My Story
The Old Country
I was born in Lithuania, a country where the forests still speak and the rivers remember their names. My earliest memories smell of linden blossom and wood smoke. My grandmothers gathered chamomile by the roadside and dried bundles of yarrow in the rafters. There was always a jar of something steeping on the windowsill, always a remedy for what ailed you. The sacred rue grew by the doorstep -- not because anyone planted it, but because it had always been there, the way certain truths simply arrive and stay.
We didn't call it herbalism then. We didn't call it anything. It was just the way women knew. A language passed down through hands and kitchen tables, through lullabies and the quiet turning of the seasons. I didn't know I was learning. I thought I was just watching.
The City of Rain
Life carried me to London, as it does. I was young, ambitious, eager to become someone the world would recognize. The city taught me speed. It taught me the shape of loneliness in a crowd of eight million. I built a life there -- a good one, by many measures -- but something in me ached for soil. For slowness. For the sound of wind through birch trees rather than through tower blocks.
In the grey London light, I began to reach back toward what my grandmothers knew. I returned to the plant knowledge of my lineage, not as a hobby but as a homecoming. Every herb I relearned was a conversation with the women who came before me. Every tincture was a prayer in a language I was remembering.
The Sun and the Soil
Spain found me the way a garden finds its gardener -- not by accident, but by a kind of inevitability. I came here carrying the scent of Baltic pine in my memory and three small souls who needed room to grow wild. Motherhood cracked me open in the best way. It showed me that wellbeing is not a destination but a daily practice, as ordinary as kneading bread or hanging lavender to dry.
Here, in the Mediterranean warmth, I discovered that the old ways do not belong only to the Baltics. They belong wherever women gather plants and tend to one another. The rosemary on my Spanish hillside speaks the same language as the rue that grew by my grandmother's door.
Why KoraKira
KoraKira was born from the understanding that we do not need to choose between the ancient and the modern. That a woman can honour her Lithuanian grandmothers while raising her children under Spanish olive trees. That traditional plant knowledge and gentle living are not trends to adopt but truths to remember.
This space is my offering -- a place where ancestral wisdom meets the life we are actually living. Where the traditions are real, the rituals are rooted, and nothing is borrowed from a culture that is not mine. Everything here grows from my own soil, my own lineage, my own hands.
The Lineage
Lithuania was the last country in Europe to accept Christianity. For centuries, our people kept the old faith -- a living relationship with the earth, the trees, the fire, the fate that weaves through all things. These are the goddesses who walked with my grandmothers, and who walk with me still.
Žemyna
Earth Mother
She who holds every root and receives every seed. The ground beneath our bare feet. We kissed the earth to honour her.
Laima
Goddess of Fate & the Linden
She who spins destiny beneath the linden tree. Protector of mothers, keeper of the thread that connects birth to death.
Gabija
Guardian of the Hearth Fire
The sacred flame that warms the home and guards the family. We fed her bread and salt. She kept the darkness at bay.
We carry the medicine of our grandmothers in our hands.
What I Believe
Rootedness
Wholeness begins when we stop floating and start belonging -- to a place, a lineage, a practice we return to daily.
Gentleness
The most powerful medicine is often the quietest. A cup of tea. A moment of stillness. The soft authority of patience.
Authenticity
I share only what grows from my own soil. No borrowed rituals, no performance of wellness -- just honest practice, honestly offered.
Wholeness
Body, spirit, kitchen, garden -- they are not separate. To tend one is to tend them all. We are already whole; we have only forgotten.