"Connecting who we are"

I've been thinking about Lithuania recently and am now in part because I'm listening to Ben Jelen who I first heard on that trip. On my way to Lithuania I read "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" and I listend repeatedly to the Maverick record label radio station on the plane. They played 4 Ben Jelen Songs, 4 The Shore songs, 4 Alanis songs and 4 of Tyler somebody. I bought Ben Jelen as soon as I arrived in Lithuania and it was waiting for me at home when I returned. Later that year I stumbled across The Shore in Chicago.

On Saturday, Lisa and I went to the Wright Patterson Air Force Base Museum in Dayton, Ohio on our way home from visiting with family in Middletown (Metro Cincy). A number of our family members went as well. Part of the museum dealt with the holocaust and included a map with swastikas marking the locations of concentration camps. In a flash I remembered visiting a holocaust museum in Eastern Europe. It was increadibly sobering. I remember walking into a small room in the museum and being told that hundreds of Jews were housed in a room this size. Unbelievable.

On another day in Lithuania we drove far into the countryside and ended outside an old rusted fence. Through the fence lay four below-ground silos...a former Russian nuclear missile base. We climbed down into one of the silos, walking underground in dimly-lit hallways hallways. Then crawling up through a hatch into the actual silo. Things you don't have the opportunity to see every day.

Another day in Lithuania we visited the Hill of Crosses:

I was in a forest over the Baltic Sea, on a mountain where I could see Russia, in a Latvian Opera House.

What an opportunity. And I almost didn't go...the day before I left, I was sad to be leaving the dorms early.

My cubemate has a sign that says, "Always do what scares you." Not sure what to think about that. Today, I think it's great advice.