Sauna

Perhaps I have come full circle.  My childhood was filled with visits to neighborhood sauna nights.  This summer He Who Must Be Obeyed has worked on making a sauna off of our back porch.  The Sauna stove with rocks has a Finnish name and works wonderfully.  We have sauna-ed three times now and plan another sauna this evening; to be cooled off in the heated pool.  I don't think that is even fair.  The childhood sauna never had the cold lake nor the snowbank cool-off.  It was completed with a steamy toweling off and getting dressed with all the neighborhood women talking in Finnish.  They could talk breathing in and breathing out.  It made for a lovely lullaby for a child who slept on the way home to my grandparent's sheep ranch.

My mother and I met relatives in Finland in the sauna.  Their summer cabin was on an island with a sauna connected to their boat launch.  The wooden floating dock must have been 70 feet to the end.  After a session in the steam, we all walked to the end of the bouncing dock for a dive into the cold Finland lake...about three times.    It was a no clothes, no towel, no swim suit event.  All women, grandma, mother, daughter, sister, wife, and small child welcoming the visitors from America with a sauna, we got new birch switches, we were scrubbed, rinsed, and given siima, a strange delicious mildly fermented lemon and raisin drink and finally taken to the cabin to the coffee table to meet the men.  How could one not feel like family!

My life has been full of these "Marcus Borg" thin places.  Those holy places where God is so close you can smell his presence.