Jonna Jinton: Ecospirituality, the Walking Body and Landscape

Exploring and appreciating the beauty of landscapes and ancient traditions can become a creative source and prowess for autobiographical narrative composition. This chapter explores how Swedish artist and filmmaker Jonna Jinton narrates the natural landscapes, forests and everyday activities in her hometown of Grundtjärn in north Sweden through vlogging on her YouTube channel, which falls under the practice of ecospirituality. Her habits of walking, dancing and listening to natural sounds of a forest river, ice breaking or wind blowing teach her worldwide audience the gravity of valuing rootedness in communities of origin and the potentials of imagination and commitment to one’s land. Using Ümit Kennedy’s notions of narrativising, which is circulating one’s autobiographical living online and digital life writing, in this essay I attempt to explore the fluid relationships between Jinton’s presence as the narrating body and means of embodying her surrounding naturalcultural landscapes, which takes place between her body’s history, memory of belonging and the traditional practices that she visualises through vlogging. The essay also explores Jinton’s meditative approaches and her endeavours to walk, listen and practice the inherited local cultural traces, as well as her attempts in enjoying the small everyday pleasures of engaging with nature, making crafts from natural materials and performing rural living with her husband and family.