In a large city, nature often arrives in small, rationed pieces: a few trees along a street, a small park between buildings, a patch of sky cut into squares by rooftops. It is not nothing. But it is not the same as living inside nature, and our bodies know the difference long before our minds can explain it.
So many people in cities are tired in a particular way — not only from work, but from routine itself: the same grey, the same noise, the same hurry, day after day. Then, on holiday, they are ready to pay far more than a few days in nature could ever “cost” on paper, just to breathe differently for a while. We pay for nature the way we pay for anything we have lost and desperately miss.
I live in the opposite world for most of the year.
Living deep in the forest
Most of my time I live deep in the forest on the Pacific Northwest coast of Canada, in a remote place where there are very few people: far from cities, far from crowds, close to trees, rain, and the ocean.
Every day, I can step outside and be in nature without planning it, booking it, or driving to it. I walk in it, I draw from it, I come back to myself in it. That daily connection gives me strength and slows my pace to a human one. In the forest, I am not performing, rushing, or answering. I am simply present, and closer to who I really am.
It is a gift — and it is also a life with its own challenges. You have to get used to bears walking through your backyard as if it were perfectly normal. Sometimes, quite literally, the only ones you can talk to are your dog, the trees, and the ocean. That means long stretches of silence, long stretches of being alone with yourself.
There is also the practical side no photograph shows. The infrastructure is minimal. You cannot just pop out to shop, or call for a service at any hour. Life here is plan, wait, and do without, in ways a city never asks you to.
People often romanticise living in connection with nature. But living here is much harder than it looks. It takes a strong inner core and real courage: the courage to be alone, with no city noise to distract you from yourself.
Silence as a creative space
In the city, it is easy to avoid yourself. There is always another sound, another person, another task. In the forest, in solitude, there is nowhere to hide from yourself. The silence leaves only you.
For many creative people, that solitude is a turning point. If you fall into it as a victim, it can feel unbearable. If you stay with yourself instead of running from yourself, silence becomes space — an outer space of forest and ocean, and an inner space where ideas can grow without interruption.
That is where my designs come from.
Almost every print I create began in a moment of connection with nature. A mushroom network under the soil, a moon over dark water, a whale’s movement through cold waves: these are not ideas I invented at a desk. They are moments I lived, and then drew.
And I know it works, because I see it in my clients. I see the sparkle in their eyes when a print I drew in silence in the forest meets something quiet and real inside them. It is not fashion as decoration. It is recognition. Something in them recognises something in nature, through the work.
A piece of nature for a city day
This is the thought I want to carry through this article.
My designs lead people to nature. I am happy to be a source of nature for people who need a piece of it every day, even when they cannot go to the forest themselves. If you work in an office, if your daily walk is through a small city park, if your view is mostly concrete and glass, you can still carry a piece of living nature with you. Not as a replacement for real forests — nothing replaces them — but as a daily reminder, a small bridge back to yourself.
That is what a scarf can be, when it is made this way.
Many ideas, and many life changes, begin in exactly this kind of moment: a moment of silence, a moment of connection with your own nature. You do not always need to move to a remote forest to find it. Sometimes you need a walk, a pause, a deep breath. Sometimes you need an object made with authenticity, that has absorbed nature in its making, to remind you of who you are when the city makes you forget.
So if you are reading this from a city, from an office, from a small park on your lunch break: you, too, have a way back to nature, whenever you need it. And sometimes, it is something you carry with you.
