Karin E. Zirk's Blog, page 3

Gathering Sounds: the book

Gathering Sounds: Field Recording with the Rainbow Family by Tenali Hrenik

This lavishly illustrated, multimedia, full-color you-are-there experience is a celebration of the annual Rainbow Gathering, a free non-commercial outdoor event held in remote locations building a loose-knit community of kindred spirits all around the world for over fifty years.



This ethnographic and folkloric listener guidebook from author and radio and podcast producer Tenali Hrenak features over a hundred interactive...

Emotional Energy

According to the experts, emotions are a form of energy and the better we are at managing our emotions and understanding what they are trying to tell us, the more positive our outlook and the healthier our bodies.  Over the years, I have had ups and downs in terms of how well I manage my emotions. Long term stress definitely takes its toll on me as I find when I am tired, it is easy to allow negative emotions to overwhelm me. When I sleep well, positivity comes more easily and my emotional watch...

Eesti Vabariigi aastapäeva

Photo of Karin at the Ceremony

Today is Estonia’s Independence Day and today we celebrate one hundred and five years since declaring independence. Independence from Russia and the German overlords wasn’t achieved on this day in 1918, but the declaration of independence known as the Manifesto to the Peoples of Estonia (Estonian: Manifest Eestimaa rahvastele) was first read in the town of Pärnu on the 23rd of February, then printed and read in Tallinn on the 24th of February 1918.

From the Manifes...

The hidden secrets of libraries

Estonian Folklore book Eesti Rahva Ennemuistsed Jutud by FR Kreutzwald

I love libraries. They hold secret worlds hidden on dusty shelves and inside plain brown or green covers.  In high school I would ditch school and go to the library where I would read, read, and read: animal husbandry, history, novels.  I would check out as many books as I could carry and then inhale ideas I understood and many I couldn’t quite grasp.

I wander the stacks at the University of Tartu library (raamatukogu) and I ...

Out of thin air

Where did all these people disappear to?

Some days I feel like the paternal side of my family came from thin air.  Living in Tartu, the only traces I experience of my Estonian family are the tombstones in the cemetery and a scattering of photos.

The Soviet occupation separated those who were inside and those who lived in the west. My Estonian grandmother had six children and for the last twenty-two years of her life, had no children in Estonia. Three died young.  One disappeared in Russia during...

Hello World!

(just a bit of IT humor to start off the year)

Estonian flag as map of Estonia: Stasyan117, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I’ve been in Estonia since the end of August 2022 and arrived here without processing all the challenges I faced during the previous two years. But this is a new year and I’m thinking about being in a new location, where my old patterns of coping don’t really work.  I arrived in Tartu without expectations, and still it has been hard. Learning a new language, failing tes...

Old Woman in an Old Town

18th Century wooden house

Tartu is not one of the oldest towns in the world, but everywhere you go, there are references to the first millennium of the common era, remnants of walls built to protect various peoples and places, and much of the town dates to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

I too am old, although not on this scale. At the university with my 20-something classmates studying Estonian (eesti keel), I feel old. Mentioning things that happened in the 1970s is ancient history t...

On Being a Struggling Student

I’m struggling to learn Estonian. I study 3-6 hours a day plus 18 hours a week in the classroom. At home, I feel like I know the words and the conjugations.  In class ,when the teacher calls on me, I freeze.

This is a new experience for me as generally I’m a good student, I love taking classes, and while I may to work hard at things, I generally do well. Until now.

Image by Dorothe from Pixabay

I wake up every day excited to go to class and then leave dejected and deflated.  I tell myself it doe...

Shopping Hell

One of the things that I did not consider when I moved myself from California to Estonia was shopping. Since I flew I had two and a half suitcases worth of possessions I could bring. I focused on cold weather clothes, a few books, including some some of my own.

Landing in Estonia, there are things I need to buy that I own in California. Stores are organized differently here and in a language I attempting to learn to speak. I had been looking for a two-hole punch to put class handouts in my binde...

Tere Tere

“Tere” means hello in Estonian.  Greetings from Estonia.

Tartu Town Hall flying both Estonian and Ukranian flags

I am in Tartu where my father lived, and where my ancestors are buried. I am poorly studying the Estonian language in an intensive course at the University of Tartu

This gives me a fantastic opportunity to feel the emotions and frustrations that must be felt by many new immigrants to the USA. While I have chosen this path, have a safe and lovely place to live as well as the funds to f...