I was born in Vienna, in a grey, treeless quarter close to the main train station. The parallel steel trails cut through the blocks of run-down, four-storey high apartment buildings like a wild ravine, lined with prickly shrubs that bore like berries the trash tossed from the whistling trains, and teeming with wildlife, with rats and martens, and fluttering pigeons. The cobbled streets were thronged with parking cars, and at night, when the street lights lit up like stars, in their yellow light columns I could see from my window the ladies in thigh-high boots smoking cigarettes between red-tipped fingers.

Naturally, when we were little, my sister and I weren’t allowed to play outside. We were confined to our apartment, which we only left for our short way to school, for a shopping trip to the fresh food market clutching my grandmother’s hand, and for the tramway ride to our ballet school in the city centre. But even in our urban seclusion, where the vast world was televised, but not experienced, seasons did not pass unnoticed.

Winters were humming radiators, and school commutes in the dark, and the constriction of winter coats and lined leather boots. Spring was the freedom of light clothing, the bouncy walk in ankle-free slippers, and the morning air soft and warm against our pale cheeks. Summer was the nauseating odour of dog turds baking in the midday sun, and light gauzy curtains flapping in the breeze. Autumn was chills and colds, and icy rain seeping in by the collar of my between-seasons coat. Seasons were a question of outfit.

Yet, I was always aware of this other world called nature, where there were trees and flowers, mountains and rivers, and wild African animals, where there were floods and avalanches, draughts and volcano eruptions. Nature was an abstract word, like war or hunger, which I had never experienced either. And even though nature had a beautiful connotation, something pristine and biblical, like the garden Eden, it was ultimately a place of danger. Nature was wilderness, like the world outside our windows, full of rats and cruising cars, and strange men I must never ever talk to. Safety was an apartment with central heating.

Since this was the only world I had learned to live in, I couldn’t imagine living any other way. As a teenager, I looked down on the country children, who didn’t have the privilege of cinemas, punk concerts and coffee shops. As an adult, my life, a dancer’s life, was strictly indoors.

It was only in my forties that my world changed. On a tour through South Africa, I decided to offer myself a short holiday, and booked, unknowingly, a cabin at a self-sustaining, permaculture farm in the endless, wind-beaten semi-desert of the Karoo. My cabin at the far end of a bumpy dirt road had no address, just GPS data. It had no electricity either. The nights, illuminated by the brilliant Milky Way, were filled with the bawling of baboons and giggling of jackals. The days I spent squatting at the door of my little cabin, staring at the bushes, where weavers were busy building their intricate nests, and koorhaans strutted in the dry grass, displaying their beauty under the yellow Southern sun. It was there, nibbling on a pomegranate, ignored by the weavers and the koorhaans, that I realized I was part of this world. I wasn’t barricading myself, I wasn’t invading anyone’s space. Nature, I felt, welcomed me.

If environment moulds a person, if landscape is imprinted on a child like a native language, then this is what I am: a creature of the urban jungle. The rattling as the tramway passed by below our window was my ocean surf. The light beams of cruising cars running across the ceiling were my meteorites. The flickering blue glow of the windows of the building across the street was my night sky.

Now, in the second half of my life, I redefined my world. I find in the bird song, in the whistling of the wind, in the immensity of the night sky unobscured by light pollution the peace of my child hood home, the night in wilderness as exciting and alluring as the streets below my window. Nature is not a place of good or evil. Nature is home.