Between countryside and city – Living a cottagecore life wherever I am.

Hello everyone! My life is so quiet right now and so is the rest of the world around me. We have been snowed in with all public transport delayed or cancelled, not that I wanted to leave the house anyways, but I am an introvert and a homebody as it is and winter definitely brings out this part of me even more. I've also been feeling so tired and just cozy crafting indoors. For the sake of my immune system and filming for this video I did however leave the house once. I went on the most magical walk around the forest and over the lake. From where we live we are able to follow the frozen river until we get to what is usually our beach and today it is nothing but frozen crunchy snow and ice. It was breathtakingly beautiful. As I get out into nature every week to film these videos some of you might be surprised to hear that I do not live in the countryside. I actually still live in the city, Berlin city to be exact, the capital of Germany with millions of people living here. And contrary to the feelings I'm trying to express in my stories on here, I have been living a rather city life for years now. I wanted to be transparent about this with you because I believe that it is very important to be truthful in our online spaces. While my greatest wish and plan right now is to finally move to the Irish countryside in a few months hopefully and to find a cottage for rent with a garden and a quiet nature surrounding me, I am not there yet by any means. We live on the very outskirts of the city right now between busy streets and beautiful landscapes that I'm able to show you on here. For the first time in my life I have immediate walkable access to rivers, lakes and woods and I've been craving it for a very long time. My personal story in short has always been about belonging to place and to people. And ever since I graduated high school I moved around countries and cities quite a bit in order to find my place. After years of living in capitals the nearly painful desire for nature centered life has been growing month by month until at the end of last year we, my partner Paul and I, decided to finally change things including our jobs and living situation. We quit our rental agreement and are currently preparing for our move back to Ireland. Something important though I have learned in these years of feeling disconnected and so out of place has been that while my outward circumstances might not be what I want them to be yet, I still have a lot of control over my life. This is a message I have been desperately needing to hear in the past years myself. Time after time I have felt so low comparing my life to others who live in my dream homes and dream countries and places. Now I see how this sadness has been holding me back from creating what I wanted and kept me frozen in place, thinking that what I dreamed of was unattainable. I come from a small industrial village and moving into the mountains seemed impossible. I was also chasing a career that depended on me being in cities, always available, always on the go and ready to network and catch a flight somewhere important. It's almost funny now how since I made my decision internally it feels as though my entire external world has shifted. I feel so much more connected and calm now that I allow myself to follow the seasons, create art every day, make these videos that help me pay attention to nature and most importantly I now make the time to go into the forest and put myself in the way of beauty. It's not that all of these things weren't an option before, I just never used them. It seemed like too much of a hassle to catch a train or bus to get to the forest, so I rather stayed inside, miserably. Yes, the thing I am looking for is a change of scenery and to begin a new, different life, but it is also a life that is creative, slower, simpler, more wondrous and none of those things require a new home or car or job. I can begin to create the life I am searching for right now, right here, by making small changes and implementing new habits, learning new crafts and skills. I don't need a garden to be a gardener right now, a windowsill or balcony is a great way to learn. I don't need a studio in order to be an artist or a cabin in the mountains to truly enjoy nature. All of what I need I currently have and everything I still work towards will be in reach when the time is right. I choose to hold on to these thoughts. I would like to think that my daily life in a year from now, or in a perfect home, perfect job, won't be all too different from my life between city and country right now. I really believe that we are able to change our lives, starting small and starting on the inside, before we take all those big leaps. At least that's what I'm learning for myself right now. And maybe that can inspire you to do the same, find out what you really desire and, instead of looking at the big steps that might be years in the future, finding all the small things that we can do in the meantime to feel better and to feel like that life is not all that different to how our every day looks like at the moment. Some of you left some lovely comments under my last video when it came to baking and fermenting things, so I wanted to leave my sourdough recipe on the screen for you. Sadly, this loaf did not turn out as I wanted it to. It's always funny when I try to film something, it just doesn't work out. I think it's because I'm too focused on other things like the camera and the lighting that I don't really focus on the task I set out to do. In this case the oven wasn't heated properly and then with filming it kind of lost its shape and then the temperature changed too much, but the bread was still delicious and now you know my recipe at least. Usually the sourdough recipe works very well for me. I've been using it for years now and I use it with all different types of flours and I also use it when I'm dividing the dough into smaller pieces to make the rolls that you saw me make in last week's video, because I think a lot of you liked those. They were amazing and it's the exact same recipe for anything I bake most of the time. Hello everyone, thank you so much for watching this video. I have not left the house much because it is so cold and slippery. It's minus six degrees today, so I will try to stay at home as much as I can. Even going to the grocery store takes a long time because I don't have a car, so I can't drive, but I also don't have a car, so I have to walk. Usually I cycle, but now even walking over the frozen streets is a bit of an adventure, so I'm really staying put as much as possible. I have been wanting to make this video for a while to talk about something that I felt quite lonely with because I was always comparing my life to all those influencers that live in the wilderness and surrounded by so much beauty in the mountains or whatever and I just felt very sad that I was not there and that those things weren't possible for me yet. And over the last couple months I have found so much joy in going out and seeking nature and implementing so many slow living routines and chores into my life that has made me feel much calmer and much more at peace. And I really wanted to make this video about how we can maybe take control for how we're feeling versus always looking for the next external thing to finally make us happy. Because yes, I want a house or a cottage in the countryside with a big garden. I want all those things and I know I will get there eventually, but it won't be this year. I probably won't have a garden this year, but that's fine. I am learning patience right now with myself and with my life and I know that if I put one foot in front of the other I will get there eventually. All in good time is what I'm trying to tell myself. I have lived in quite horrible situations in the past when I was a teenager and I moved out relatively early. I moved overseas to a different country and I was working there and going to college and I lived with multiple other people that slept with me in the same room for the first year of college in different apartments that were all, I think, rented out to us illegally. But it was all I could afford and I was paid in cash and my rent was paid in cash and it was quite shady. It was moldy, it was wet, it was cold, I had no privacy. It was very, very uncomfortable. And looking back I wonder how I had the energy and the determination to push myself so hard but then around one year later I had just a massive breakdown and I couldn't take it anymore because it was way too much. Working so hard and for so little and then having nothing to myself and I can tell you some really almost funny but rather horrendous stories about the apartments I was living in and the people I was living with. But I want to say that all of this has definitely helped me so much to feel gratitude for what I have today. My own apartment with an amazing partner, with hardwood floors and a little balcony and I can walk into the most beautiful forests and to the most beautiful lakes and yes this is not where I want to stay any longer because we still live in the city. I'm so grateful that I am here and to see what I and we have built in such a short time it gives me so much hope to know that no matter how often I want to change my life I can always do so and everything is achievable and everything is possible with determination and patience and gratitude along the way. Because when I moved into my first own apartment, my first studio apartment which was tinier than a shoebox and I was sleeping right next to my stove and I was using the oven for extra heating and things were not ideal, that I felt as if I had just woken up in a castle. That first morning of waking up alone was incredible. So I want to feel this much gratitude wherever life takes me and I just wanted to share with you that if you are not in the perfect situation right now, you know you want to change your life in certain ways, you can do it with patience and gentleness and determination. But also sometimes our brain wants to trick us into believing that we need that next external thing in order to feel a certain way. And over the last months I have learned for myself at least that I didn't need to change that much to feel better. What I needed was to really incorporate ways to feel more connected to nature and to feel more creative into my everyday. Because that dream life that I'm picturing is not just carried by having that perfect cottage, it's carried by the things I will be doing, the way I'm going to be spending my time and a lot of that I can already implement today. So I wanted to leave this here with you and maybe inspire you to be more gentle and do some fun things that make you feel like you already live the life that you dream of. Thank you so much for watching this video, I will see you next week and I'm sending you all my love. Bye bye!