Behind the Prints
The Story Behind Puddynaut
How a fostered cat named Puddy became a design that honors the psychonaut tradition.
Every design starts with someone I actually know. This one started with Puddy. We knew Puddy and her human. When her human became ill, we fostered her and finally adopted her. Anyone who's lived with a cat like her knows the feeling — she doesn't perform for you, she just watches, and somehow that's more unsettling than anything she could do. Strong. Wise. Entirely on her own schedule. When I went looking for a way to put that into a design, "psychonaut" was the word that kept surfacing. The term isn't new, and it isn't a joke to the people who use it seriously. It comes out of a long lineage — shamans mapping the spirit world, mystics sitting with silence for decades, and later, in the 20th century, researchers and seekers who started calling the interior of the mind a place you could actually explore, with its own terrain, its own weather, its own risks. A psychonaut is someone who takes that seriously enough to go looking — through meditation, through plant medicine, through prayer, through whatever door opens for them — not for a thrill, but for something true they can't get to any other way. It's a discipline as much as an experience. People spend years on it. I used to spend my days behind a camera, which is its own quiet form of that same search — waiting for someone to stop performing long enough to catch what's real and let you see it. Puddy did that constantly, without trying. So Puddynaut isn't really a costume we put on a cat. It's a nod to everyone who's done the harder work of going inward and coming back changed — and a small, sincere bet that our cat's been doing it the whole time, longer and better than most of us.
