Ignorance It’s hard to get to where you want to go if you don’t know where you are. To get to Pålstorp – Paul’s farmstead – from Mattila, you need to go north. But our instructions said “turn left when you leave Mattila,” so we did. Those who wrote the instructions had assumed we were […]

The day after Mia and I arrived in Finn Forest, we drove to the Torsby Finnskogsentrum – a place dedicated to Finn Forest artifacts and history just a short drive outside the town of Torsby. The map to the right comes from that center: “The First Finnish Settlements in Torsby Area.” Sixty of them! How […]

We had our passports stamped when we reached Finland. Never again were we asked to show them, not until we left Helsinki to fly home. In between those days, we flew to Norway, drove into Sweden, crossed back into Norway, went to Sweden again, drove to Norway, flew to Finland. I went back to Norway […]

On Midsummer Eve Mia and I were led to a star made of sky and trees. Earlier in the day we had helped weave flowers around the Maypole. “May,” I learned, refers not to a month but but to the act of decorating one’s self, of making one’s self beautiful. A Maypole is a fancy-dress […]

We release. We cleanse. We banish that which does not serve us. We cannot hold on to magical energy that is burned up. Cannot ask more of a spell once it is complete. I have to let go. It’s easy to wonder what would have been if we had known. If we had been witches, […]

One of the first words I learned in the Duolingo Finnish course was velho. Duo translates the word as “wizard,” but the sentences give a better indication of the meaning. – “We love our wise velho.” – “The Swede is a Viking and the Finn is a velho.” – “The shaman is Sami, and the […]

  Finnish storytellers/poets/singers would offer their words in pairs. Two bards would sit face-to-face, holding hands and rocking back and forth as first one spoke and then the other. Frequently, their words would duplicate. In this way, the Kalevala was passed from one generation to another. Amelia and I have begun a discipline that resembles […]

Pictured here the immigrant Anderson Family: Bottom row – Lars, Mabel, and Lisa; Top row –  Mathew, Levi, and Alma The Mystery Even as children, my siblings and I knew we were mostly Norwegian. (We must have known we were legally Americans, but we never called ourselves that.) Our mother’s father (morfar in Norwegian) came […]