Signs and Portents: A Search for Meaning
The man in this photo is my grandfather. He’s just lit a fire in the sauna. You’ll notice the sauna has no chimney—it’s a savusauna, a “smoke sauna.” The smoke from the stove swirls around the building’s interior, then out the door. My family is Finnish by descent. I’ve been doing a lot of meditating lately on the importance to us of “sauna” and “the family farm.” My grandparents bought the land in the early 1920s. My mother was born there, and she and my dad eventually owned it for forty years. After Dad died, Mom made a hard decision—to sell the farm and relocate close to me. The whole extended family felt wretched about her selling, but we were accepting of reality. I was the one who walked the house a last time. It felt symbolic, a thing to be done with reverence, putting that key into the lock for the final time. Losing the farm was a family trauma, and of course, the mind needs structure and meaning to deal with such things—and equally of course, with structure and meaning, things that happen become signs and portents.
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