Four threads, one oasis

When I was fifteen, my father asked what I wanted to become. I said a drawing teacher. I used to sit in the forest with my drawing board, drawing trees. He asked if I'd make money with that. He wanted me to have my own income and never depend on anyone. I listened. I became a physiotherapist — in four years, which few managed.

I worked in hospitals in the United Kingdom, became a senior physiotherapist, and later worked in Riyadh. That is where the desert first entered my life. I didn't know yet what it would become.

But the artist never left. After a summer of grape picking in France, I said out loud that I wanted to become an artist. The people around me said, go and do it. Follow your heart. I did. I built a portfolio, took workshops at the Van Gogh Museum, and was accepted into the autonomous arts department in Utrecht — twenty students out of five hundred. When they asked me to specialize, I said no. Picasso never specialized. I wanted to keep every skill, together.

Then I became a mother, and food became urgent. What do I feed my children? That question started a search that has lasted twenty-five years. Raw food. Superfoods — I bought the bags, tested each one, made a label for it. A beach house in Thailand, where I couldn't join the retreat, so I watched, listened, and asked. And a cleansing lifestyle that fits into real life: while you eat, you cleanse.

Meanwhile, the plant kingdom pulled me in. When the children were older, the research took whole days, then nights. Some weeks were eighty hours. A hundred and fifty labels later, I was weak in body and mind, and barely moving.

So I began again, small. A push-up from the chair. A yoga mat next to the computer. A Swiss ball. A kettlebell. Then twenty meters, from the house to a tree and back. Then the street. Then the forest. Over time, I craved the trees more than the screen.

When my daughter was fifteen, she didn't want school anymore. So we left for the mountains of northern Spain. Horses. Spring water straight from a pipe. When she left for Switzerland, I stayed on with a wolf dog. I gathered firewood. I carried water. I washed in river water, even in winter. I drank wild-plant infusions by the liter. I planted date seeds and thought about deserts — how an oasis begins with a few seeds.

There, with a phone and a library computer once a week, I asked myself one question. What can I do with everything I know to make people happier?

I looked at what I carried. A physiotherapist's understanding of the body and movement. A cleansing lifestyle built on nourishment. A forest that healed me. And an artist's eye for beauty — the antiques my father repaired, the thrift stores I still visit with my mother, the pieces that already have a life and deserve another.

Movement. Nature. Food. Beauty. Not four skills — one concept.

That concept is Oasis-Office. A place that comes alive where it wasn't before, for the people who walk into it, and for the persons who keep building it. Every day.