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My transformation from glamorous to spiritual was years in the making. When I worked for other people and had my own source of income, I purchased heirloom quality items to leave as a legacy for my niece. My curatorial sensibility was developed by taking courses in the liberal, literary, and fine arts at the largest university in the Ivy League and by being mentored by a professor of Japanese culture and comparative literature who is the director of the Society for the Humanities at Cornell. As a result, over time, my senses became sharply honed and more finely focused until I developed a distinctive voice, style, and sensibility that I call neo-Zen.
Friends and strangers call me psychic, or highly perceptive, but I say it’s a matter of cultivated attunement.
With an eye toward archival quality, my wardrobe consisted primarily of well-constructed and beautifully lined dresses and suits in sizes 0-4 by Italian, French and German designers: Ferragamo, Armani, Versace, Prada, Missoni, Chanel. Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Ferragamo are the logos on my leather accessories. The luxurious quality…the natural materials such as silk, wool, and leather used to craft these goods…the pride in workmanship by unknown artisans…I sensed all this whenever I held or viewed treasures from my stockpiled trove.
I understood that price is an artificial stimulus used to drive up desirability, but this principle had no bearing on the sensory joy that handling and using these goods brought me. However, if you learn to examine an object’s innate value to your own life, you might decide that you can do without. My classic, buff-colored Versace silk and linen blend trench coat is an object of beauty, but it loses its functional desirability if I have no business meetings to attend. So, when my husband and I decided to return to my family base in southwest Oklahoma and to leave behind our home, friends, and artistic lifestyle in New England, I had to reconcile myself to the idea that I was supplanting an exterior-driven existence for a far more insular one. A friend’s mantra that downsizing doesn’t mean downgrading rings true.
Now, almost everything in my work wardrobe has been meticulously archived, photographed, and carefully stored to bequeath to the next generation. I have streamlined and simplified my life so that my days are primarily occupied by my family and my time on my laptop computer, writing and otherwise multi-tasking. Instead of buying objects, I seek peak experiences that fill and inhabit my senses. I now select clothes for absolute comfort, which means silk-cotton-spandex blend textiles that weigh no more than four ounces per item.
But the interior changes that mirror my outer life are even more significant. Instead of an epitaph that reads: artist – traveler – citizen of the world, the plaque might now say: daughter – sister – aunt – wife.
And my legacy? It is my thoughts, my ideas, my writings…my sensibility—incorporating all of the above.
Neo-Zen is the sensibility…which I first captured when it surfaced in the 1980’s when the Millennial generation was being born. Strange Tango, the epistolary novella, is the heart of Neo-Zen…and StrangeTango.com the personal website is but a glimpse into this, my inner world. Only a handful of people have read the manuscript of Strange Tango the epistolary novella—and they call it a masterpiece. My oeuvre will remain hidden from the world until it is published.
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