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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how second-home users in coastal Finland narrate the sea as a culturally coded elemental space in the context of second-home life. Through interviews, I analyze how the vastness of the sea mediates human–elemental entanglements and expands the meaning of place.

Paper long abstract

Water is fundamental to all forms of life, and in many creation myths the cosmos is said to have originated from an infinite expanse of water—the Cosmic sea—from which all life emerged. In this sense, water, and by extension the sea, is conceived not only as a material necessity but also as an elemental origin, a medium through which existence itself becomes possible.

Drawing on interviews with second-home users and owners in Ostrobothnia, Southwest Finland, and Åland, this paper explores how the sea is culturally and symbolically charged with notions of freedom, imagination, mobility, and isolation. The analysis demonstrates that second-home users’ senses of place extends well beyond the physical boundaries of the cottage plot. Standing on the shoreline, they project dreams and imaginings across the horizon, linking the local with the global. These narratives resonate with Doreen Massey’s concept of a “global sense of place,” which emphasizes places as constituted through flows, connections, and imaginaries rather than through fixed rootedness. The sea thus emerges as an elemental medium through which the cottage, the self, and the world interrelate.

By examining how the sea is narrated as a culturally coded and symbolically charged element, the paper contributes to broader discussions of how humans experience and articulate entanglements with the elemental in the Anthropocene. Here, the sea appears not as a passive backdrop to human life but as an active presence shaping perceptions of freedom, belonging, and the possibilities beyond the horizon.