Into the Estonian countryside

Leaving Tallinn this afternoon, we headed for Estonia’s west coast to a retreat centre on the edge of the Matsalu Nature Preserve.  This is a lovely house, built by German Churches originally for young people to use for education, but it hosts conferences and nature retreats now and is a popular spot with birders who come in the fall and spring to watch the migrations along the Baltic flyway.  We’re very close to the seashore here.

Estonia reminds me a lot of southern Ontario, even though we’re at 58 degrees north, almost as far north as the Yukon border.  The land is flat out here, with stands of deciduous trees in the wetter parts and scrubby pine forests in the drier and sandier areas.  The whole region seems like a big glacial sand deposit.  You’d think you were anywhere in the southern Great Lakes basin except for the odd 400 year old church and stone barns or the more recent, and more run down former collectivist farms.  We passed a big one just before arriving here near the town of Haapsalu that had its own power plant and barracks for the farm workers.  While Tallinn seems to have built over the scars of the Soviet years, there are still structures that remind one of how recently the country was devoted to collectivist agricultural production and TV communications in service of the Communist dream.

Out here in the country though, history takes on a decidedly geological flavour, and the history of humans coming and going over the land seems to disappear into the drizzle and the forest and the call of little winter birds in the bush and gulls on the beach.

Our Art of Participatory Leadership workshop begins tomorrow.