There is a village in the north of Finland with some thirty inhabitants. While the villagers do not lead the idyllic lives that are sold as images to tourists, they also do not lead lives of depression, alcoholism, poverty, and seclusion—an image generated by research results from the likes of National Research and Development Centre for Welfare and Health. The ill-being of rural northern villages is well documented in large-scale quantitative research,1 but qualitative research on the actual well-being, of what (...) is already good and fulfilling, is scarce. In this paper I present a research project in education in which I have collected the data through a year-long correspondence with four participants from .. (shrink)