The feeling of safety and calm was overwhelming. I wanted to curl up on her couch and never leave. My nervous system settled in a way that’s unusual for me. This is the magic of the enchanted house in the forest.
This blog post is free from AI, and written by me. I share my opinions, experience, typos, and weird Danish/English grammar with you gladly and totally free of charge :)
A couple of weeks ago I went to see a friend of mine. She recently moved to a house in a forest. In a beautiful little house hidden amongst trees. To get to her magic house, you have to drive down a dirt road for a mile or so, turn up another little path, and suddenly….there it is… the enchanted house.
This place is magical.
It has a patio, there’s a garage and plenty of space for a vegetable garden. There’s an outdoor oven for summer cooking, and if all that isn’t enough, there’s a river running past the house.
Straight away, I felt my nervous system smile to me. I was speechless, and a huge wave of calm came over me.
Inside the house, the fireplace was spreading its warm glow, the smell of wood burning, and I felt like curling up on her couch and never leave.
How environment affects my creativity
The feeling of safety I felt in this house was overwhelming. Of course, I know this feeling is related to my lovely friend and how she is, as well as our relationship, but there is something different about this place.
The world felt, well, a world away, and it could go on worlding away without me because I felt safe here in this enchanted place.
It’s actually only a 10 minute drive to the nearest village and 30 minutes from a bigger town. In Denmark, you’re never really that far away from anything.
As a super sensitive person, my well-being is tied up in my feelings, which affects my creative side. The pros and cons of this can be explored in another post, but I am sensitive to the space I’m in.
As a child, I used to rearrange my room so often my dad got fed up moving wires and lights, that he taught me how to move them myself. I remember how the feeling of a “new” room affected me for weeks. I loved it.
There is something about a new perspective that inspires me to create something. It sparks new ideas, or re-ignites old ideas.
Respecting my friend’s privacy, I only share these photos
Walking in the woods
My friend and I go for a walk in the woods, which is all the walking we can do.
I, of course, take pictures, which almost seems like an intrusion. At one point, my friend stops and says “smell this air!”
The air smells different in amongst trees, bushes, mushrooms, and wild deer. We fill our lungs with this cleansing air as we continue catching up on work and kids.
I see beautiful Autumn colours on the trees and bushes, leaves fallen on the ground, and it is a stunning time of year for a first time visit. But it’s the feeling this little enchanted place leaves me with, like a gentle whisper to me, that this is also a way to live.
You don’t need the “right” environment to create your work
You really don’t. You can always define what a right environment means to you, but you definitely don’t need a beautiful house, an office, or expensive equipment to write, draw, design, or make. Or even a magical house in the forest.
Thinking we do is often procrastination tactics.
I sat at a corner of our dining table for years. It’s where I started my blog and website, where I ran a webshop from, and where I trained as a kaizen-muse creativity coach. I coached people from my bedroom. It was the only place I could have some privacy from our 3 kids. I didn’t have an office until I was 50.
Much of my struggles in my creative life is about that toggle between what goes on inside me and me thinking about what others think of me, and what I do.
I know I’m not alone in this.
Now I’ve decided to channel Rick Rubin’s thinking of only doing work I like. Not considering the audience at all. My work is a diary entry. It’s a moment in time for me, and it doesn’t have to be anything more than that.
It’s for no one but me, and there’s freedom in that.
The enchanted forest house was the physical safe space I look for inside myself
I enjoy my little cocoon, I always have. As a little girl, I would invent worlds where I narrated the story and they were safe worlds, they were happy worlds, with kind people looking after each other.
My office is my safe little world now. What I’m looking for, of course, is a safe space inside me that no one can influence. Wouldn’t that be nice?
Is it time to move to the forest?
We live in a lovely house, a house we’re still fixing up and decorating to our liking, and we’ve made great memories living here. Memories that would make me sad to leave this house behind.
My little office, for one. It’s in here I try and leave the world worlding outside. This is my safe haven, it’s my room, with my stuff, and I can change the furniture around when I want.
It’s too big, though, this house. When all the kids have gone, it’ll be too big and too much upkeep for hubby and I.
Will we move to the forest? I don’t know, maybe, we’ll see.
