quilt

I was born white. Caring family, mom and dad, a country that was just one year from getting out of the Soviet Union and 14 years before joining the European. My passport said Latvian, and I believed it to be true, until I lived to my teens and figured out I’m quarter Latvian, Polish and Belorussian, quarter Jewish, half Russian with a hint of German blood. Half of my family was Old orthodox, quarter Jewish, and remaining quarter christened me to be Catholic – then I took the nationality out of my passport stating I belong to them all. Living in an independent country with a bunch of interdependent people, being able to speak loud, say what I want, without too many consequences.

Dad did his best to teach me how to carefully pick my principles and stick to them until I die and never betray any, nor ever to change my beliefs. I grew to learn he was all wrong. Mom did her best to teach me unconditional love – those lessons brought me to some harsh outcomes, but probably that’s a part of the lesson as well. Do whatever makes you happy, if it doesn’t harm anyone else, is the lesson I’m sticking to – hopefully this one stays with me until I die.

We are different, all of us; skin colours, behaviour patterns, religions, names. “You have to grow up and learn all people are following the same patterns,” once said one of my employers, and all I learned ever since was that despite wars and betrayals the world can be beautiful, it can depend on an angle you’re looking from, and she was also wrong. The way you can hug a person in one country and cannot enter a private space of somebody in another one is just a dance with some certain rules; you might not know them but you’re still leading your part. Actually, you might not like dancing at all, but you were born in your dancing shoes, so don’t fuck it up.

Quilt is a multi-layered textile, traditionally composed of three layers of fiber, combined using the technique of sewing the layers together. You, me, each of us in this room, we are just a multi-layered textile cloth sewn together to cover the globe. We are a good large quilt, all of us, and there have been so many times I’ve damn hoped the stitches will never fail.

I know three and a half languages, two of them I talk while sleepwalking. My family lives in five countries and I have friends living in more countries than I can count. The least thing to learn is the ability to be grateful in as many languages as you can, even if the only thing to be grateful for is the fact that this planet speaks more than six and a half thousand languages, and I believe each of them has a word for love.