Talk 5: The desert, the oasis, and the wolf dog

When my daughter was fifteen, she didn't want to go to school anymore. I thought about it, and I told her, look, plenty of the world's wealthiest people never finished school either. They built a skill instead, and built something from it. She already knew how to read and write, she was excellent with numbers, she was creative, and she could always learn more. So I said, we're going to nature instead. To save you.

We left for the mountains of northern Spain. Horses, no electricity, a life built around what was actually in front of us. The water came straight out of a pipe from the mountain spring. The first time I drank it, I was moved almost to tears. In Holland, I used to drive to a water shop just to buy bottled spring water from sources around the world. Here, it simply ran from the ground.

My daughter learned stillness there. Music, when there were gatherings. And languages, until she was fluent in six of them. In time, she got her driving license, gathered her skills, and left for Switzerland to work.

I stayed. Alone, with a wolf dog, in the mountains. I gathered my own firewood. I carried water from the village. I washed by hand with river water, and bathed in it even in winter, which I came to see as building my body stronger. I made strong infusions from wild plants and drank them by the liter. I pounded fruit by hand for smoothies, no blender, no power. I grew plants from seed, even from date seeds. I became fascinated by deserts, and by how an oasis can begin with people planting the date seeds they eat.

It was there, mostly alone, that Oasis-Office really started taking shape. Not on paper. In my head, during long days with no one to talk to but a dog. Once a week I went into the city for groceries, and I combined it with hours of computer time in the library. My phone, with a small 5 GB data plan, did the rest. With that, and the library's WiFi and PC, I built this brand.

I started asking myself the only question that mattered: what can I actually do with everything I know — the body, the food, the art — to make people happier, and the world a little better?

I thought about my physiotherapy, which was never about machines or massage. It was about teaching someone to feel their own body again, to analyze it, to move.

I thought about food, still learning even there, eating what the land gave me, staying vegetarian when raw and vegan wasn't possible, and finding a kind of Zen in being satisfied with what I had.

I thought about what my son had taught me. He introduced me to people like Jim Rohn, and to how you actually build something, not just dream it.

Eventually, I knew it was time to return to the world. I called my old friend in Amsterdam, who runs a raw, organic, vegan kitchen, shop. I'd worked with him sixteen years earlier, right at the beginning. He took me back in. I worked his kitchen for a year, then moved toward the cleansing and detox work that was pulling at me by then.

I came back to that same place again, sixteen years later. It had grown into something much bigger — a restaurant, a cafe, a shop, all one living thing. I had new skills to learn all over again.

But the real work had already happened, back in the mountains, with a wolf dog and no electricity.

Oasis-Office is named exactly what it is. An oasis. A place that comes alive in the middle of somewhere that wasn't, for the people who walk into it, and just as much for the person who built it and keeps building it. Every day.