My trip

I've been putting off writing about it as there is too much to say. But I suppose it's time I did it.

To start off with, the general facts:

16-18 July: Liverpool (arrived by plane from Riga, left by bus to Hull, from there by ship to Rotterdam)
19-26 July: Rotterdam; 93. Universala Kongreso (visited Amsterdam on 23. July by train)
27-30 July: London (arrived by ship to Harwich, from there by bus through Withan to London)
30 July: Oxford (arrived by bus from London, spent a few hours; from there on to Liverpool in the evening)
30 July-3 August: Liverpool (with a tour around the nearby smaller towns; back to Riga by plane)

Now that that's over with, I'll just write about whatever feels important right now...

England. I think for the first time in my life I understood what it means to love a land, not because it is expected of you or because you're at the song festival singing a patriotic song with 10000+ other people and overwhelmed by the experience, but because something inside you really feels it. For the first time I felt I loved the Earth element as well, not because it is something I once again should do, because it's useful etc, but because being there, having roots seemed like a good thing. It was a place I felt I wanted to have my roots in. I felt the strongest resonance with the local nature, which there was unfortunately very little of. But what there was felt just right. England in general felt just right. I'd been afraid that if I went there in reality, I'd be disappointed as it wouldn't match up to my expectations. But I wasn't. There wasn't much in the way of a sudden and powerful illumination, but in some more subtle ways the confidence in the reality of the connection reached me.

For as long as I can remember, my father has talked about me going to Oxford. In recent years it's become a sort of joke matter between me and my mum and some people I've mentioned it to. Suddenly, it's no longer a funny strange impossible thought. By the end of my first day in London, even before actually going to the place, I knew I'd start looking into ways to make that thought a reality. And the actual visit there. Well. I'm not sure if I should even write about it here. But I saw and experienced something that made me certain I would go back there again. The longer the time period and the closer to the place of the experience, the better.

You know, I actually feel like I've now already stated the most important. At least as much of it as I am willing to write down somewhere other people can read it. I still have much to learn here, more perhaps than I thought, more than I would certainly be aware of even now. To understand the connections of my blood and birth. But it seems inevitable that eventually my soul will take me back there. To explore connections of an entirely different kind.