What I miss most about my childhood is the mountains. I remember my childhood in summers and springs. We were always in the mountains walking and exploring some farm or another. I remember my feet planted on the grass, I remember laughing with my granddad. He used to take me and my 17 cousins up to the mountains in Lebanon to show us the greenery. He would teach us about the land, and farming, and how to stay mindful. I remember his voice, and how he seemed like the grandest thing in the world to me. Of all my cousins, I was the youngest, and I would tail him wherever he went. More than ever, though, I remember the poems he had us write about what we were seeing. I sometimes find myself pretending I am up on that mountain, engulfed by the pine trees, the breeze brushing past my hair, and my granddad pointing at the horizon. I have always found a lot to marvel at in nature. The first of which was how, whenever I was surrounded by it, I found peace, I found myself.
Quiet is fundamental for art to thrive. I know a lot of the time we assume that because the creative process is so hectic that that is what makes good art as well, but it is actually quiet. It is in the silence that I can truly hear my inner voice. And it is when I am surrounded by what I would like to create, that I actually have the creative capacity to create it. Nature has always been my one true muse. It runs like a thread through all of my work. I find the currents of the sea in the patterns I embroider and the curves of the trees in the jackets I stitch. I learn so much structure and balance, but also flow, from nature. It is in the synchrony of all its chaos that life becomes art. In between the trees and the birds and the ponds and the puddles and the animals, in between sand and sea, in between mountain and water. It was on Earth, first, that we saw polar opposites dressed together, before we decided to put red next to green or blue next to orange. This is also where we learned to mix patterns.
It might not seem like it, but all we know we learned from the Earth. Fashion and nature have always been linked, since the moment we started wearing clothes, when flowers were the only fashion choice we had, till now, when we have hundreds of others but still come back to it time and time again.
