I have some exciting news to share with you. This post is a little longer than usual, so make yourself comfortable with your favourite cup of tea, coffee or a nice glass of something…
This post has been a long time coming – a long time to me anyway. For those who me a little, patience has never really been my strong point. I am learning through and one of my favourite teachers is actually four-legged and her height is measured in hands. Even her arrival took much longer than expected and then I had to wait almost another year before I eventually rode her. Today I have understood that even those long months were too quick for her and we are now taking things slow and keeping it simple, which feels right and new and unusual all at the same time.
Of course this post was never meant to be about a horse – it’s actually about me and this business and how it has already evolved and where it needs to go now.
When I first decided to run a market stall with German Christmas goodies, close to ten years ago, I had already registered my business name ‘busy lisi’ a little while beforehand. I had plans to teach baking and cooking to kids, because I believed then, as I do now, that my time in the kitchen with grandmothers and my mother and even on my own, measuring and weighing things, helped me build foundations for maths & meant I was never once unsure about numbers & fractions & adding. It was practical first and became abstract later.
However, I didn’t think I could teach something that I had no qualification in. People might not believe that I could in fact bake. So bake I did and I ran my market stalls in various locations, met people, learnt a lot about marketing and about myself. And of course life carried on and changed. I went from uni to fulltime work to part time juggle, from married to mother of two, from life in the city to life on a ¼ acre block and from a cat and two turtles to a cat, two turtles, two horses, 13 chooks and countless fish. And in amongst it all, the name ‘busy lisi’ truly reflected my life. Busy is what I had become and had mostly forgotten about Lisi.
So I realised a change was needed and took the first step in late 2019. I left my big city job of eight years and with it the impossible juggle of family life in a small country village and the weekly commute to tight deadlines, long hours and artificial light. My feet have since begun to be firmly planted on the ground and I am learning to go back to my roots – grow them and then slowly unfold my wings and find my home.
I believe it isn’t only children who need to be given roots and wings, but rather everyone of us. Roots that remember how and where we started, that keep us grounded and anchored and give us the sense of belonging. And wings to soar high up into the skies with our wildest dreams, feeling the freedom we all crave and feeling at home with ourselves and in our lives.
This journey for me feels like it has only just begun and I have a lot to learn, explore and find. To help me do that my new business name is ‘My Heimat’. “Heimat” is pronounced as ‘hi-mart’. It is, you guessed it, a German word and incorporates my roots beautifully. Not only does Heimat mean home and where I grew up or place of origin, but it is about feeling at home and this home does not even have to be a place. It is about memories, language, feeling comfortable and protected and where you can or have grown roots. In a nutshell, Heimat is, where you don’t have to explain yourself.
‘My Heimat’ aims to help find, create and define a Heimat for all of us. The first step will be to offer online baking classes for you – starting with the quintessential loaf of sourdough bread. A fail-safe way to make any house and kitchen feel like home. In future ‘My Heimat’ will offer courses, workshops & coaching about making food from scratch, growing a garden, raising families and animals and central to it all financial wellbeing and our relationship with money. The courses are all aimed at helping you grow roots, spread your wings and find your Heimat.
I really look forward to meeting you along this journey and see how it will guide us home.
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