Sometimes I sit with the question:
Who am I?
And I think of the lands I’ve never walked,
but which live inside me like echoes.
Not one place. Not one people.
But a tapestry of migration, myth, and meaning.
From England and Northwestern Europe, I carry the bones of ancient stone circles and the rhythm of folklore etched into rain.
This is where the hearthstone of my ancestry lives —
in mist and meadow,
in ink-stained history
and lichen-covered ruin.
I can almost feel the brush of wool cloaks
and smell the scent of peat fire.
These were the keepers of stories,
the ones who lived close to land and sky.
From Germany,
I carry the old world’s wild, forest-wrapped heart.
The land of Grimm tales and stained glass cathedrals,
of thinkers and craftsmen.
My lineage stretches through black forests
and along cobbled streets,
where myths walked beside men
and every town had its tale.
There is structure here, but also shadow.
For these people migrated to a new land,
whose influence would intertwine with the Slavic spirit.
Ukrainian rhythms,
language,
and customs seeped into our daily life.
We became something in between,
we became a people of the black sea.
Ireland pulses like a heartbeat in my blood.
It’s thunder.
The songs,
the sorrow,
the wild green defiance of it all.
I carry that, too.
The grief and the magic.
The kind of love that bends like sea wind but never breaks.
I understand why I cry at Celtic music —
I was never just listening;
I was remembering.
Wales gave me a quiet kind of fire.
The dragons still breathe in their hills,
And within me.
The Welsh were poets and warriors,
bards who knew how to turn pain into melody.
It is from them, I think,
that I learned how to hear what’s unspoken —
how to find transmutation between heart and word.
Sweden lingers in me like snowlight on the edge of a forest.
I feel the ancient rhythm of long winters and the warmth of survival.
The Norse spirit is there, not in conquest but in continuity.
Stillness, strength, fire in the cold.
From the Netherlands,
I carry the memory of windmills and water,
of survival against tide and time.
A people who learned to bend the world gently to their will,
who planted tulips in defiance of despair.
I wonder if that’s where my practicality comes from,
my need to make beauty out of adversity.
And then, tucked in like a final flame, Spain.
It sings in the back of my soul like a guitar string plucked in twilight.
It’s the scent of orange blossom and the slow burn of passion.
The Moorish arches,
the Roman roads,
the shadow,
and the sun.
It reminds me that not everything about me has to be cold or quiet.
Some parts are allowed to smolder.