Being originally from Finland, yet living in Australia, I have often been asked what a Finnish sense of humour is like. If you are Finnish, you would understand immediately just how difficult that is to explain. Customs can be explained. Beliefs can be described. But humour is something far more elusive. It lives between the…
Second Chance
This year, I have found myself in circumstances I would not wish on anyone. Circumstances that have shaken me, humbled me, and brought me to a place of deep reflection. Yet it is often in life’s most painful and unwanted moments that we are forced to stop, to truly look, and to learn what perhaps…
Escape
The tougher life becomes, the more I find myself daydreaming of escape. The dictionary tells me that escape means “to get free from something”, and there are days when that definition feels almost painfully simple. If only getting free were as easy in real life as it is on a computer keyboard. We press the…
Rustic Wisdom
During our last visit to Finland, I had the privilege of staying in my late mother-in-law’s childhood home, in a small village in the Finnish countryside. These days, that ancestral homestead belongs to one of the cousins, Hannu. The moment I stepped across its threshold, it felt as though the whole earth had paused for…
Road Closed
On rainy summer days, my mum used to send us children up into the attic. As an adult, I understand why. Ours was only a small cottage, and when rain kept us indoors, we children must have made the walls ring with our noise, our energy, our endless movement. Sending us upstairs must have brought…
Harvest Time
I grew up in Helsinki, Finland, in what felt like a very typical Finnish way, with both a winter home and a summer home. When the end of May arrived, our family of six would leave the city behind and move to our summer cottage, where we stayed until autumn crept in and school began…
Keep Calm
Have you ever carried a fear so private, so difficult to name, that even whispering it to yourself feels dangerous? The kind of fear that seems to gather strength the moment it is acknowledged, as though giving it words might somehow invite it closer? And so you tuck it away, deep in the hidden chambers…
Kintsugi
Kintsugi is a 15th-century Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. The word comes from kin, meaning gold, and tsugi, meaning joinery — to join with gold. The more I think about it, the more deeply it speaks to me, because it feels like so much more than an art form. It feels like…
This Moment
I rose before the sun this morning and slipped out the door while the world was still half asleep. The birds were already awake, singing their bright hopeful songs into the dawn, sounding far more cheerful than I felt inside. Mum was having surgery today, and I was going to spend the day with dad,…
A Few Words
If I were asked to name one thing that lies at the heart of Finnish people, I think I would say this: Finns place great value on words. That is something I have carried with me all my life, perhaps without even realising it fully when I was younger. There is something in Finnish nature…
Apples of Gold 