Travel

A year of living mythologically

/ Rudy Owens / 1 Comment

Another year of my life gets ready to end. The clock will start anew to begin the exercise of measuring life’s passing by years. That means it is time to reflect on how I spent it, as my planet circled the sun and I counted away irretrievable minutes, hours, and days of being alive in the universe.

I felt a mythical pull to Finland last year, and found myself there twice in six months, completing a journey that started decades earlier.

Physically, I feel a bit older. That is a given.

However, the cumulative issues I have experienced and still feel in my back have sharpened my understanding of my mortality. I have been humbled, even as I respect every aspect about caring for myself. It is now more clear that my days of very good health could be over. I may now be entering a phase of manageable but slow decay. I’m still overall in great health. I run. I bike. I swim. I rollerski. I surf far less frequently, and cross-country ski even less often. But I can feel the reality of what “the slow glide out” now means. My best years, in terms of physical health, were in my 40s.

My mental health, however, has remarkably improved during the past five years, as I continue to appreciate what a purposeful mindset of “finding meaning” has brought to my daily life. The hardest challenges I have navigated the last two decades strengthened my ability to withstand the strongest storms. Maybe I have just accepted who I am, at last, and the wisdom of wiser predecessors who have offered ideas of living well. So despite many challenges, my outlook is very calm.

Awaiting the inevitable loss of family

I continue to plan for loss and death. Human myths have been doing this for all of us since we first collected our shared stories and passed them down orally. So this is nothing new, and because it’s not new, it should not be feared or avoided.

I have three family members who face very severe health challenges. Two are my biological kin and one is my adoptive sibling. The stress can gnaw at any moment, out of the blue. Yet I can do nothing to change what will inevitably come. That could be any day.

I took this shot in 2015 at the Detroit Institute of the Arts with one of my ill family members, who is nearing the end of their journey.

I fortunately have found my safe harbors in spaces that always serve me well: exercise, good food, a sense of gratitude for my own good fortune, being mindful of what is within my power to address, and deep knowledge of what I cannot change.

Feeling at peace with death is one of the oldest roles of myths for humanity, and I have found my place with its company this year even more. As Joseph Campbell, author of the Hero with a Thousand Faces, describes, death and death imagery are the very beginning of mythology. Campbell let all of us know that there is comfort knowing that what we all experience has been charted for millennia in myth: “So there’s a sense of death as not death somehow, that death is required for new fresh life.” 

In fact, it was the cumulative stresses surrounding the health and wellness of my surviving family that finally propelled me to visit one of my ancestral home countries of my biological mother, Finland. I felt what I can only call a mythical pull to go there.

Hearing the call of Finland

My planning started on an important day celebrating Finland’s great myth, called the Kalevala. On February 28, 2023, on Kalevala Day, I vowed to visit the Nordic nation that summer. What’s more, I would also seek out my biological family I could trace only as far back as my maternal grandmother and grandfather, who emigrated to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the early 1900s. There were no contacts between my Finnish-American biological family and their distal relatives in Finland since the 1950s.

Famous Finnish painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s study called “Kullervo Herding his Wild Flocks” (1917) is held in the collection of the Ateneum art museum in Helsinki, Finland.

I announced my idea publicly, to make it known I was taking a mythical journey: “And my new journey into my ancestral past has begun,” I wrote. “Where it ends now, I know not. Once the ship leaves its harbor of safety for parts unknown, the mind, heart, and soul breath in the fresh sea air that only is found by discovery. Finland.”

Everything about this idea was mythical. I could feel the tug, the way I did when I set out to find my birth mother and my biological families in the mid-1980s, completing the task in April 1989 in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

In fact, understanding myth and my adoption story gave me what I consider to be a tactical advantage compared to other adoptees who start their journeys for self-awareness far later in life. I was in a totally different place because I already had deep knowledge of myth’s meaning to the human experience because I read countless books on myths as a young person and learned the stories of the Bible in church every Sunday.

I knew intuitively why my impossible task had meaning and that I would succeed, like the “hero” celebrated in myths and tales across the time and all cultures. My memoir and study of the U.S. adoption experience explores interplay of myth and adoption in detail, where I describe why my experience closely resembled the “hero’s story.”

In this instance, I immediately recognized the myth dynamic in wanting to go back to a family origin location, in Finland.

That recognition propelled me forward with the power that can only be understood as mythical and by all the dynamic rules of a mythical story. It was familiar territory, and it completely energized me. I knew I was on a journey, which made it easier for me to throw myself completely headlong into this project. The myth played out almost effortlessly, with joy instead of sorrow.

I successfully found my long-lost Finnish relatives, thanks to blind good fortune of finding a benefactor named Satu, a professor who I contacted by email in the early summer 2023. (Even Satu’s role felt mythical, like the kindly stranger who intervenes to propel the hero forward on their journey to the unknown.)

In my long story about meeting my biological family, I describe how we first met by video calls and email and finally in person in Kurikka and Tampere, Finland, in September, 2023. Even before I met them, we knew that the meeting would be special for all of us.

I described in my story how one of my aunts told me how I resembled her adult kids. “I find same features on my sons’ and your faces,” she wrote to me. I also noted: “Later I learned that others in the family, including two daughters, said the same thing, completely separate from each other. When I compared a photo to the youngest son in the family with myself, and shared it with friends, everyone I sent them to were mostly stunned; some swore we could be brothers. All my friends mostly shared that the power of genetic similarities were both astonishing and cool.”

Embracing my Finnish mythical muse: Kullervo

I stumbled on the bronze statue of the famous mythical antihero Kullervo and his loyal friend and dog, Musti, my first morning in Helsinki, probably by fate.

On my first morning in Helsinki in September 2023, I went for a run. It was cloudy and rainy. I got lost. Almost by design, I regained my bearings near Toolonlahti, a bay in central Helsinki. I stopped my run the moment I saw a bronze sculpture of the Finnish antihero, Kullervo. The statue shows the famous mythical character, and his dog Musti, the moment before he kills himself with his own sword.  It stands peacefully in an outdoor rose garden in Kaupunginpuutarha park in Helsinki, but feels tense with foreboding. This was no accident. It was myth at play. I immediately shared the photos with my Finnish relatives, who told me it was Kullervo.

Kullervo is perhaps the most beloved character from the Kalevala by the Finnish people, despite a mostly short section in the epic myth relative to other heroes in it. Jean Sibelius wrote an entire musical score with a chorus telling his doomed and tragic story. As an infant, he was enslaved and orphaned, only to be tormented by the clan that destroyed his family. Despite abuses, he learns he has magic power, befriends a dog Musti, sleeps with his sister unknowingly (who kills herself), murders the man and clan that enslaved him, and finally kills himself in anguish.

This is my favorite painting by the great Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela called “Kullervo’s Curse,” which I know proudly wear around town.

I made my T-shirt honoring Kullervo based on the painting by the great Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela, when I returned from Finland in February 2024. 

My latest trip to Finland in February 2024, visiting family again in Tampere and Kurikka, completed the mythic trip I had started in late September 2023. It offered fresh insights into a nation and its national identity and stories. The Kalevala, the national story, is part of this story the Finns tell themselves. It also gave me wonderful insights into my ethnic Finnish roots.

When I returned, I looked back at the year of impossible events. I did what I knew I would always do. I had visited my ancestral villages of my blood relatives. I found my relatives, with whom I shared a physical resemblance and a strong kin connection. I felt connected to my identity that was long hidden from me by laws in Michigan. All told, in one year,  I have written nearly 20 stories about my long journey back to my roots.

Without trying to write another book, I laid the foundations for one that arrived almost organically. I had no intention of writing any of these stories when the strange siren call to take the journey started. Yet it just happened, the way a myth naturally unfolds. My friend saw my new collection of essays and called me the “Finland Fanatic.”

What a perfect name for a book. What a perfect description of a mythical character, pulled by the power of the quest. My journey so far has been a happy one. Death of my family is still stalking my path forward. We shall see where it goes this coming year.

‘Can I sit next to you?’

/ Rudy Owens / Leave a comment

I love random meetings when I travel. Most of the time these moments prove far more memorable and meaningful than the trip one sets out upon, even when one is traveling for a purpose.

In my case, my trip to St. Louis, Missouri, from Sept. 28-30, 2022, involved seeing a very sick family member. It was a heavy trip, and I had a lot to do. At that moment, thoughts of life and death weighed on my mind, so I was in a reflective mood. Perhaps I was willing to share stories with a stranger.

This short cross-country jaunt was also my first out-of-state trip from Portland, Oregon, in more than 15 months. I had booked a cheap flight, which meant I would leave at an early hour.

Because I always prefer to arrive early, I parked my car at the airport extended car park parking lot around 1:30 a.m. and quickly got the shuttle bus without much waiting time. That meant I walked into the nearly empty Portland International Airport for my 5 a.m. flight far before I expected.

It was still the dead of night, when nearly no one was in the facility. Because of that hour, Transportation Security Administration (TSA) staff had not opened the check-through area for the gate I would use. That meant I had an hour to wait and perhaps read my books I had brought for the flights.

I sat in the nearly empty front lobby by the empty check-in area, until the full staff would arrive. Few other travelers were around, and a handful of security personnel walked the quiet space. A few weary travelers had crashed in the lobby area, sleeping on the floor, perhaps waiting for another early morning flight too.

An older woman, who I learned was 81, approached my seating area with four seats. We both were wearing masks. She asked, “Can I sit next to you.”

“Of course,” I replied.

That was the beginning of a conversation that meandered for an hour. I never got her name. I should have asked.

The retired nurse told me she was a widow. Her husband died more than a decade earlier, she said. She now lived alone in an apartment in downtown Portland, which she liked. She told me about her life, like her recent trip to the Alps this past summer to hike with a group. She told me she needed to go on that trip, before she could do trips like this in the future. She loved it, she said.

She then talked about her coming travels. She was estranged from her family, back in Kansas. But now she was traveling to Topeka, Kansas, for an indefinite time. She was going to care for a slightly younger sister dying of cancer. She did not know how long she would be there.

I learned that her oldest daughter, who lived in Portland, was also dying of stage four breast cancer. I did not probe with questions. I could sense it was not going well and would end badly. The pending deaths in her family made her increasingly aware that her days also were numbered, she mused.

Though she said she had left her family decades earlier, it was now time to connect with kin who would be passing. I concurred. I told her it was very caring for her to be so generous to her sister. She nodded, in agreement.

I told her I was seeing my ailing family member, who was not well and living in a nursing home. I told her briefly about my mom, who had died in early 2020 from Alzheimer’s after a seven-year battle. Mostly, though, I was the listener.

Near 3 a.m., we noticed the TSA team had arrived and the security checkpoint was open. We both walked over. That was the last time we spoke. I saw her get a seat ahead of me on the plane. She got off the connecting flight in Denver before me, and I never saw her again.

The encounter, with a stranger I will likely never see again, reminded me why it is good to listen to people and let them share their burdens. We all need to listen when we can and just be kind.