Small Village Life in Northern Finland | Happiness in the Smallest of Things

Hello, my name is Sanna Vaara. I live in the far north of Finland, in an old farmhouse in a small countryside village of 25 people. I create photographs, videos and music, inspired by this wild Nordic nature I get to live surrounded with. Hello, you all beautiful people all around the world. So, winter is still going on. It is starting to make all of us a bit tired and so ready for change for the next chapter. There are some signs of change, but nature keeps us waiting. We have a lot of light and have had a bit of warmth, not just enough to melt the masses of snow around us. All we can do is wait and find happiness in the way things are, in the smallest and simplest things. Good morning! It's about maybe 7 am and it is so light outside. I mean, I think the lightness just exploded in the last weeks. I can't believe it. Just last night I had to pull the curtains for the first time in our bedroom window, because I went to bed maybe 10 pm or something and it was still light. So, we are definitely in the changing of seasons. It is a very quiet morning, except Rover here is making, I don't know, his morning shower or something. I just thought that these are probably the last few weeks of quiet mornings, because after then comes all the birds. We haven't had so many birds in the wintertime, because only a few species stay here during wintertime. A lot of them just move to south, to warmth. They will return soon and then these early mornings will be filled with all the bird sounds. I mean, every year it is so amazing. I forget it every year and maybe in the early May, when it starts, it is such an amazing thing. It's like a nature's orchestra. Rover really enjoys winter and snow. And this is his favorite thing to do. Just rolling in the snow. If possible, downhill. Quite warm today. Surprisingly warm, though there's still a lot of snow. Oh my god, there is so much snow. Let me show you. I'm sitting here with Papu. Hey, Papu. And here is a very ugly yard. And here is the amount of snow. And Rover is sitting on top of it. Rover! The king of snow. Hello. Oh, you want to cuddle. You all want to cuddle. This time is the hardest for me. Everything is in between something. Not quite pretty frosty winter, but not spring either. It is on its way to something, and it is so hard to accept, I notice. Maybe that is in life in general. We would want to be somewhere already, but find it hard to take the in-between time. The most important time of growth and development. Without it, the main goal wouldn't be possible. There is a time for us to be in chaos, to be unfinished. But also a time for us to bloom. And my time to bloom may not be the same as yours. And your time of blooming might be my chaos. If we could remember that, maybe we would find more happiness in our own lives. In this messy time, I've spent my time baking and knitting. I thought I'd share my favorite sourdough recipe that I've been baking for several weeks now. And you've been asking it quite a lot. It has half wheat and half rye, and the rye makes it extremely tasty and super healthy. So I mix 200 grams of ready wheat sourdough, 800 grams of cold water, 500 grams of rye flour, and 500 grams of wheat flour. I let the dough wait for an hour before I add salt, about 20 grams to it. This dough makes two quite large breads. If you're not familiar with how sourdough breads are usually made, I recommend learning that first, since it has a few steps to make the breads succeed. It might seem a bit overwhelming at first, but I promise every step and learning is worth it. Sourdough bread is so good, you'll never want to eat any other bread again. Our house is quite cold, so I need to keep the dough very close to our kitchen baking oven to keep it warm. I have to have my coffee break, daily coffee break, alone because my fiancé is away of town. I was just thinking that how much I really enjoy being alone. I think every single one of us needs to be alone just to hear ourselves and just to hear our thoughts, and we are here quite much at our house and we spend a lot of time together, which obviously I absolutely love. I have to be alone so that I can hear myself and meet myself. I really think that I can't do that if there's someone around, so I need to remind myself, even when we are here together, to take time to be just with myself. I have a meeting with myself. A couple of days ago we had a meeting with the people who live here in our village. There were about 25 of us. It was a really, really nice meeting because there were us, 20 of us, and then there were a few people from town who had come there to tell us how we could develop our village or how we could get some funding to build something new or just to take our small village to the next step. I felt such a belonging when we talked about it in the meeting and all of us, 20 something, we thought that we actually don't want anything special to be done to our village. We are very, very happy how it is already. There are so few of us living in here that it feels weird if we would try to develop something huge in here. Why we live here is because we want to have small things and quiet life to make us really, really happy. I felt such heartwarming feelings when I was there because we didn't discuss with each other. We were just in total unison with the thing. I saw that it was really hard for the other people to understand why we didn't feel that we need any funds or anything huge to be made for our village, that we are actually very happy just the way things are. That led me to thinking that I wish we could understand that more in other situations too, that you don't always need to develop and you don't always need to go for the huge and big things. Don't get me wrong, I'm the kind of person who thrives when I have something to work for, when I have a goal that I have set myself. But still, I don't think that everything should or even can go forward all the time and develop all the time. If you look at the nature, it develops into a certain point, like flowers on a field. They bloom to a certain point, but then they stop. The main point in our village meeting was that we want to keep our village the same quiet, old, tiny village in the middle of this wilderness. So, I just love to live here. As for knitting, I've started a new sweater for myself. Yes, again. I finished the one I was knitting in my previous video, but it turned out a better fit for Esa than me, so I ended up giving it to him. I realized I haven't knitted any sweaters for myself this winter, so now is the best time to do so. I've had a lot of questions from you about how I knit, which patterns and yarns I use, so I'm planning on making a separate video on my knitting. So, fellow knitting lovers, hold your horses, it is coming soon. As I've told you before that this time also makes me very tired, because my body and mind are trying to adapt to the constant light. Sometimes I still feel tiredness, but other times I'm starting to get my energies back. It just takes time for me to adapt to changes, and I try to remember to give myself all the time I need. I'm only dreaming of summer here. We took these inside, we had herbs in these last summer, and there's still something that has grown. I wish I could do all of this already. I mean, this is the time of year where I actually find myself being envy of other people living somewhere else, because I see all of these beautiful videos and pictures of spring, what first flowers are blooming, and people are wearing summer dresses. This is a hard time, a really, really hard time. I don't often feel envy of other people. I feel that I have created a life that looks really much like me, and I really, really love my life, but this time is really a hard one. Even in Finland, in southern Finland, the first flowers have started to bloom, and people have started to grow things in their garden and in their greenhouses, and we have two meter snow in our yard. Everything is so ugly and so just in between of things. I'm just here touching old dirt and trying to imagine what it feels like when something will grow again. It will come. This is a test of patience for me. We don't have any services in our tiny village. The shops are far away, the town is far away, and mostly we live it here in our own peace, but we do have one amazing thing in our village that I wanted to share with you. Once or twice a month, there is a library bus coming to our small village from town. This is the only service we have here, but I think that is one of the best things here. When the bus arrives, it is a time for us to meet and greet our neighbors, in addition to getting new books to read for the long winter nights or muddy spring days. To me, this feels like a luxury, having this service in our distant village. I get so much joy waiting for the bus to arrive, meeting all the people we live next to, and hearing about their lives. This is one of my highlights of the month, to stop by at the library bus. After I visited the library bus, chatted with our neighbors and read a bit of my new books I got from there, I finished the breads I started in the morning. I'm still in the process of learning sourdough baking, and my breads never look as good as the best ones on social media. But if anything, I've decided not to take pressure about my baking from others. We always eat every bread, since the taste is just amazing. This time, I was making another bread for my neighbor, since she asked for it when I met her in the library bus. I find such joy being able to give something to someone. It is one of my simple and small sources of happiness.