A lot of things about this topic are spoken in past tense. There used to be a tradition, it was thought, etc. Don't get me wrong though, I am fully in support of revivalism, and try to practice that in my personal life. Quite depressing that this stuff isn't really taught in schools, but I guess that is the point? We are supposed to be God-fearing Christians, the myths only serving a purpose for some nationalistic identity building. No thanks for me. I'd rather learn the myths like my ancestors experienced them. Things like ancestry are not important to some people, and that's fine, but I'm personally living in the region where we've been hanging around for centuries so I've become quite attached, sentimentally.
To me, the runosongs are the most important. By reading a lot of them, you start understanding things about them which didn't make sense to you at first. You start seeing double meanings in ordinary words, etc. And you are able to understand a new, EXCITING perspective and web of things connecting the topics to each other. This has brought great joy to me. I do not literally believe in that oh, there is a woman in the Sun, she's the Sun goddess, no. It is simply that the Sun itself is personified in runosongs as a maiden. It's all more about the values these songs teach you. In many ways, it's less of a religion and more of a philosophy. The nature around us is sacred. It's our helper, and our executioner. We must only take what we need, and we need to give back. Since humanity at large is not doing this at the moment, we will suffer from its devastating results through things like global warming. But maybe that is deserved for our constant destruction of the divine for greed.
The difference in my thinking and the thinking in Abrahamic religions can be very well seen, I think, in the words of President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan, a majority muslim country. At the world's largest climate conference in COP29, he said that "oil is a gift from God". Truly we can abuse this planet as much as we want since God gave it to us to be utilized, the markets want oil after all. This is the view I can never, ever swallow. (And Christians aren't any better so I don't want any racist remarks on this. We all need to do better. I tend to point out the Abrahamic religions because I was raised a Christian. No personal hate towards you, reader.)
Another thing which certainly gives this site a leaning is the fact that I am a woman. Professor Anna-Leena Siikala said it well when she pointed out that people in Finnish mythology research have been so focused on the northern, male-centric creation myth, that the southern female-centric one has been largely ignored. This is good to remember, I think, even though the northern version is the one in my region and therefore "mine". The female singer focused traditions of Ingria and Estonia have been, in many ways, ignored, but can provide us with valuable new insight on the runosongs. No doubt, you'll see some special emphasizing on goddesses and luonnottaret on this site. What can you do, I am very interested in them.
I guess one of my dream jobs would be being a priestess. Currently, I don't have any fellow believers around though.
