Romanticizing my life in the French countryside

My family and I are extremely blessed that we've been able to create this beautiful slow life here in the countryside in France and will be forever grateful that this is what we call home and every year still my intentions at the beginning of the year are the same. I want to continue seeing the beauty in the world, the beauty of all that is around me, the beauty in the mundane and I think that being happy and content with our life, no matter what circumstances we're in, is really all about what you're setting your mind to and what you're focusing your attention on, the things you say to yourself, the things you give yourself, the things you give to others. And in today's video, I wanted to share a couple of things that I am working on or that I'm doing to help myself see the beauty feel contentment and just make my life a little more beautiful so one of the things that has been such a slight but important change is my coffee ritual now i used to have an espresso machine i was very happy with it but i noticed that grabbing a coffee becomes something you do very quickly while you're busy on your laptop or in a call and this italian way of making coffee it's called a mocha pot i think just forces me to turn it into a moment i need to slow down carefully do all the gestures it really really makes me happy to make my coffee this way i think we have so many daily things that we need to do things we take for granted i mean the fact that i have a warm house or i can make a delicious coffee with my favorite almond or oat milk i mean all of these things are things to be grateful for and same for the many tasks that we have just because we need to keep our household going a lot of the things that we do are repetitive they're boring i don't always feel like doing laundry cooking cleaning going through emails and doing admin, but it is just part of adult life. And I've struggled with it all my life to accept this part of being an adult. But again, it's all things that you can be grateful for because you have food on the table, you have invoices to send and taxes to pay. All of these things are signs that you're doing really well. So another way I like to make my life a little more beautiful is to turn these simple daily chores into a moment I can enjoy and to me it's as simple as just feeling that gratitude and saying hey I have a washing machine my grandmother didn't have one I will sleep in a clean bed tonight with sheets that smell wonderful and the other thing I like to do I was always baking a lot of bread and I've kind of lost that habit a little bit because I don't eat a lot of bread it's mostly for my family but there is something so soothing and relaxing about making bread and for those of you who have my cookbook you may know that I always struggled a little bit with baking bread but I found a really simple recipe now where I just prepare the dough in the evening I mix 500 grams of whole grain spelt flour with 20 grams of salt then I add two bags in this case of instant dry yeast I think you need about 10 grams but you can look it up on the packaging and then I mix that with 360 milliliters of water a little colder than lukewarm and then I just roughly mix that I cover it I leave it for about an hour an hour and a half just to give the flour the time to absorb the water then I do a couple of stretch and folds and then I leave it for the entire night and this has proven to work for me every single time i get up in the morning and i just need to shape the bread and then while i preheat my oven the bread rises for another maybe 30 minutes and then i bake it in a really hot oven at 240 celsius that's where i start but then i just leave it for a couple of minutes maybe two and then I turned the heat down to 220 to 10 depending on the oven. Today I actually wanted to make it in our wood-fired oven but depending on the weather it doesn't get hot enough so I am starting in my Lacanche. I'm also adding a bowl of water and I'm just starting the first three four minutes and then I will continue baking in my wood-fired oven which isn't nearly hot enough actually for this but I'm just going to try and see it's another way that I make life easier for myself and just more enjoyable is to just try things and be willing to fail and then just try again you know I have the luxury that I can try this again tomorrow or another day another way that helps me to stay focused on beauty and to make me feel happier is to actively seek beauty around me. One of the ways I like doing this is to go into town and just walk around see all the art or the beautiful detailing in buildings and today I am taking you to Autun because I want to go into a bookshop here that I've been wanting to try because I really feel like going into a bookshop and look around. I did a video recently with a couple of book recommendations and a couple of you said I should really read books by Valérie Perrin so as you've maybe seen earlier in this video I've already found and read the book Changez l'eau des fleurs which I absolutely loved and today I want to try to find another one of her books called Les oubliés du dimanche and I understand these books have been translated to English as well if you're interested in reading them as well. Although I buy most of my books secondhand in Emmaus or thrift stores, walking into a bookshop is heaven to me. There are so many stories to be discovered. I just love looking at the covers, just letting the title speak to me. In many bookshops now, they write a few lines with their personal feeling about the book or recommendation. And I also love seeing all the other things like notebooks or coffee table books or cookbooks or books about art. A bookshop to me is the gift in itself. You know, I would want to buy everything, but I won't. I will pick one, the one that I came for, but it just feels so inspirational to see all this beauty and even if you can't afford to buy books all the time just walking into a store is to me a way to surround yourself with the beauty of books and art and I wanted to ask you a friend of mine has been talking about these book series The Seven Sisters let me know if you know this book and if you think I will like it I wanted to pick it up but then I stuck to buying the Valérie Perrin one that I came for and keep this one for a next visit to the store another way I try to make my life more beautiful is to gift myself fresh flowers when I can now they can be very expensive I am fortunate to have a garden where I grow flowers so I basically only buy them this time of the year I just feel these spring flowers instantly make me happy and excited for spring and everything that's to come this year and the last thing I wanted to share a way to see more beauty in my life is to see it through the eyes of art and one of the art forms is music I recently discovered a French I think she's French singer she sings in many different languages her name is November Ultra and you just have to google her on YouTube find the video I can highly recommend the song Open Arms I wish you a life filled with beauty wherever you are a life filled with love and with gratitude thank you for watching and i'll see you next week