When life feels a little too overwhelming, when my thoughts grow noisy and my heart begins to ache for somewhere to rest, I know exactly where my mind goes. It returns to a place that has long lived within me. A place I can step into without packing a bag or opening a door. A place of refuge. A place of remembering.

Mine looks like this.

In my mind’s eye, I am barefoot in the cool of the night, walking slowly along an old wooden jetty. The boards beneath me creak softly as they shift over the dark water, and that familiar sound alone is enough to quiet something in me. I sit down carefully, my hands wrapping around the railings as though I am steadying not only my body, but my soul. First I dip my toes into the lake, then my feet, then my legs, letting the cold water rise around me. I move them gently at first, making small silver ripples in the stillness, stirring the surface as though I am easing myself into another world.

Then, after a while, the coolness no longer startles me. My body grows used to it, and I grow quiet. I stop moving my legs. I stop disturbing the water. I become still.

And that is when it comes to me fully.

The silence.

Not an empty silence, not a lonely silence, but the kind of silence that feels full. Shelter-like. Sacred, even. A silence so deep that it seems to gather around me and hold me. In that moment, there is nothing but the faint sound of my own breathing and the wide, unbroken hush of the lake at night. I look out over the water, so still it mirrors the sky, and for a little while it feels as though the whole world has stopped trembling.

There, in that quiet, I do too.

It is in moments like that that I stop analysing everything. I stop rehearsing tomorrow. I stop carrying what has not yet happened. I stop trying to solve life from every angle. All the endless inner noise, the questions, the planning, the weariness of being needed, of being responsible, of holding so much in my mind and heart, begins to loosen its grip. Silence asks nothing of me. It does not rush me. It does not demand answers. It simply lets me be.

And perhaps that is why it touches me so deeply.

Silence has always felt different to me in Finland. It is not awkward there. It is not something to be filled. It breathes. It stretches. It belongs. In Finland, silence is not the absence of life, but part of life itself. It lives in the lakes, in the forests, in the stillness of evening, in the spaces between people who do not need to speak in order to understand one another. It is gentle and spacious and healing. It leaves room for the soul to catch up with the body.

I think that is why it keeps drawing me back, again and again.

Not only the beauty, though Finland is beautiful in ways that reach deep into me. Not only memory, though memory lives there too. But something quieter than beauty and older than words. Something I do not always know how to explain. A stillness that meets me in the deepest part of myself. A silence that feels less like emptiness and more like being held.

And maybe that is what refuge really is.

Not escaping life altogether, but finding one place, even if only in memory, where the heart can unclench. One place where the noise falls away. One place where I can breathe deeply again and remember who I am beneath all the weight of living.

For me, that place will always be there: a creaking jetty, a still lake, the cool night air, and silence spread wide around me like mercy.

And even now, across distance and years, I think some part of me is still sitting there, on the jetty, feet in the water, listening to the hush, feeling my soul grow quiet, and knowing without needing to say it out loud:

this silence is my place of refuge.