Pilgrimage to the Self: Nat Girsberger in Conversation with the Desert
Written by Bella Greenbacher
Published on August 6th, 2026
I met Nat Girsberger at the cafe she suggested, a small patisserie in Williamsburg called Ando. The interior is minimal and quiet with tall yucca plants lining the white stucco walls. Warm, ambient lighting and lo-fi indie music fill the room. It feels like an oasis transplanted into the bustling streets of New York City: calm, serene, meditative.
Nat walks through the door and immediately greets me with a smile. She wears a matching set of a green linen blouse and pants, instantly blending into the bohemian surroundings. We sit down together, and she compliments my tattoos. I point out my favorite and bashfully admit that it has no meaning behind it. “Decoration is art, too though,” she reassures me, rolling up her sleeve to reveal her own tattoo. It is, of course, a desert motif.
I was curious as to how an artist raised in Switzerland, a notoriously mountainous country, found herself drawn to the aesthetic of desert. Nat explains that she grew up predominantly in Lucerne, a small conservative town where she often felt out of place and pressured to fit into a certain cultural and visual stereotype. The disconnect she felt to her surroundings limited her creativity and led her to crave more chaos and exploration.
“It’s limiting when you feel like you’re out of place. I always found the idea of leaving fascinating. I was like, ‘this can’t be it.’ Belonging to the world in different ways and being able to have different aspects of me coexist is helpful.”
Girsberger was initially drawn to New York City after visiting as a child. “I remember seeing this woman in a crazy outfit, singing on the street, and no one even turning their heads. That was unheard of to me. I felt like people were not mad at me for looking a certain way” she says. This freedom of expression inspired Nat to take a gap year in the city, joining a film program before attending college. The following year, she decided to plant permanent roots in New York, enrolling in a visual arts program at NYU. “My gap year turned into a fifteen-year gap year.”
After moving to New York City, Girsberger stumbled upon the desert by accident. She was visiting a friend in Los Angeles who had planned a weekend trip to Joshua Tree, an eclectic town in the Mojave desert. Initially, Girsberger was hesitant to go, having prepared to spend her getaway in the metropolis of LA. However, this first experience in the desert forever changed both her art practice and her relationship with herself. “It was something I never dreamt of,” she gushes, “I feel extremely connected there and have access to my rawest inner experience.” Her artwork reflects this, serving as a visual language for the desert aesthetic: palettes of rich terracottas, salmons, and ambers, iconography of desert flora and celestial bodies, and archetypal symbolism of our inner meditative states.
Girsberger’s artist statement revolves around the idea of getting in touch with our own internal desert landscapes.
Girsberger’s artist statement revolves around the idea of getting in touch with our own internal desert landscapes. She personifies the desert, not as a separate entity, but as a reflection of herself. Going on pilgrimages to Joshua Tree for weeks at a time, Nat goes alone but doesn’t feel loneliness in her solitude. “I sound crazy saying it, but I swear I feel like I’m talking to the desert all the time,” she says, “I see the desert as myself and call her ‘she’ because I am that. I see the desert as the expanse of the inner world. You can observe your inner processes in an external way, and vice versa.”
Despite her affinity for spirituality, Nat acknowledges that it is possible to take these practices and beliefs too far to the extreme and recognizes that staying anchored is equally as important. She doesn’t enjoy when people are overly dramatic about spiritual practices, like yoga or meditation, and prefers to stay somewhat in touch with reality. “I think we’re meant to be on earth and not just floating in the stars. It’s hard to say reality, though, because what is real in the end?”
In addition to the desert inspiring Nat’s exploration of spirituality and creativity, her early exposure to witnessing mental illness within her family led her to understand how inner experience doesn’t have to match the outer world.
In addition to the desert inspiring Nat’s exploration of spirituality and creativity, her early exposure to witnessing mental illness within her family led her to understand how inner experience doesn’t have to match the outer world. She understands that there are experiences we cannot see, both beautiful and painful, that inform each other and those around us.
“It’s hard to see when something really challenging happens in your life that it informs the good things,” she says, and confidently quotes the Radiance Sutras: “The ache in your heart is holy.”
Nat’s digital artworks, collages, and her series of tarot cards serve as “tools for people to get close to themselves.” She urges people to tap into what is alive and joyful within them. “Yoga can’t hurt, and meditation can’t hurt. Even if it’s just to find that that’s not working for you. It’s a little bit different for everyone.” Her tarot and oracle cards have no set rules for use, but rather serve as resources for people to play with and explore their own way of connecting with their inner landscapes. “We all have slightly different truths. We think mystical things are an external force, but it’s really just getting closer to what we already know inside, our shared consciousness,” she says.
Nat and I discussed spirituality in the form of organized religion and the dangerous ideologies that can come from abusive misinterpretations of holy texts: sexism, racism, homophobia. “How could you hate a gender if everything is connected?” Nat wonders, “It feels arbitrary. If we’re tuned into our inner world, everything feels connected.” She professes the need for liberation from discrimination and rationalism in our society, lamenting that people are focused on egotistical aspects of life rather than shared consciousness and the pursuit of being good to each other.
“Rational people are just dreamers who have had their hearts broken.”
“Rational people are just dreamers who have had their hearts broken. And what is rationality, really? We’re spinning on this rock in the middle of space glued to the earth by some weird mystical force. We don’t know where we came from, and yet we’re all acting like we need our bank accounts to look a certain way. That’s insane to me.”
At thirty-three years old, Nat is thinking about the future, playing with the idea of starting a family or wondering where she will find herself next. She rejects the idea of an inevitable mid-life crisis, explaining that she is trying to get ahead of this false prophecy. Interacting with Nat’s art serves as an antidote for this: a pathway into exploring our own inner landscapes. “We’re all just looking for a solution to that discomfort of uncertainty,” she expresses, “We’re getting occupied with all of this noise, and the answers are really quite simple.”
We finished our coffees and I left the cafe’s oasis to enter back into the noisy streets of the city. I reintroduce myself to the ruckus of cars honking, ambulances shrieking, people arguing. I find myself still caught up in our conversation, pondering these ideas of inner deserts, shared consciousness, mysticality without restriction. And for a moment, it feels a little easier to peer through the veil of outward cacophony into my own landscape and realize: it has been there all along.
