we were the colonizers of the land upon which the nation sits. Despite the emergence of the USA out of the belly of other colonial powers, those who founded the USA continued the same practices as the British, French, Spanish. and Russian powers that began the occupation of North America. As has happened again and again throughout history, the new rulers are the same as the old rulers.
Growing up in California in the 1960s and 1970s and going to university in the 1980s, my cultural milieu was the Civil Rights movement, Second Wave Feminism, Post-Colonialism, Post Modernism and post post. My parents were immigrants to the USA and as such I was positioned as the colonizer who took the land and forced the indigenous people to adopt Western lifestyles under penalty of death. Therefore, I adopted the position of supporting those who had been colonized while not understanding the complexity of colonization despite years of study.
Then I came to Estonia, the land of my father. Estonians are the indigenous people and have been colonized for almost eight hundred years, excluding the period between the twentieth century’s world wars and the last thirty two years. And I am half Estonian. Wow!
In Estonia, my veil of separation between the colonizer and the colonized has fallen. I am at once the victim of centuries of colonization and coming into a colonized country as an someone from an imperial power. I feel lost. Before I came to Estonia, I knew the basic outlines of Estonian history. Yet as I walk on the land my ancestors walked on I am learning different types of knowledge. I am learning as someone whose history and ancestors are part of this story and as someone coming from the USA into a small country that has fewer people than the city in California in which I had been living.
Intellectual understanding of one’s role in the industry of colonization is not the same as walking in the colonized lands. The added benefit of Estonia is that it has not been colonized by the USA, so I could experience one part of the equation without my embeddedness in another part.
One aspect of colonization is forcing the colonized to speak the colonizers language. Yet Estonians have maintained their language and here I am studying it. It’s a different way of thinking than American English and in my learning journey, I am slowly coming to understand that.
For approximately 700 years, German nobility, merchants, and clergy ran things in Estonia, no matter if the land was under the control of Germans, Danes, Swedes, or Russians. That is until WWII, when the Soviet Union became the occupying power creating an exodus of Baltic Germans to the motherland of Germany. Baltic Germans where the German nobility who lived in Estonia for generations and ran the government, controlled the serfs (the Estonians), and whose language was German.
Those few Estonians who rose about the class of house-hold servants, serfs, or artisan culturally assimilated into German norms and language. Even Estonian folklore studies originated from occupiers. Yet through all this, Estonians maintained their unique language.
I can see things here that are invisible to me in the USA. In Estonia I feel the emotional trauma of having to fit into a system that someone else dictated. And that someone else kept changing: German, Polish, Swedish, Russian, Nazi, Soviet. And yet the people survive.
I come from a place of privilege as being white in the USA aligns one in the position of the colonizers because the benefits of being a colonizer are automatically bestowed on you. Of course being a woman, I am also subject to the discriminatory practices and limitations placed on women by the colonizers. Yet in Estonia, I am perceived as Estonian by most people who speak to me in rapid Estonian until they realize I am a second-language learner. When I explain my father was one of the many who fled the Soviet occupation to avoid death or banishment to Siberia, then I become a cousin of Estonian culture.
I can see so much here in Estonia and this an intrinsic part of culture in the USA. I am grateful for this new perspective.
Gathering Sounds: Field Recording with the Rainbow Family by Tenali Hrenik
This lavishly illustrated, multimedia, full-color you-are-there experience is a celebration of the annual Rainbow Gathering, a free non-commercial outdoor event held in remote locations building a loose-knit community of kindred spirits all around the world for over fifty years.
This ethnographic and folkloric listener guidebook from author and radio and podcast producer Tenali Hrenak features over a hundred interactive aural experiences drawn from a quarter century of Rainbow Gatherings, as well as copious illustrations and essays from nine contributors including me, Karin Zirk.
A teaser of my essay that is included in the book
Hrenak has been doing field recordings at Rainbow Gatherings for over twenty years and this richly ethnographic books is full of amazing recordings and interesting reflections on the gathering and these recording.
Learn more at gatheringsounds.org.
Available now in hardcover and paperback (B&N has the best price): Barnes & Noble | Bookshop | Amazon
Or buy the ebook: Gumroad | Purchase List
According to the experts, emotions are a form of energy and the better we are at managing our emotions and understanding what they are trying to tell us, the more positive our outlook and the healthier our bodies. Over the years, I have had ups and downs in terms of how well I manage my emotions. Long term stress definitely takes its toll on me as I find when I am tired, it is easy to allow negative emotions to overwhelm me. When I sleep well, positivity comes more easily and my emotional watch dog is ready to spring into action at a moments notice and keep me balanced.
But there is another situation that requires huge amounts of emotional energy and it’s related to being a newcomer in a land where I am at once the outsider and the insider. I am an insider as my father was born and raised in Estonia along with most of the paternal relatives. I am also an outsider as I was born and raised in the USA.
The type of emotional energy I am thinking about today is the kind that we use to take on difficult challenges, enter into hard conversations, or put our selves into uncomfortable situations. You know what I mean: that job interview, conversations with your sexist/racist/homophobic family member, or doing something brand new that you terrifies you, but which you still desire.
Every day I am doing two or three or sometimes four of those activities that require loads of emotional energy just to show up and try again. Most days I manage it with the help of some dark chocolate and sheer grit and the belief that I can do anything (even if that doing is unfolding at a snail’s pace).
I am grateful for the emotional experience. In the USA, I understood on an intellectual level how hard life is for immigrants and I understood on a familial level as well since both my parents emigrated to the USA. Growing up first-generation American-born, there was always a distance between “in here” or in our family and “out there” or in the USA. However, by the time I was old enough to perceive this distance, my parents had already lived in the USA at least ten years, if not longer. I did not experience the steep part of the learning curve that my parents must have.
Now I am experiencing first hand how much emotional energy it takes for refugees to land in a new place, for new immigrants to get up every morning and create a new future, or how those separated from their emotional support system find the determination to get up every day and put themselves into a new and challenging situation.
I wish that everyone had the opportunity I am experiencing so that there would be more compassion in the world towards newcomers in our communities, no matter where or how they may be formed.
Photo of Karin at the Ceremony
Today is Estonia’s Independence Day and today we celebrate one hundred and five years since declaring independence. Independence from Russia and the German overlords wasn’t achieved on this day in 1918, but the declaration of independence known as the Manifesto to the Peoples of Estonia (Estonian: Manifest Eestimaa rahvastele) was first read in the town of Pärnu on the 23rd of February, then printed and read in Tallinn on the 24th of February 1918.
From the Manifesto:
Never in the course of centuries have the Estonian people lost their ardent desire for independence. From generation to generation the secret hope has endured in Estonians that despite the dark night of servitude and violent rule by foreign peoples the time will come in Estonia “when all splinters, at both end, will burst forth into flames” and when “Kalev will reach home to bring his children happiness.”
While Estonian counts 105 years of independence, the country was occupied for almost half this time by the Russians, Germans, Nazis and Soviets. The restoration of independence only happened on August 20, 1991 a mere 32 years ago. As you can imagine, many of the people who brought about the current era of independence are still alive. The blue/black/white flag predates the first period of independence and was born out of student organizations in the 1800s. According to one of my teachers, even dressing in blue/black/white colors during the Soviet Occupation was grounds for arrest and being sent to the gulags. Yet people still kept their flags!
Today, I joined in celebrations at Tähetorn (the legendary observatory), a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
I am disoriented as in the USA I don’t celebrate Independence Day in the rah rah barbequing beer drinking fireworks way common in the USA. Instead, I go to the woods to pray for world peace and celebrating Interdependence Day.
Today is new to me, but as my father was born during the period of the first independence struggles and named after an Estonian hero, I am embracing the holiday and sitting with the conflicting emotions and sadness because my father was never able to return to his homeland. When you are a very small nation, independence is not given and for most of recorded history Estonians were the peasants and serfs, ruled over by Danes, Swedes, Germans, and Russians – although in the Swedes favor, they abolished serfdom when they ruled the country.
Enjoy my photos from today and my greatest wish is that all peoples in every nation no matter how small be free to live peacefully as they wish.
As Doctor Seuss’ Horton said:
Do you see what I mean?… They’ve proved they ARE persons, not matter how small. And their whole world was saved by the Smallest of ALL!
Estonians at the ceremony
Estonian Folklore book Eesti Rahva Ennemuistsed Jutud by FR Kreutzwald
I love libraries. They hold secret worlds hidden on dusty shelves and inside plain brown or green covers. In high school I would ditch school and go to the library where I would read, read, and read: animal husbandry, history, novels. I would check out as many books as I could carry and then inhale ideas I understood and many I couldn’t quite grasp.
I wander the stacks at the University of Tartu library (raamatukogu) and I can’t even comprehend the titles, let alone the books. I want to inhale the ideas of Estonia like I once inhaled books in English. These Estonian (eesti) books keep their secrets from me. The raamatukogu has books in English, but I want to be able to read all the books in the library (I know it’s a fantasy).
Photo of Estonian fiction shelf in University of Tartu Library
Instead I pull books off the shelves and try to comprehend the table of contents, flip through the books looking at images, or just look at the book design as if these pieces of the book could in any way represent all the amazing ideas within the covers.
Instead I struggle to read Kadri — an Estonian young adult classic by Silvia Rannamaa first published in 1959. And of course I study the magic key: Estonian.
I hope one day to be able to at least be able to easily read the table of contents of all these mysterious books.
Where did all these people disappear to?
Some days I feel like the paternal side of my family came from thin air. Living in Tartu, the only traces I experience of my Estonian family are the tombstones in the cemetery and a scattering of photos.
The Soviet occupation separated those who were inside and those who lived in the west. My Estonian grandmother had six children and for the last twenty-two years of her life, had no children in Estonia. Three died young. One disappeared in Russia during World War I at the age of nineteen or twenty. My father escaped the Soviet Union during World War II and his brother had left before the war to study engineering. Both my father and my uncle hid their Estonian memories from their children.
A photo of a farm where the memories they shared with us where made but no knowledge of where that farm was, who the uncle was who farmed it, or if I have distant cousins living on the farm.
Photo of my grandparents with my uncle and father (shortest).
If it weren’t for the tombstones, I might imagine that my father did not come from Estonia or that his survival was fabricated. The line drawn between the Soviet Union and the “west” still continues to haunt my life, long after the Soviet Union’s demise.
My father in front of a bike with his mother and father.
Some days I feel like one of the bus loads of tourists at the grassy knoll in Dallas, Texas, searching for the missing clues that would reveal what happened to John F. Kennedy almost sixty years ago. Only I’m searching for clues from eighty years in the past.
(just a bit of IT humor to start off the year)
Estonian flag as map of Estonia: Stasyan117, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
I’ve been in Estonia since the end of August 2022 and arrived here without processing all the challenges I faced during the previous two years. But this is a new year and I’m thinking about being in a new location, where my old patterns of coping don’t really work. I arrived in Tartu without expectations, and still it has been hard. Learning a new language, failing tests, and navigating a country that relies on being a formal resident with participation in their electronic systems for everything (when I am not) has made me dig dig onto internal and external resources to survive.
Image by -Rita-👩🍳 und 📷 mit ❤ from Pixabay
Just being a vegetarian outside of California has been an eye opener. Living in California, I know we have it good, but we have it good because we made it good. Californians have thought about food, cooperatives, health, organics, the planet, air pollution, and how to live on an increasingly fragile planet for decades. During the Summer of Love (1967) there were approximately 3.4 billion people on the planet. Today here are just over 8 billion or more than double since the explosion of living lightly on the planet started in West Coast communities. In my United States’ circles, we have a saying “the hippies were right.” Once a fringe movement (for some people not me), the ideas put forth in the late 1960s and 1970s are the ones that if broadly implemented will create a livable planet for humans and other creatures.
I didn’t become a vegetarian until ten years after the Summer of Love, but since I joined the club, I’ve been able to rely on all the great stores focused on vegetarian and vegan lifestyles that arose from West Coast hippie culture. That is until I landed Eestis (in Estonia).
Image by Anemone123 from Pixabay
The teaching and learning methods I grew up with in California and used all through my graduate studies, don’t apply to my language learning classes here. The method seems to be based on first language acquisition instead of second language acquisition. As someone who grew up outside of Europe, my previous learning methods did not prepare me for Estonian teaching methods. I have had to learn how to be at the literal bottom of the class after a lifetime of being in the top 10% of class without too much effort. I have had to adjust my attitude big time!
Between not eating well and trying to keep up with a class driven by the achievements of medical students in their late teens and early twenties, I was on the path to a melt down.
My classes ended in mid-December. Since then, I’ve been able to re-balance my life, my eating habits and my Estonian language studies. I’ve visited family in Sweden, am trying to eat better, and continuing to study in a more balanced fashion.
My goal for 2023 is to study and write about Estonian mythology and maybe even learn Estonian!
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
18th Century wooden house
Tartu is not one of the oldest towns in the world, but everywhere you go, there are references to the first millennium of the common era, remnants of walls built to protect various peoples and places, and much of the town dates to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
I too am old, although not on this scale. At the university with my 20-something classmates studying Estonian (eesti keel), I feel old. Mentioning things that happened in the 1970s is ancient history to them.
Although the town and the buildings are very old (väga vana), Tartu is young and lively. No doubt the presence of multiple universities and thousands of students helps create this vibrant, active city.
Photo of old town Tartu and the Emojogi river
Amidst all this liveliness, I feel unmoored. I’m not who I was without the stories of my life. Yet I’m not a new person either. Sixty plus years of experience, education, and community activism have been erased. I am just an old woman trying to learn a new language. While I meet many young people on this adventure, some by choice, some due to war, I feel alone in my age bracket, floundering to find my footing.
C.G. Jung argues that at my age I should be working on integration between the inner and the outer, my journey towards death, and the opportunity to see and perhaps fulfill my destiny. The turn should be inwards, towards the mysteries of life and yet…
I come from a culture obsessed with the young, the new, and the shiny. I carry this baggage in me even though intellectually I reject it. I am caught between the journey I thought I was taking and the one life handed me. In between these two places is the life I wanted to live.
When I first visited Estonia in 2017, I was transported into an imaginal memory reel of my father’s life and tribulations, which gave birth literally and figuratively to my life. These challenges created both my drive to treat life as an adventure and the impediments to my desired experiences. Now that I am living here, the past is not some sentimental journey but rather a passage into the future.
Each day in Tartu, I awake excited to learn, explore, and expand my horizons. To step outside the bling of the USA and the constant battle over money. Here is a post-Soviet, post-occupation world that I am struggling to read and understand. Today it is almost five weeks that I have been in Tartu and perhaps my zip zip attitude of wanting to understand it all is holding me back from experiencing it all. No wonder I keep getting slapped down.
