There's room for everyone

Dear Crew,

For a long time, I thought that one's origins had to be clear-cut. You come from somewhere. You belong to something—a family, a country, a culture, a history.

It's just that my life never really fit that idea very well.

The more I searched, the less clear it became. And the more vivid it became.

In the past, I might have tried to figure out which of these stories is the most important. Where my true roots lie. Which world is truly mine .

Now I'm wondering something else: What if they all have room?

I don't want to put my ancestors on a pedestal. I want to get to know them.

These people didn't just suffer. They laughed. They fell in love. They probably did some completely crazy things. They were brave and cowardly, generous and difficult, creative, headstrong, and funny.

And above all, they had something we tend to forget when we think of our ancestors: a future. They didn't know what would happen next. They, too, had dreams and aspirations. And there were things they themselves would never get to experience.

Ever since then, I've been thinking differently about ancestry. I'm not just a descendant of their past. I'm a possibility for their future. And that future looks quite different from their world.

Right now, I'm in Helsinki with my boyfriend.

I dance outside in the morning to electronic music. We sample caviar in a market hall—something that has been part of my family history since I was a child. We spend a long time in the cathedral and then admire the art in its crypt in the basement. Then we have coffee there. Later, I fall asleep on a park bench under a rowan tree. We come across birch trees, magpies, and reindeer. At night, the full moon shines over the bay.

And we're finding spiderwebs everywhere! At least twelve!

Small and large spiders scurry around in them. They live there, weaving and moving among their threads. The webs are close together. It’s a whole neighborhood of spider families and spider lovers.

I had to laugh. Because maybe I've spent far too long trying to understand my life as a family tree. But now it looks much more like a web.

A circle answers an important question for me: How can everyone have a place?

The same goes for heritage. When I embrace my Baltic roots, I’m not turning my back on my German or South American roots. When a new relationship develops, it doesn’t erase an old one.

Turning toward something is not the same as turning away from it.

Perhaps the problem only arises when we turn differences into a hierarchy—when one culture must be more important than another. That’s when we start fighting over positions.

I don't want to switch places. I want to replace the hierarchy with a circle—a circle in which no one has to become smaller so that someone else can be bigger.

A net raises the next question: How can everyone be connected without one person having to bear the entire burden?

Maybe that's exactly what a relationship is. Not merging. Not sameness. But rather: You remain you. I remain me. And a bond can form between us.

My partner and I don’t have to see the world the same way. We can sit together in a church and each experience something different there. We can take a trip to Estonia because I’m moved by an old family story—and he thinks it’s sure to be a special trip and that we’ll find some good Estonian food. There’s room for both.

Tomorrow I'll turn 44.

And tomorrow, of all days, we're taking the ferry to Tallinn. There, bonfires will be lit by the sea in the evening.

When we were planning this trip, I simply thought that a sea crossing like this would be a wonderful way to spend my birthday. It wasn’t until after we’d made our decision that I found out that, of all days, an annual traditional festival with bonfires by the sea takes place in Tallinn on my birthday.

Only now do I understand what a gift lies within it.

For some time now, I've been imagining my ancestors gathered around a fire — a pretty colorful bunch. And tomorrow, I'll literally be standing by a fire. In Estonia. With all these stories inside me.

With my German, Baltic, and South American roots. With people whose names I know, and all those whose names have long since been forgotten. With the difficult ones, the funny ones, the devout ones, the wild ones, the loving ones, and the headstrong ones.

There's room for everyone.

Maybe we'd been planning this for a long time. And I was just the last one to realize it. And the only one with a calendar and a ferry ticket.

A church and a rowan tree. Ancestors and electronic music. Caviar and a campfire. The Baltic States and South America. Roots and wings.

None of it has to win. The variety is the picture.

And tomorrow I want to celebrate it—not as the conclusion of my story, but rather as a brief moment by the fire within a much larger web.

Because my ancestors aren't just people who came before me. They, too, once had the future ahead of them. And I am one of the possibilities that emerged from that.

A woman dancing around a fire somewhere in Tallinn 44 years later.

Perhaps vitality is not the opposite of transience. Perhaps its preciousness stems precisely from that.

And maybe that's why people have been dancing around fires for millennia.

With love, wind, and smoke in my hair,
Jeannette