Endless Days of Summer - simple & slow living in the English countryside | painting, cozy life 🌿

Hello, friend. These endless days of summer are filled with a sweet kind of softness. This might be the first summer on my memory where I didn't want to hurry and make the seasons pass, but instead thoroughly enjoyed every single warm sunny moment. I celebrated 15 years of life in England this year, and on my memory this is the first time we had an actual real summer, which is so unusual for a little island country. It comes with its own issues, of course. Nature stands still and thirsty, unused to this level of heat. My soul still craves autumn and rain and cool wind on my face, but these golden hues and barley fields and balmy evening walks fill my heart with this sweet kind of happiness. Happiness. I've been thinking about happiness a lot recently. If I'm being completely honest, I don't think I felt it for the longest time. In fact, I even took pride in my brooding melancholic personality. Skepticism, realistic expectations, disappointment were the building blocks of my early 20s, the remnants of which carried over into present life. I realized that despite all the good that is going on in my life, I can't call myself truly happy. Happy, optimistic were never the words that defined me, nor did they fuel my actions. And that's when I realized, perhaps just like love, happiness is a verb. It's an action. It's not something you have, but rather something you do. Something you do that is not in any way connected to happiness, the emotion itself, but something that inevitably brings you to it once enough little verbs, enough little actions connected and compiled into a soul full of joyful energy. It's not happiness that fuels the actions, but actions that fuel the happiness. Do you know what I mean? One of the little actions that makes me happy is cooking. No matter how simple or elaborate, cooking and trying out new recipes, creating my own or discovering cultures through taste is one of the most joyous things to me. For a while over the recent few months, I've been so busy with life that cooking became just an essential routine. I haven't even done that much of it and enjoyed being cooked for instead. But now I'm thrilled to get back into it and share some new recipes with you too, of course. Today I'd like to share this super easy gooseberry full recipe with you. It's a traditional English dessert made with tart cooked berries folded into light cream. If you can't get gooseberries, you can replace them with any other kind of fruits and berries. Plums, strawberries, raspberries will do. However, it's preferable to choose tart fruit. I also made some sugar snap cookies to go with it. Originally, the idea was to make ginger snap cookies, but I ran out of dried ginger and decided to use cinnamon instead. Lots of cinnamon. However, it's completely unnecessary and you can omit it. Gooseberries have been cultivated in England since about the 13th century and though not very popular today and sometimes rather hard to find, they are quite traditionally British. They are a rather sentimental berry to me too personally, even though my childhood was spent on the opposite side of Europe. I grew up picking gooseberries off my neighbor's bushes at the back of our high-rise city apartment blocks, prickling my fingers on the thorny branches and squirming at the tangy taste. Yes, I much prefer eating them the English way, cooked and sweetened with sugar mixed into light cream. Gooseberry fool dates back to the middle of the 17th century, though some believe it might have appeared even earlier than that. Originally made with custard, but I prefer this lighter cream and yogurt-based version, light and easily whipped by hand. I spent most of my summer in the garden, enjoying warm long evenings outside. There were many things I felt like I didn't have time for recently and painting is also one of them. I realized that unless I made time for it, I won't ever get back to doing things that I enjoy. We never really have the time, don't we, unless we decide to allocate it. I'm searching for inspiration in my daily life, in my beautiful little garden. Right now, in the middle of summer, roses decided to give a second bloom, hydrangeas are lush and striving, cosmos flowers are attracting butterflies and busy bumblebees. We have a resident red admiral butterfly in the garden who recognizes our faces and flutters comfortably around us, or so I like to believe. Of course, we also have resident wasps who help themselves to our lunches and dinners on the daily and who I struggle to get comfortable around. This garden served as a big inspiration to me and was one of the biggest reasons we moved into our little village home five years ago in the first place. So today I finally decided to paint it. With some added whimsy and fantasy perhaps, imagining what it would be like if the house was a cottage hidden in the trees and little chickens running about on the path leading up to it. Of course, you can't always have it all at the same time in real life, but that's where painting makes everything better. If you can't have your dream garden or house just yet, you can always paint it, and who knows, maybe one day it will exist in real life too. Oh, happiness. Let me try and untangle the thoughts and meanings I was trying to convey earlier. You know how more often than not we wait for the perfect conditions to do the things we want? To start a new project, schedule a coffee date with a friend, learn a new skill, put effort into making an elaborate dinner. We wait until the weather is better, until it's not so hot outside anymore or until the rain stops. Wait until the baby grows up or the moment is perfect. We wait for a Friday or the weekend to do the things that make us happy, or wait for a holiday to finally get some much-needed rest. We think once all those things align and happen, then we will finally be happy. But is that really so? In my experience, whenever the moment to be happy arrived and passed, I barely got a chance to enjoy it, and then it's again back to the boring routine. Is that what true happiness is supposed to feel like? So here's the thing. True happiness, at least in my worldview, happens when you are done waiting. When you have a candle-lit dinner on a casual Tuesday, food served in the prettiest plates you keep for guests or special occasions. When you stop waiting for a holiday to get some rest. When you use your favorite high-quality watercolor paint without the fear of running out. When you take your baby on that flight or for an evening walk while they sleep in the carrier on you instead of that usual 7 p.m. bedtime. When you don't chase it or wait for a special moment to be happy, but instead do little tiny actions every day that turn happiness into a way of being. When happiness becomes a verb rather than a destination. Anyway, thank you again for being here and listening to my endless musings. I will see you again very soon.