Nature, man. It's the best. That's why hipsters take photos of leaves in front of their faces, right?
I put on my agenda, "Write a blog post about how nature inspires me." I was thinking of making moodboards, and taking some photos and then making colour palettes out of them, which is like, lovely, designer-y stuff, and might be a fun project for me sometime, but it isn't something I actually DO.
What I actually DO is go out into nature and take walks.
And I take photos. So many photos. Most of my iPhone photos are of leaves, trees, roots, water. Shit that at the time, feels so awesome and powerful and beautiful. (And, it is.)
So then I was like, I'll just write about how nature impacts my designs.
And then I sat down to write about it, and this is what came out:
How can I put into a blog post what nature does to me?
The way it makes me feel? Why I want to be out in it, all the time? What the fresh air does to me? To my soul? How excited it all makes me? The leaves on the ground, the flowing brook, the needles of the larch, the colours all around, the way the clouds change colour. The smell of the air. The goddamn smell of the goddamn air. It invigorates me!! All the exclamation points!
I need it to breathe. To breathe deeply. To really inhale. To feel free. That feeling of freedom, that’s what I’ve been searching for, for the last year. I was feeling frantic, and stuck. Stuck in between boxes and boxes and boxes that existed in my dayplanner… boxes I had set up. The boxes are commitments to things. But along with all those boxes, I was also checking social media all the time. You don’t realize what that does to you. I didn’t realize until these last few months, when my imagination started coming back. When my sense of freedom started coming back.
Reading back through 100 Rejection Letters book, I see: Slow Down comes up a lot. SO WHY AM I RUSHING MYSELF AND PUSHING MYSELF TO DO MORE? I want to build a business sustainably. So that means not making myself burnt out doing it. Simple. As that.
Here and here are other posts I wrote (on my old blog, Dream Big Cape Breton) about nature. I like 'em still.
