In the Western understanding, culture often appears like a box — a defined whole within which we live. Traditions, then, are like glue that holds the culture together. But if we look more closely at how people actually live, we don’t find a box, but shifting, open activities that move constantly through time. Oral tradition changes with time and place. It connects researched knowledge with lived experience depending on the situation and the need, using both sources of knowledge.

Protecting nature is protecting culture.

Singing has been part of our heritage longer than we can remember. Songs and the stories told through them have described daily life and experience, strengthening the sense of belonging and shaping our cultural identity. In the Western world, culture has been seen as separate from nature — a world of humans, and a world of nature and animals — whose connection is often left unrecognized. Yet Finnish people have lived in and with nature for centuries, and still do.

We don’t have temples; instead of grand monuments, memories and oral tradition have preserved our connection to the past. Our ancestors, who once heard the sounds of nature, brought them into their art. Through old songs, joiks, and other traditions, we can reach aspects of places and times in nature that might otherwise go unnoticed. Nature opens to us through songs.

“When singing folk songs in nature,
it feels like the boundaries between time, past generations,
and nature begin to fade.”

Nature Singing is a world of stories and paths, where paths and nature cross and create new meanings and realities. The singer is on a journey in nature, rather than aiming for a set destination. The song is movement in the moment — a living, ever-shifting flow.

Stories inspired by nature have been shared for thousands of years through song, music, and dance. When we pause to listen to these stories, we hear nature the way it was heard hundreds, even thousands of years before us. And when we tell our own story of nature — by singing, playing, or creating our own expressions — nature becomes close to us, a part of our lives, a source of strength and inspiration we can draw from day by day.

Mu ruoktu lea mu váimmus, ja dat johtá mu mielde —
My home is in my heart, and it travels with me.

Nils-Aslak Valkeapää

Nature Singing is, at the same time, reconnecting with our ancestors and traditions, strengthening the self, and enabling the continuity of living heritage into the future. Instead of clinging to the past, Nature Singing looks forward, creating and maintaining vitality.

From the archives into living culture.

What is Nature Singing not? It is not fixed material to be studied. It is not folk songs sung in a stylistically correct way. Nature Singing comes from within — familiar melodies may appear in humming, but they are not studied separately. Instead of learning, Nature Singing is awakening one’s own voice, sensitivity to self and surroundings, the joy of discovery, and the bliss of sounding together.

“It feels as if the song belongs there,
as a voice among the birdsong and the hush of the forest.”

Nature Singing is not communal singing in the traditional sense either. It arises from the connection between the singer and nature — which is different, unique, and always living for each singer. Songs and melodies may be sung alone, in turns, or together, with the voices echoing from within and intertwining.

Time spent in nature is full of encounters. We don’t act mechanically; everything we do carries experience. My own water-fetching trips at the summer cabin often stretch out, as I stop to admire the waves and listen to the sound of the water. I might test whether the water is colder or warmer than yesterday, glance at the sand on the shore to see whether someone else might have come to drink — maybe a fox or a deer. At the water’s edge, thought begins to wander and time disappears. From these encounters, songs are also born, rise, or are stirred into being.

Nature songs are born in the moment and are valuable to the singer in that moment and in the environment where they arise. They can lead us back to the birthplace of songs — but songs are never whole without the environment where they were born.

Songs begin in the present moment and live with it — rather than trying to change it into something else. On a high hill, a melody might open and follow the shape of the land; in a valley or the shelter of a forest, the song may be closer to the singer’s speech. Near a rock or cliff, the melody might gain force — the song continues through the grey stone. When following the flight of a bird, the voice might lift and glide with the wind.

Nature Singing is improvisation together with nature.