Dear ones,
When I first learned that I would have the opportunity to take my daughter, Eva, to the solstice gathering at Song Hill in 2019, I had a rush of understanding. The emotion that overcame me made it hard to breathe — a mixture of grief and excitement and longing.
Finally starting to understand how important it is to sing these songs of my heritage on this particular land, on this day, and to have the honor of bringing my fourteen-year-old daughter with me — it was beyond my capacity to process. It was overwhelming.
And then I got to see my first pirts practitioner there as well, doing dry whisking. To see the bonfire surrounded by flowers and the weavings that encode the symbols of cultural memory. I will never forget that day.
Song Hill — Tautas dziesmu kalns — is not simply a beautiful place in the Gauja valley. It is a place where, in the national consciousness, symbolic importance has accumulated over time, connecting with the values of freedom, unity, identity, and belonging. Beginning in 1985 and through the years of the Singing Revolution between 1986 and 1991, people gathered there every Sunday, united in Latvian folk songs, to sing out their longing for freedom and to strengthen their sense of belonging to their land and to one another. That nonviolent resistance — song as sovereignty — is woven into the very ground of that hill.
The hill was created in honor of the Latvian folk songs and their collector, folklorist Krišjānis Barons, who compiled the dainas in a unique Folk Song Cabinet, now entered in the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme. These are not merely songs. They are the encoded wisdom of a people — their world order, their values, their survival.
To sing them on that land, at solstice, surrounded by oak leaves and flower crowns and fire, is to participate in something ancient and alive. It is to understand, in your body, what cultural memory actually means.
Now, seven years later, I am once again returning to Song Hill with my daughter and others, as part of our Matriarch Makeover Solstice and Pirts Retreat in Latvia. I am beyond excited.
For this solstice, I invite you to find a song or two from your own lineage — songs of nature, songs of resistance or freedom, songs of unity. And to know that when you sing, you will be singing with people all over the world, in unison.
That is what Song Hill has always known.
With care and respect,
Maija
