Why I had to go to Latvia

I sought a way to close the circle.

Listen to this episode: “Why I Had To Go To Latvia”

It felt momentous to me, humdrum to many of the others on the plane.

It felt like being on a regional jet in the US, except it was in Scandinavia.

For me, it had been the first time anyone from my family had returned to Latvia, my mother’s home country.

My family had left there in 1945, fleeing the Red Army. 70-odd years later, I was returning. But alone - I was the only family member to make it through the 20th century.

So the trip felt momentous, even if my flight-mates were people traveling home for the weekend or a team of Swedish kids headed to a soccer game.

In late September 2016, I traveled to Latvia for the first time.

I was looking to close some circle or sequence of events that wasn’t entirely legible to me, but I knew I had to go. ⭕️

The other thing was that my grandfather’s art was part of a show called Survival Kit, put on by the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art.

I knew I had to see my grandfather’s work in the city where he had once lived.

This is what got me on this regional flight from Oslo to Riga, flying over the Baltic Sea, which appeared only as a blackness below.

I felt ambivalent and weird about the whole thing.

I wrote this about the trip not long after it:

📝 The trip was the culmination or progression of an obsessive path I had put myself on, but this made it more real. I hoped that the whole process would unlock doors for me. I would open some more profound secret or hidden level of perception that I was missing. Still, my journey felt sudden and ill-planned, and I questioned my motivation for any of this. Was I driving myself mad with all of this? Couldn’t I live my life in peace and leave it all alone?

That was my state of mind at the time, at least in relation to my search for answers about my family and origins. I had been obsessed with answers for the previous seven years, at least, so I often wondered if it was all too much and whether I should leave things alone.

But something drew me there to find answers, so that’s where I went.

I followed the plot, which I share with you in this podcast episode. I’ve talked in the past about things like embracing discomfort, honoring the ancestors, or facing dark truths, and this journey that I was making embodied those ideas.

I felt like I was coming back into contact with something dark and unknown that had haunted my family.

Or maybe I was just being dramatic and overheated about the whole thing.

I had no perspective on it then, but now I can say that my moves were right regardless of my thinking at the time. I had to go to the roots to engage in an entirely creative healing process.

I’ll let you listen to the episode for more details on all of this, but here are some pictures from the exhibit.

Listen to this episode: “Why I Had To Go To Latvia”

PS - I mean it when I say I would love to hear from you. I want to hear your questions, insights, reactions, comments, whatever. Learning how you respond helps me to understand what to talk about in the future. 🖤