I always knew I wanted to have the experience of mothering. To create. To give birth. What I couldn’t comprehend was how completely it would transform me. Not in the sentimental way people speak about motherhood more like surviving inside a storm while becoming the storm itself.
I suffered deeply with postpartum depression and stopped recognising myself. I disappeared inside my own mind and often felt like I was melting like candle wax. Every part of me burning away. She arrived from somewhere ancient and unknowable. Of bone and smoke and scent. Beneath exhaustion and terror, there was recognition. A certainty. I knew her before this life and we were connected in ways I will never understand. That is eternal.
I don’t know if motherhood made me a better person. Good, like I thought it might. But it has made me profoundly aware of my choices and how the affect her life.
Virginia has taught me the true scale of love. How vast it is. As she grows older, we are slowly untangling from one another. Spilling out of the container that once held us both. There is joy in that, and grief too. The bittersweet realization that we are separate souls with separate paths. I have learned to love her not as an extension of myself but as her own person. Her own tonic. It is a privilege to know another being so deeply and to let myself be known and seen in the rawest form. I want to be more like this in other aspects of my life. It’s an act of bravery.
That is the revelation. Love is freedom. It does not strain or bargain or demand. It exists as naturally as breath. Constant. Inevitable. Essential.
And though my body yearns to be reunited with her body. I know she is happy and knows deeply she is loved. That’s all a mother can ask for. Happy Mother’s Day. To the mother in you.
Self portrait 2020
3 things ring true in this moment:
1. I prefer my denim covered in dirt.
2. I feel more comfortable in my skin than ever. 3.This is not my first rodeo.
Words can’t quite hold what it is to film out here just beyond AustinTX. The last time I came through these parts was collaborating with dear Mr Terrence Malick, and am reminded it was not a dream.
Nature still hums an endless song. Everything feels slow and soft. It’s greener than my memory serves me. Rain pounds on tin like its got nowhere else to be and our crew attempts to escape torrential downpour and lightning strikes. We chase moments like a storm attempting to capture a story that we love on 35mm before the sky changes its mind again.
There are horses and chickens and donkeys, guinea fowl darting around and bunnies slip through the grass. Id take one home if I could. Sunsets arrive like little miracles signalling rest. Days of heaven and hell, of highs and lows, of chatter and quiet, bags of chips, cowgirl carbonara.
Thou shall not remove Stetson. Music will rattle through my bones like thunder.
@halolorraine shares her experience at the Original Mayr Medical Resort and what keeps bringing her back.
Haley Bennett erzählt von ihren Erfahrungen im Original Mayr Medical Resort und warum sie immer wieder gerne zu uns kommt.
#originalmayr #mayrclinic #reset #haleybennett #austria
how cute would it be if I wrote and directed a new pippi movie starring by baby girl and @dienstanddotter as a production consultant in Swedish antiques. dream #worldbookday @annamckinney yes I stained the wood floor orange 🍊 yes that’s a basting brush
we want a small pet monkey
A custom gown that was made for me by Chloé in 2018. Worn to the BAFTAs that year, before I had my daughter, Virginia. Last night, I brought her back for the Dunhill Annual BAFTA party.
Because film is about what endures. The stories. The craft. A quiet rebellion against trends. A celebration of work that lasts longer than a season.
Congratulations to all the incredible nominees on an extraordinary year of film @dunhill@bafta
First trailer of film directed by Tina Gharavi @logicofthebirds Gharavi, Night and Day reimagines Night and Day @woolfsnightandday an “unromantic comedy” with extraordinary sensitivity, capturing Woolf’s wit, restraint, and emotional complexity while allowing the story to breathe for a modern audience.
Filming this was a truly surreal experience, working alongside so many talented, funny English actors: the incomparable Timothy Spall, the legend that is Jennifer Spall, the brilliant Jack Whitehall, and the incomparable Lily Allen.
A charming ensemble, a timeless story, and a director whose love, care and intelligence made every frame feel alive.
