24/08/03 — Menuo Juodaragis: Kernave, Lithuania
I head off to check out the techno with Fiona, an English woman from the youth hostel in Vilnius, who I met completely by accident at the festival. It's a little hardcore for both of us and we want to be in the right spot for the midnight ritual anyway, so we head into the Winds Hut. There are already lots of people 
there with their drums, but we find spots close to the fire. I send Jack an SMS to get ready for energy heading his way.
I pull out my cloak pins and join in the rhythms as if they're clapping sticks. Around midnight, one woman starts a droning chant and slowly all the women around us pick up harmonies. I follow the patterns of one of them and then notice a gap in the rhythm where one woman is adding an occasional "heh, heh". The next time that gap comes around, I sing a deep, "heya, heya". She counterpoints me on a higher note next time, and together we start an exchange. The men are drumming and the women's voices weave around them, rising and building as different women join in and follow and pick up each others' melodies. As far as I can tell, it is all just nonsense syllables, but it could be phrases in Lithuanian. It's amazing. Slowly, we let it drop down to whispers so you can hear the drums, then back up, then round it off together, signals with eyes, signals from the men to the women, from the women to the men, between us all. I can't help it: I zagreet, even though I'm the only one. After all, it's an arabic tradition I've learnt at Woodford, this women's wailing call, not something from here at all. I take up my travel talisman and breathe into it the energy and breath of the space. I light a candle for peace and place it on the rocks around the fire. So mote it be.
Fiona wanders off to find Will, the other Australian here, and I wander around hoping to bump into Evaldas. Sure enough, I do... "How are you?" I ask. "I'm wonderful," he replies. "I've just met the woman I was supposed to meet." "And it's me," says a small woman just near him that I hadn't noticed until then. "I'm too late then. I was hoping it would be me," I say, now that it's all too late. "It's never too late," he says. But I have no idea if he's just being philosophical or whether he's saying he's open to ideas...
The three of us wander over to where they're building an enormous bonfire, as it's getting quite cold. She's a social worker, it turns out. He keeps touching her, holding on to her, and she keeps laughingly dancing out of his reach. I can't tell what's going on, but when they talk to each other in Lithuanian and disappear off to dance without really saying goodbye, I know I'm not a part of it. I can't help but feel he was ripe for the picking and if only I'd been more forward... but I already have my tickets to leave for Tallinn and she is a local. They have a future where I would have been a whirlwind.
The huge bonfire finally catches alight. There are whole trees on this thing and scary amounts of petrol. I have no tent, so it's either stay up all night or pray it doesn't rain and sleep next to this thing. There's music till 5 and then the sunrise ritual anyhow.
I'm too tired to dance, so I sit next to the fire and listen to the techno from the nearby tent. Fiona appears again and we talk until 3.30. She wants to go back to her tent to sleep, so I promise to wake her for the ritual. I snooze by the fire. I have set my phone alarm to wake me, but disturbingly I am woken at about 4.30 by skinhead types singing something rousing that sounds to me like each verse ends with "Sieg Heil", but in Lithuanian. It's enough to get me up and gone, anyhow. I wake Fiona and we head over to the mound next to the river. Folk 
singers from Gostauta, a Lithuanian group, lead us through the songs. I don't understand a word, but Fiona translates a little where she can. One song is a greeting to the river god, another to the sun, another to the forest spirits. The songs go on and on, beautiful, haunting, as the sun rises and the river sings behind us. Then we do traditional spiral dances, and eventually head down the hill together, singing a parting song.
Fiona invites me to crash in their tent for a while and so we sleep until 10-ish. There is a ridiculously huge pan frying eggs for the masses, so we grab breakfast and settle in the sun to watch folk dancing and listen to more singing. I try to listen to a talk by Lithuania's high priest of the heathen community "Romuva" talking about harmony and sanctity, but it's all in Lithuanian... It's amazing to be in his presence anyway.
On my way back past the Witches' Hut, I hear music I like the sound of. There's nothing on the program, but people from Kulgrinda, Osimira and Gostauta are jamming. It's fantastic. Despite my tired bones, I just have to dance. Drumming and wild flutes, Lithuanian bagpipes and fiddles, goat horns and other, longer twistier horns with weird unearthly voices.
Unfortunately, the CD shop isn't open today... but there's a Web site. This could be dangerous...
Eventually, it's time to go. We stop by the hill fort in Kernave, but without my expert guide, it's hard to interpret what we're looking at.
As chance has it, there are no direct buses from Vilnius to St Petersburg. So, that night I travel from Vilnius to Tallinn, Estonia, an unplanned stop, a place I wanted to go to, but thought I wouldn't have time for.