Firekeepers: the Remaking of a Village

Aug 31

7 min read

Sauna is a powerful place, a bedrock for community and resilience. This is especially true in the story of women.

For generations of Finnish women, the sauna was more than a place to bathe. It was part of the architecture of life, woven into the ordinary work of living. Women cared for their families in this space: they washed children, cared for the sick, brewed beer, washed laundry, tended the fire, practiced folk healing, gathered with one another, and passed knowledge from one generation to the next. The room could be prepared as a warm, private and clean place for many purposes, beginning with the humble cradle of life: a safe place for mothers to give birth. When a person died, the sauna held their body while women washed and prepared it. The sauna was a witness to the complete arc of life. A sanctuary for the holy work of women.

Finnish scholar Kaarina Kailo has spent years exploring women and Finnish sauna culture, including the ways sauna was woven into women's rituals, life cycles, healing, and the passing of knowledge from one generation to the next. During Finlandia Foundation's National Sauna Week, she spoke about the sauna as a place of birth, healing, transition, renewal and care, and about the women whose knowledge and rituals helped shape its place in Finnish life.

two women, on a boardwalk, walking towards sauna, with sauna hats and towels on

A girl learns

I keep imagining a little girl in the sauna with her mother. She may not think of it as anything special. This is simply where her family goes. Her mother washes her hair. Her grandmother might be there. Someone tends the stove. They talk about dinner, school, a neighbor, something that happened that day. There is an intimacy to these ordinary rituals, something women have created in different forms across time and place: the sauna, the red tent of biblical times, the quiet rooms where women gathered to tend to one another and share the knowledge of their lives. Not grand sanctuaries, necessarily, but sacred spaces made from the humble rituals of daily life, where women could be together, care for one another, and simply belong.

She learns how to wash herself and eventually how to help someone else. She learns that her mother gets tired. She learns that older women have bodies that look different from hers, and that there is no particular shape a woman's body is supposed to hold forever. She learns how to care for someone who needs help. She learns that there are times when you talk and times when you sit quietly, listening.

She can learn that caring for herself is not the same thing as fixing herself.

When a woman becomes a mother

The historical relationship between sauna and childbirth reveals a very different understanding of community. Women with experience of birth could gather in the sauna and see a mother through childbirth together.

A woman knew every line, every expression of joy and pain, fear and relief. She knew how a mother sounded when she was frightened. She knew what labor looked like. She knew when to bring water, when to call for help, and when simply to stay, holding vigil.

In so many areas of our lives, we are starved of that kind of attention, both receiving and giving it. We move through everyday life at such a speed that there is little time left to simply witness one another. We hunger for community, for simple love and kindness, for connection, for an appreciation of the quiet beauty of an ordinary life.

The years when everyone needs you

Then there are the years when a woman can become the central nervous system of an entire household.

Someone needs a ride. Someone is sick. Someone has an appointment. Someone has lost a shoe. Someone needs dinner. An aging parent needs help. Work needs attention. The laundry has somehow multiplied overnight. You can spend years being the person who remembers what everyone else has forgotten.

For many mothers, parenthood feels lonely. Families live farther apart. Grandmothers, sisters and friends may be hours away. The women who would once have shown a new mother how to feed and settle a baby, bathe a child, make a meal, or simply get through a hard day may no longer be close enough to knock on the door. The load is heavier, and the village has become harder to find.

Modern self-care can sometimes become another form of work. We track our sleep, count our steps, monitor our hormones, optimize our diets and add one more thing to the list of things we are supposed to do for ourselves.

Sauna offers another path. The phone doesn't work. Nobody needs anything from you. You sit beside another woman who also has a life waiting outside that room. You don't know what she's carrying. Maybe she's exhausted. Maybe she's a new mother. Maybe her children are grown. Maybe she's caring for an aging parent. Maybe she's simply had a terrible Tuesday. For a little while, none of it matters. For a little while, none of it matters. You are simply there, together.

That, too, is community.

When the body changes again

an older woman with sauna hat on, crossed arms over a venik, eyes close, bringing the heat into her

Then the body changes again. Perimenopause can arrive quietly or all at once, and a body you've inhabited for decades can suddenly feel unfamiliar. Sleep changes. Temperature changes. Energy changes. The rules seem to shift without asking permission. And once again, women are expected to figure it out, often quietly and largely on their own.

There is still much we don't know about sauna and women's health specifically. Most long-term research has included women, but research focused specifically on women is only beginning to grow. What we do know is that heat places a real physiological demand on the body, and regular sauna use has been associated with cardiovascular benefits. Women themselves also describe sauna as a place for relaxation, restoration, sleep and simply feeling more at home in their bodies.

Learning to listen again

We have become very good at outsourcing our understanding of our own bodies. There is always another expert to consult, another protocol to follow, another supplement to try, another number to track. We have more information about our hormones, our sleep and our bodies than ever before, and still feel strangely disconnected from the woman living inside them.

The women who came before us had a different kind of knowledge. They watched one another. They noticed changes. They remembered what they had seen before. They learned about pregnancy, illness, children, plants, bathing and healing by being present, and by being together. Science keeps evolving, but our own attention has grown scattered.

Maybe that is part of what sauna gives us back, a quiet place to notice. To feel the heat rise, to listen to your breathing, to recognize when you need to step into the cold or when you need to stay a little longer in the warmth. To become acquainted with your own body again, without asking it to perform.

Maybe listening is its own kind of knowledge.

What we pass down

I would love for girls to grow up with sauna as something ordinary. I would love for a young woman to know that she can come with her mother, her sister, her friends or by herself. I would love for women to see one another at different stages of life and become a little less frightened of the changes that are coming.

A girl's body will become a woman's body. A woman's body will change again. She may become a mother or she may not. She may care for children, care for parents, build a career, change careers, fall in love, lose someone, become a grandmother, or live a life that looks nothing like the one she imagined.

Maybe she deserves somewhere that doesn't ask her to fight that fact. Somewhere she can simply inhabit herself.

And perhaps, when she has a daughter of her own, she will bring her into the sauna and begin the story again.

A room for the village

The more I learn about women and sauna, the less interested I become in calling it a wellness practice. It is older and more intimate than that.

It is a room that has been part of ordinary life for generations. A room where women cared for children, cared for one another, passed along knowledge, worked, rested, celebrated, grieved and marked the great transitions of life.

The same room could welcome a newborn and later receive the body of someone who had lived for eighty years.

That is a remarkable kind of continuity. And that is what I want to bring forward at woodsmoke.

knees surrounding the sauna stove, with water being ladled onto the stones and steam rising

Not the idea that sauna can fix you. Not another promise about losing weight, reversing aging or finding the perfect hormonal balance. There are enough people selling women those things.

I want something quieter. A place where women can come as they are. A place to listen to the body, to sit beside other women, to be cared for by community and to remember that the body is not a project to perfect. It is the life we have been given.

This is what brought me to woodsmoke: my own deep need to be held, and the desire to share that feeling with others. To bring sauna to the community. To give us a place to gather, reconnect and rebuild some of the roots we have lost.

For women like me. For women like you.

Come sit with us in sauna at woodsmoke, where the village can begin again.

Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes. . . including you." — Anne Lamott

Warmly,