About

A place for what is worth preserving.

EchobelleGarden is a universe of life, memory and story. It is also the home of the Life Tree, EchobelleBooks and Livspor.

The creator

Michelle K.S. Bruun

Author & Creator of EchobelleGarden and Livstræet

Michelle is an author and the creator of both EchobelleGarden and the Life Tree. Her first book, Stop Burning Out, was released as Sister Book No. 1 from the publishing house EchobelleBooks.

The name

Echo: what resonates
Belle: the beautiful, and my own name
Garden: the place where everything is allowed to grow

Read my story

A brush painting a chamomile flower in watercolour

The idea

Not just a brand. A place.

EchobelleGarden is the place where you find calm, the essence of a life, and room to bloom.

The universe brings three things together: the Life Tree, its philosophical and visual heart. The books, which are doorways into the universe. And Livspor, which will be the concrete way to preserve a person’s story.

Why EchobelleGarden?

Because I see my books, thoughts and imaginings as a garden full of understanding, meaning and significance.

EchobelleGarden is my garden.

The name holds several things that matter to me.

Echo is the echo: what keeps resonating. Thoughts, stories, people, memories, dreams and feelings that keep coming back, because they matter.

Belle means beautiful. But Belle is also part of my own name. So the name is both something poetic and something very personal.

And then there is Garden.

The garden.

The place where everything I create is allowed to grow.

For me, EchobelleGarden is the place where the beautiful is allowed to resonate.

Where stories can sprout.
Where ideas can take root.
Where something can wither without it being the end.
And where new shoots can always come.

Maybe that is also how I see life.

We are not finished just because something withers.

We are not broken because a branch breaks.

We carry our years inside us. Our traces. Our losses. Our joys. Our beginnings.

And sometimes we grow in a completely different direction than we had imagined.

That is EchobelleGarden.

Why I write

I write about what makes us human.

Stories across genres, born from the same curiosity about people, feelings and the patterns that shape us.

I have written many books I never published. I have decided that this ends now.

I am ready to share what I know, what I have lived through and everything I dream of. And I am certain that people will listen. That the time has come to use nature as part of our own honest language, and to find calm in everyday life, but also to understand ourselves better, and our needs, our boundaries and our dreams.

I look at the world and at people from a more philosophical point of view. After almost 25 years of working on myself and my own mind, I have learned a thing or two about living a life with ups and downs. About getting back up again and again. And about keeping going, even when it feels too hard and far too impossible.

I am not a psychologist or a therapist, but I am a human being with an enormous amount of experience in the living of a life.

I use the Life Tree as an image of what it means to be human. Roots, branches and growing points that keep unfolding.

Many of my stories begin with a question like this one:

What if there is nothing wrong with you?

Maybe you don’t need more advice. Maybe you need a place to stop.

A place where you can understand why you react the way you do.
What drains you.
What gives you energy.
Which direction feels right.

When I am not writing, I find my calm in the garden or out in wild nature. In the forest. And that calm often slips in between the lines.

I believe we can lose our direction, lose ourselves, lose people we love, and still find a way back to life. Not back to who we were before, but on to who we have become.

Maybe that is what I have spent most of my life learning.
My name is Michelle, and I am the one behind EchobelleGarden.

My life is not a straight line

When I think about my life, I do not think of a road.

I think of a tree.

A tree that has stood through storms.

My tree has many growth rings.
It has marks from blows.
Branches that have broken.
Places where something had to die before something new could grow.

Life came at full force

School was not always easy for me. I daydreamed. I would rather write than learn physics. And I felt that the whole world depended on me. That is a heavy weight on a child’s shoulders.

Later came a difficult youth with many worries.

And when I became a mother, my life as a mother started like this:

A baby with colic.
A bruised tailbone after giving birth.
A baby with RSV at five weeks, when we had no idea what would happen to our son.
And later a child who became seriously ill.

My nervous system has lived in constant alarm. It has felt like the sabre-toothed tiger was breathing down my neck, even when a child simply cried or someone raised their voice.

I have three boys who love to push the limits and believe they are invincible and cannot break. So we have had our accidents along the way: split eyebrows and ears, holes in heads, teeth knocked loose, and a broken leg. Because breaking gravity and finding out whether you can fly, every single day, is simply the best thing in the world.

I love being a mother. My sons are the best thing I know. But I would be lying if I did not say that it is also hard. It is a lifelong task in the front row: learning to keep calm myself, and to trust that things will be all right. That experiences turn into experience, which leaves its marks in your own Life Tree. And teaching my children the same. That is the most important work I do.

I have withered myself.

More than once.

There have been times when I could not see how I would find my way back to myself. When I felt tired, stuck or far away from the woman I actually wanted to be.

But every time, there has been a small green shoot somewhere.

And slowly, life has come back.

I do not get back up because my life has never cracked.

I get back up because my trunk has grown stronger.

Maybe I stand a little crooked. But that does not make me more fragile.

The forest

I have always had a special connection to nature.

There is something about the forest that makes me breathe differently.

In the forest, I do not have to perform.

The trees do not ask whether I have come far enough. They do not compare their branches. They are in no hurry to be finished.

They just stand.

They grow.

They lose their leaves.

They stand through the winter.

And then spring comes.

Again.

And again.

It reminds me of something I forget myself:

That growth does not always look like growth.

Sometimes it is standing still.

Sometimes it is surviving the winter.

Sometimes it is letting an old branch fall.

And sometimes it is suddenly discovering a small new bud on something you thought was dead.

EchobelleGarden

EchobelleGarden is my garden universe.

But it is also a picture of my life.

A garden is not perfect. It is alive.

Some things bloom. Some things wither. Some things sprout. Some things need pruning. Some things grow wild, while others need time.

And maybe that is exactly how I want to live.

Not as a finished person.

But as a person who is still moving.

EchobelleGarden is the place where my ideas, stories, books, thoughts and dreams are allowed to grow.

This is where I write.

This is where I explore what it means to be human.

This is where I play with stories and worlds.

This is where I try to understand patterns, relationships, dreams, grief, creativity, nature and the strange, wonderful task of being a person with a whole life inside.

And this is where the Life Tree has grown.

Because I believe we all have a tree.

We have roots.

A trunk.

Branches.

Growth rings.

Broken places.

New shoots.

And a crown that can still bloom.

I believe in getting back up

Not the perfect kind.

Not “everything happens for a reason”.

Not “think positive and everything will be fine.”

I believe in something more down to earth.

I believe we can begin again.

That we can change direction.

That we can create something, even when we do not feel ready.

That we can find joy in the middle of grief.

That we can be both strong and tired.

That we can be broken in some places and still whole in others.

And I believe a person is not worth less for having had a hard time.

On the contrary, I believe a special kind of depth can grow in the places where life has left its marks.

My crown is still blooming

My tree has been through a lot.

But it is standing.

Not because it has never been close to falling.

But because the roots have held on.

The trunk has grown stronger in some places and marked in others.

The growth rings tell the story.

The broken branches tell the story too.

But they do not tell the whole story.

Because new branches come.

New leaves.

New flowers.

New stories.

And maybe that is what I believe in most of all:

That even if we have withered, we can grow again.

Not back to what we were.

But onwards.

With our roots.

With our scars.

With our growth rings.

With everything we have lost.

With everything we still dream of.

And maybe one day we discover that our crown is blooming in a way we could never have imagined when we stood in the middle of winter.

That is what EchobelleGarden is to me.

A place to grow.

A place to create.

A place to tell.

A place to remember.

A place to begin again.

And maybe that is also what I hope you find here.

A small place where you can breathe.

Maybe find a thought, a story or an idea you can take with you.

And maybe remember that your own tree, no matter how many storms it has stood through,

can still bloom. 🌿

The sentence

I am, and that is enough.

It is one of the sentences I say most often. To myself, and to my boys.

It does not mean that everything is good. It means that I am here, and that this is enough to begin with.

I am not enough because I get things done. I will not become enough the day I have tidied myself up. I am, and that is enough.

What I can do, and what I do, is added on top. But it does not begin there.

It is also how I try to raise my boys. That they are enough before they have done anything at all. That they are allowed to fail without it changing who they are. That they do not have to earn their place here.

In the Life Tree this sentence belongs deep inside, in the core. It is what remains when everything you can do and everything you achieve is taken away.

And when I say it to you, it sounds like this: You are, and that is enough.

The original EchobelleGarden Life Tree in watercolour

Why the Life Tree exists

Because a human life is more than a timeline.

The Life Tree gives us a language for what belongs together: what you came from, what settled in as the directions life took, and what you wish to pass on.

It is not a system you have to finish. It is a way of looking at a life, a philosophy of life if you like, with dignity, curiosity and respect.

Explore the Life Tree

Origin

The Life Tree was conceived and created by Michelle K.S. Bruun.

The philosophy, the nine parts and the language that belongs to them are my own original work. It is not an adaptation of anyone else's model, and it has grown over many years.

Why stories are worth preserving

What we preserve is our memorystorylifelegacylove.

Stories carry more than facts. They carry the voice, the values, and what made a life that particular life.

Read the stories See the books