So I fell in love with a castle.

Reaching towards the end of the journey from Tallinn to the Rohuküla port, on the left-hand side of the road, there it stands. My castle.  But I am not being accurate, am I? It is not a castle I fell in love with, it is its ruins; The ruins of a castle; The ruins of a home; The ruins of a dream. For months it has been haunting my dreams, reaching out from the depths of my gut, calling for a spectacle. And in my world, there is no stronger call than that of a love. And there is no greater act of love than that of listening. 

So I am leaning in, to listen. 

I heard someone whisper that someday we’ll be dancing with the devils in the sauna; I heard someone dreaming, I heard us dreaming -drinking our dreaming drop by drop, drop-by-drop-dreaming; I heard a scream, mourning this glorious body gloriously decomposing out in the open; children playing and drunk women laughing their pants down; I heard songs of victory - the soil’s victory; I heard the sound of chewing the remnants of oppression; I heard, that once upon a time, a time, a long time ago, yesterday almost, here too was sea; a promise for a lifetime in a castle was whispered from one lover’s mouth into the other’s; a maiden was sucked into the earth, by a rupture, by war or her own internal desire(?) the stories do not tell; a young rich boy fell, not into the deep deep earth, but into love; a mother -It always starts with a mother, the one who feeds us grains for breakfast, the one who drinks in front of the corner store, the one who checks your ticket at the ferry, the one who refuses, refuses to let her daughter go; the one who searches for her child relentlessly; the one who grows us in her soil. 

It starts with the mother, the mother we call earth. She who flows and ebbs under our feet. She who bends head over heels to feed us. She who is easy to forget about. She who moves in the shadows like majavaimud. She who takes care. We take her powers for granted, take her humbleness as a given. As we often do with our mothers.

I ask you now, here and now, to take a moment, listen with me, listen to her, listen to the calling of the earth mother. The wind that whispers to your cheek. The blow that your ear receives. The mother I am talking about is in some places known as Demetra, others as Maaema. Kõige armastatum ema meie hulgas, tema, kes kannab meile kartulaid, tema, kelles me ehime oma juuri, tema, kes annab meile kodu. Maaema, earth mother, the mother of earth.

 

As all mothers she comes with a story, a story of loss and gratitude, a story of her own. She whispers the remains of the story to our mouths. Plays it out through the ghosts on the stage. Follow her. Listen. Pick the flowers on the way.

 

(co-written by Mia Tamme and Sofia Filippou)