A new life is built by meeting one unfamiliar moment at a time. The morning after arriving in Australia from Finland, my family went for a walk from our new home at the migrant Midway hostel in Maribyrnong. I suppose we wanted to see this strange new country we had landed in, to step out…
Tag: belonging
The Magic Word
Delivery matters, but warmth does not sound the same in every language or culture. To an English-speaking ear, Finnish can sound a little blunt. The words do not always arrive wrapped in softness. They are not dressed up or sweetened unnecessarily. Finns tend to say what they mean and mean what they say. There is…
I Found It!
Our roots help explain who we are. When my brother and I were children, we loved playing hot and cold. One of us would hide some small object, and the other would become the hunter, searching, guessing, listening for clues. The closer the hunter came, the louder and more excited the cries would be: “hotter……
Timeless Treasures
Some people belong not only to our memories, but to the story of who we are. When I was a little girl living in Finland, I had a friend who was woven deeply into the fabric of my childhood. Her name was Tiina. We lived only a few hundred metres from each other, and we…
Treasured Simplicity
The deepest sense of home comes from feeling known without needing to explain who we are. Some places do not simply hold memories. They hold parts of us. That is how Finland feels to me. Not only as the country of my birth, but as a place where something deep within me still recognises itself….
Everyday Moments
Sometimes the way we see the world helps others rediscover the beauty they have stopped noticing. I have lived in Australia for most of my life now. As the years pass, I think we all grow used to the world around us. What once may have felt striking or new slowly becomes familiar, and familiarity…
Blue and White
What we experience as children, we often only truly understand as as adults. I was eleven when my family left Finland and migrated to Australia. At that age, I could not possibly grasp the full weight of what was happening. To me, the biggest wonder was that I was about to fly on an aeroplane…
Time Travelling
Those we love never truly leave us. I caught myself daydreaming today, though it felt like much more than that. In my mind, I had travelled back to the happy days of my childhood, back to my grandma’s house, back to everything that felt safe and warm and deeply loved. The Finnish word mummi has…
Dancing Lights in the Sky
Contentment begins when we stop measuring a good life by the world’s expectations. I come from the country of the midnight sun, from a land of crystal-blue lakes and endless forests, where the air feels so clean it seems to wash over not only the skin, but the soul. I come from a place where…
Silence
Peace can come through surrender rather than control. 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…
