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“Today is the day.”

That memory came to me this morning, while I was completely overwhelmed with love and joy, petting my cat Nutmeg in the morning sun. He is an absolute delight, an angel of a being — cute, funny, silly, a total cartoon cat. This morning, as he does every morning, he was rolling around outside the door while we got ready for work, peacefully enjoying being alive, off to the side of it all. As I stroked his velvet fur, white and ginger shot through so beautifully with the easterly light coming through the trees, a thought arrived unbidden: how long will I get to enjoy moments like this? He’s getting slowly but surely older, and there’s a death at the end of it. That’s when I remembered today’s date.

Immediately, two thoughts rose up to meet it. One: enjoy the moment, because everything you experience or remember is happening now — so don’t let yourself fall into misery for no reason when what’s in front of you is beautiful (I had the tendency to this doom and gloom). Two: let life surprise you. He may live till twenty-five and end up chief mouser of the farm, peacefully stretched out on the veranda in the setting sun. Those are some of the lessons I’ve had to learn along the way to find peace — a peace that’s now present even when I remember that today “is the day.”

The closure

The moment the grief I’d been carrying truly seemed to dissolve — like ink in water — wasn’t one I expected. I was driving to work, listening to a voice message from a friend in Australia. I’d told her that the emotions around the anniversary somehow creep up on me every year, and I’m not really sure why, given how long ago it all was. Then I told her the story of the evening it happened, and her first word back on the voice note changed everything:

“FUUUCK!!”

I swear, the moment I heard it, something in me just calibrated. It was the first time anyone had met the news with that reaction, and it was exactly what I’d felt back then — I finally felt heard, and seen. This isn’t to take anything away from anyone who’s met me with compassion or sadness on learning this — but that simply wasn’t a place my nervous system had been able to get to for twenty-five years. Only when I heard the shock, the anger, the rage in that one word from across the globe did I feel like I could access everything else that came with it. Credit where it’s due: we met during a powerful mastermind run by Peter Crone, whose work on “grieving with gratitude” has shaped me profoundly in the years since. But it was Nicole who broke the spell, and I’m eternally grateful to her — for truly listening.

Every day above ground

My other friend Mary, who’s in her seventies now, could often be heard saying, “Waking up above ground is already a reason to be grateful.” Hearing this in my late thirties, I lived by it, no matter the circumstances. Gratitude is so important — it was also the first tool I reached for when things were at their hardest. These days, the instant connection and relief comes from practising Heart Coherence, but back then, when my mind and body struggled to focus on anything deeper, a daily one-minute action was the first step toward recovery. I don’t know if it still exists, but there was an app called Presently that nudged me every night at 11pm — yes, I was only just getting to bed at eleven back then, mad to think about now — to write down what I was grateful for that day. And even on the days I felt like writing “nothing,” I made myself think, made myself really look at the world. A bus driver who was kind and smiley. A beautiful pink cloud. A good night’s sleep. I was practising something that eventually became a daily, even hourly, habit — the art of noticing. When we really look around, there’s an infinite amount out there to repair and grow our nervous system with; we just have to exercise the muscle. Sometimes an app is a good place to start.

One evening, a balloon popped on my phone, congratulating me on 250 days of gratitude, and it startled me into looking back through them. I remembered every single one — the day, the moment, the person. I felt all 250 gratitudes again, all at once, and I realised: it’s all out there, all the time. It’s up to me to notice it.

I deleted the app after just over a year — I didn’t need it anymore. Gratitude, love, and appreciating the small moments turned out to be the greatest blessing over the years, slowly training my nervous system to relax and stay at ease. No more walls to build, even when death comes along — and it will, folks, that’s the nature of life. The key is to make space for all the feelings, even the painful and the ugly ones.

*I didn’t expect to write this post at all — it just came to me. And the title that followed it so aptly is in memory of my brother Tomek, who was the one who introduced me to Monty Python’s Flying Circus. If you know, you know.

(If you are one of my Skool people: I’ve closed the classrooms and moved everything here instead — same me, same soil-and-ferments world, just landing in your inbox now instead of behind logins and modules. The format’s changed to regular newsletters rather than a static course, but there’s more coming your way through it, not less.)

I want this to be an entertaining journey for anyone hanging along — equally a diary of life passing by, whether that’s the changing seasons in the garden or the kitchen, and a slightly random library of the experiences and knowledge I’ve picked up along the way.

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Truth is, there’s a lot I’d like to share, but I rarely schedule the time to put it into something coherent enough for people like you to actually use. Instagram is both addictive and pointless for this — it never lets the real depth of a story come out. I love posting a picture of something beautiful the moment I capture it, but there’s usually a story behind it too, and the reel-editing does my tits in. I’m old-school enough that I’d rather ramble than edit.

I’m hoping Substack suits the long-form writing I’ve always loved, though I’ll warn you now — I digress. I was an avid reader as a teen, read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings three times before I turned eighteen, and used to lug 600+ page books back from Polish bookshops to fill the hour and a half I spent commuting to and from work when I first moved to the UK, almost twenty years ago. I now live in Oxford and had the pleasure to visit the Master himself.

Fermentation found its way into that same restlessness, years later. After a long stretch of my own gut health struggles, coming back to food that was alive — properly alive, not just fresh — taught me that our bodies are far more capable of healing than we’re often told. That’s the thread running under everything here, even the silly stuff: soil, ferments, and the slow, unglamorous work of feeling well again.

So what you’ll actually find here: a hell of a lot of fermentation content, soil nerding, and general biohacking for lazy people — some professional advice, some opinions, quite a lot of recipes and hacks for toxin-free homes, and the odd bit of nonsense about cats and vibes. Read at your own risk :)

How this actually works, since I know some of you like structure:

Free, for everyone — a note roughly every couple of weeks. Less step-by-step recipe, more the feel of a season or a theme — growing, food, or something more heart-led, whatever’s alive for me at the time.

Paid subscribers get a weekly post every Sunday, alternating between a growing newsletter (soil, compost, the garden apothecary) and a homesteading one (what’s cooking, pantry remedies, home crafts) — proper, practical, and straight to your inbox. You’ll also get the fermentation course that used to live in Skool, now yours to keep for good rather than borrowed from behind a login — it lands in your inbox the moment you join.

If you were part of the Skool community, keep an eye on your inbox — I’ll be sending you something separately as a thank you for being here from before this even had a name.

No pressure either way. See you in September!

Martyna