Setting the Scene: Christmas Eve, December 24, 1995, Taos, New Mexico
I'd just turned 24 and had been in New Mexico only a few months, having graduated that past summer from college in New York. I moved West in time to experience the golden unfolding of Autumn in the land of Georgia O'Keeffe and Manifest Destiny, guided by nothing but my intuition and the knowledge of what I knew I didn't want - which was to move to the City and get a job at Vogue or Mirabella Magazine and live in a shoebox apartment with 4 other girls, like I was supposed to. So, when faced with the question of 'What Do I Do With My Life?' the answer for me seemed to be located somewhere in the wide-open landscape and limitless skies of the Southwest. Taos just felt like the right place to go.
I'd grown up on the East Coast and I'd never even been to the West before. So I'm not sure where the idea to move to Taos actually originated, except for being sparked by a divine inspiration that landed in my awareness and captured my imagination. For months prior to graduation, this idea of Taos led me on and I put together a plan of action that resulted in my solo departure from all that was known. I still don't know how I actually pulled it all off, especially in pre-internet days, where I subscribed by writing to the local newspaper which arrived in the mail each week and was my only source of information about this new uncharted land.
So with my car packed with all my worldly belongings, I drove cross-country, off the proverbial map, to a place I'd only heard and read about. After getting settled in this tiny town, in a tiny adobe Casita of my own, I began to build a life anew. I worked briefly at a restaurant that a friend of a friend owned, where waiting on the local legendary artist R.C. Gorman who came in for his daily lunch of a 64 oz. Buffalo Steak was a momentary glimmer of excitement. But the restaurant was sold, and I was again free and untethered to find my way forward in a sea of possibilities.
It was the week before Christmas and I'd just started a new job working for a fledgling computer company, having answered a classified ad. My new employer turned out to be a small family of vegetarians who practiced Kundalini and wore turbans and were running an ISP from their basement, where they also lived, always keeping their windows tightly sealed with the drapes closed to block out the light of day. I knew it was a little strange, but I was optimistic. However, the universe had other plans for me. On Friday of that week, I was handed my paycheck and told that my services would no longer be required. Fired! On Christmas Eve!
For some reason, being fired didn't give me pause or hit me hard at all - instead it felt like pure freedom. As if the sun had just come out. It took me barely a second to decide what to do: I immediately cashed my check - without thinking anywhere beyond the moment, or perhaps thinking completely beyond the moment - and I took myself shopping! It was Christmas Eve after all. The New Mexico blue sky seemed bluer. Snow was just beginning to fall, landing on red adobe walls lined with candle lanterns. Everything looked like magic.
There was something intangible descending through the veil onto this auspicious late afternoon on the edge of evening as the mystical New Mexico 'blue hour' emerged. It was my first Christmas on my own, alone and 4,000 miles away from my family, yet I felt a sense of belonging. Connectedness to all that was, is, and ever will be. It was as if that magic was inside me. After going to the grocery store and buying a ham to cook Christmas dinner in my new home, where I had recently learned how to chop my own kindling and build a fire to stay warm through the night, I went to stroll Bent Street, just off Taos Plaza, where shops were sparkling with Christmas lights and there was music in the air, carrying last minute shoppers beyond space and time.
A favorite bookstore was glowing with warmth and beckoned me in. I bought a big, beautiful art book and let them gift wrap it for me to open on Christmas morning. It was a collection of contemporary photography in the West - inspiring and expansive - that gave me sense of place and my place in it. In the depiction of the world outside me, somehow the world inside me was reflected back to me. And I knew, in that moment, simultaneously who I was and who I wanted to become.
Then, I went to the leather makers shop. I remember climbing the few steps to his tiny store and shaking the snow off my boots against the hollow, wooden floorboards as I crossed the threshold. I can still smell the intoxicating scent of freshly oiled leather as I browsed the glass case like a box of jewels, touching each one of the items he'd made by hand. Quickly, my hand was drawn to a simple, black leather motorcycle wallet, that was at once cool and unexpected, sophisticated and liberating. I had no job, no plan, and it was the last of my money, but somehow buying myself this wallet on Christmas Eve was the perfect gift. It was a confirmation - a commitment to my life, a present to my present self, and to my future. Saying, 'Here we go. It's me and you. We're in this together and it's going to be alright.' It was more powerful than words, an action that sealed the deal, like a ritual. A deal between the conscious and unconscious, or perhaps between my individual soul and all the greater forces at work that I'll never be able to describe. Except to say, and I can see this now, it was my first experience engaging with these greater forces that continue to define my life today. At that moment, I was given a deep understanding beyond words, of how these forces support us in our becoming, as we dance with them and live our life going forward, to create a life of our own.
For me that Christmas Eve was a beginning, a letting go of all that came before with a full awareness of how I got there, and making a decision at a very deep level that I was all in and fully trusting of life and my journey. It can be awe-inducing to reflect on life looking backwards where the path is so clear in retrospect. Yet there is also a sense of knowing on some level, at that time, it was almost as if a light had been shining the way so brightly, with everything else in shadow, that I couldn't have done it or lived it any other way.
This idea of the light has been very strong for me over the years, and grows even more so, especially reflecting on the Solstice and with the birth of this new idea for The Lighthouse - as a place of illumination - which is so ancient and universal. Where the light is a constant that shines the way through the dark - whether it's a literal journey from East to West, the dark night of the soul, or the process of creating and moving through a painting in my studio.
This is a process that 30 years later - I've come to think of as 'Conscious Creative Living' in work and art - engaging in the generative flow of life that is a dance between awareness and imagination, this ability to somehow wield through creativity the magic outside of me and through me, and giving myself over to that which is becoming. And I find myself feeling so grateful and excited for the path I set myself on back then - that continues to unfold in my life and family now with each new day - on this journey into the unknown, without truly realizing the depth and width and the magnitude of what I'd set in motion.
“The light of the soul is within us all, waiting to be discovered.”
- Rumi
