Happy Summer Solstice and Father’s Day.
This weekend, the sun hits its highest peak of the year, casting light into the deepest corners of our lives. In ancient Finnish tradition, this time of Juhannus is a sacred portal where the veil thins, and we honor the peak solar fire.
Lately, I’ve been doing my own version of soul retrieval. I went deep into the digital archives to rescue timeless wisdom posts lost years ago during a blog migration. Reclaiming those lost words felt like gathering scattered pieces of my own history and identity.
But the universe wasn’t done illuminating the dark.
Right on the eve of this solstice, a sudden genealogical breakthrough shattered my timeline. I discovered my family’s true, original Karelian surname before it was changed in the early 1900s. While, I learned about some of it, on my last trip to Finland, new details were a revelation.
My grandfather used the name Oras, which means “the first green sprout of grain pushing through spring soil.” But our true, unbroken bloodline name is Luukka which translates directly from its ancient roots as “Bringer of Light.”
Talk about a cosmic alignment for a spiritual light worker.
The Backlash: In the late 1800s and early 1900s, a powerful national romanticism movement swept Finland. Finns fiercely reclaimed their identity. In massive national campaigns (most notably in 1906 and 1935), hundreds of thousands of Finns legally dropped their Swedish-sounding or old peasant names to adopt “pure,” poetic, nature-based Finnish names.
Luukka vs. Oras: Luukka is an old, highly regional Karelian surname tied heavily to specific eastern farmsteads and rural environments.Oras, meaning “sprout” or “new green crop,” perfectly matches the trendy, poetic, nature-inspired names that the younger, patriotic generation adopted during the Finnicization era to sound modern, educated, and proudly Finnish.
I guess my grand dad thought it was a good thing but I never liked my last name and would have much preferred a name reflecting my true roots.
Needless to say, I wasted no time trying on new names with hubby #1 and again with hubby #2. there is a lot of power in a name and warrants a separate Blog post about identity, numerology names, and all of that.
But today my focus is on my dad. Seen here as a young soldier.
As I sit with this revelation, I am holding a physical anchor of this lineage: a beautiful, precious box my father hand-carved while serving on the front lines of the Continuation War.
Inside this piece of trench art, I have kept his dog tags, his military passport, his tiny Bible, and a small photo album of intimate military photos of dead soldiers, his brothers in bathing in a frigid river after a sauna, senior officers inspecting the troops and other mementos of war.
He carved a safe harbor for his spirit in the midst of darkness as very young man. When the war ended after four years of active service he was barely 21 engaged to my mother.
Today, I am sitting in the liminal space of this discovery, honoring my ancestors with prayers to the seven directions.
I am looking at the photos from his box, alongside the last photo taken of my dad and me, and one where I am five years old sitting on his lap. He carried the sprout through the trenches so that I could finally uncover the light.
As we step through this solstice gateway, I invite
you to look back into your own archives, both digital and ancestral. What beauty is waiting to be pulled out of the shadows and brought into the open fire?
I love that my dad became a cat man late in life.
Below are five timeless wisdom lessons rescued directly from the archives…and new weekly feature/Summer Solstice Wisdom
And from my other blog Cat Wisdom 101:fun tribute to cat dads
