She's a woman way ahead of her time.
Before work-as-fun became trendy, when German-born Anjali was just eighteen and looking for a career, she decided to settle for nothing less than that.
"I didn't know what to study after I had finished school but I didn't want to wake up in the morning and think 'O god, you have to go to work.'
I wanted to find something that I would love getting up for," she says.
The work had to be practical. A few minutes into a conversation with her and it's easy to understand why: artistic she certainly is but Anjali has her feet fair and squarely on the ground.
She chose carpentry because "it's one of the very few things you can do in which you are involved from start to finish – from designing, to making to selling."
She undertook an apprenticeship in her chosen trade for three years and then decided to restore antique picture frames.

After her initial visit to the Osho Commune "the first ideas came drifting into my mind through which I developed the concept of 'nature for art and art for nature.' I kept coming across materials – like seedpods or leaves – and immediately saw their potential from a different perspective. Then I started collecting materials and sketching my ideas into a book".

"I often have ideas in my life but they hardly ever get realized. This time I said, 'Okay, I will give myself permission to work on this for one year.'"
And that's just what she did on her return to Germany – developed her vision of "nature for art" and simultaneously gave more time to her other passion, photography.
Now both forms of creativity are her livelihood. "I get all my materials and all my inspiration from nature.
I rearrange natural materials in new formations.
"Nature is perfect, I can't enhance it, but I like to play with things.
It's fun, and the feedback I get is that through what I am doing people actually have a different view of nature.

"This is where art comes back to nature. It makes a complete circle – that nature is presented as art and then, when I sell something, I give ten percent of that to worldwide funds like Greenpeace. In this way I am trying to return the energy somehow to nature."

Where does meditation come into her everyday life?
"For me there is no split between my work and meditation; to talk of integrating the two sounds so absurd. But it hasn't always been like that.
"Before I became an Osho meditator I had been expressing my creativity but it was out of a longing and desire – an unpleasant feeling.
"When I discovered Osho that all changed: now my creativity comes more out of overflow than angst.
"Certainly, being a meditator enables me to see the potential and beauty in nature and then to translate those elements into an object that resonates with meditativeness – with space and silence".

"Sometimes I look at my art and I can't believe I have done it and I became afraid that I won't be able to produce another piece.
Yet it keeps happening, so I am slowly gaining the confidence that if I stay open it will happen.

"But I really don't feel like the 'doer' in this, in the sense of my projecting anything of me into what happens; I am providing the hands for some impersonal force.
Right from the beginning I understood that meditation wasn't something you do, but the way you do anything.

"'Anjali' means prayer and Osho told me that whatever you do one hundred percent becomes an offering to existence – no matter what it is.
What's important is that you put yourself into it completely.
I love intensity anyway – being a Scorpio! – so that felt right on for me and has definitely been a key, a koan that keeps coming back to me."

She is making money, Anjali says, but is quick to add that this isn't her focus.
She has several exhibitions to prepare for – Ibiza, in October, and in Dreieich, her hometown near Frankfurt in Germany, in November, and a third next February at the Goethe Institute in Pune – so how this will all pan out financially remains to be seen.
But she isn't fazed by the insecurity this might throw a less spunky soul into.
"If I can make a living of it, if inspiration keeps coming, great! If not, something else will turn up," she says confidently.

"What is happening with my work feels extremely juicy, extremely right.
At the moment I am on a wave.
Sometimes in life you know when you have hit the mine, the source.
That's what it seems like to me."

Copyright© Osho Times International