Beauty

Example of Zen Design

Woody Allen's film, Interiors (1978), is one of my favorites. It is centered on the relationships between a severely disturbed interior decorator and her estranged family. The decorator, played by Geraldine Page, is obsessed with color, symmetry and space. In other words, her tortured internal environment fuels her attempts to control her external environments. She finds no real comfort in her work. 

Anyone who has known me for some time knows that I have moved frequently and frequently change my decor when I stay put for a while. These behaviors began when I first left my parents' home, where furniture seemed riveted to the floor boards. It never moved. When my mother died two years ago, the decor of the 1960's was preserved in her house like a museum collection. Worn but meticulously maintained furniture and accessories helped to sell the house. I believe many perspective buyers toured it just for its retro ambiance. 

My first room, meaning my first room of my own, was a drafty second floor front room in a tawdry rooming house, located in Boston's Fenway neighborhood. I was twenty. The owner, a mad symphony violinist, lived in a room with a squeaking door by the front entrance. Whenever I entered the building, loud violin practice ceased. The door squeaked open a crack as I rapidly ascended the stairs. It was truly creepy, but quite affordable.

My rented room was stark. Its only ornament was an ornate Edwardian fireplace mantle sans fireplace. The mantle was used as a headboard for the lumpy twin bed. A hard wooden chair was placed by a kitchen table at the double windows. Lace curtains, suitable for Miss Haversham, sagged and admitted jaundiced light through the soot-encrusted windows. I loved the place. I bought a colorful psychedelic bedspread and a matching cushion for the chair. I took down the curtains and washed the windows, which afforded a wonderful view of the busy city street below. I quickly learned that beauty was perception. I also learned that perception was mine to develop and change.

Since then, I have lived in thirty different homes. Being nomadic served me financially and psychologically over my years of mostly urban living in Boston and Manhattan. My two favorite environments prior to my present home were an empty one-room studio in Manhattan's Upper East Side and a one-room cottage in Provincetown on Cape Cod. 

My empty Manhattan studio, where I lived on parquet floors with a futon and a small table, was on the 32nd floor of new apartment tower on the East River. The apartment came with my nursing job. The juxtaposition of the building's grand lobby with doormen and my airy room tickled me. I was chanting Japanese Buddhist sutra in those days. I chose my environment to immerse myself into that cultural and mental experience. When I came home from my tense and exhausting job on a violent psychiatric ward, I quickly relaxed in my near-empty apartment. 

My rented one-room cottage in Provincetown was a refuge from city hustle. I had just closed an antiques business and was working two 16-hour days on a psychiatric ward outside Boston. I commuted the 120 miles to the city on a motorcycle initially. Stayed two days. Returned to my refuge for the other five days of each week. My unsold antique-shop inventory was piled into that cottage. I lived with two dozen chiming clocks, all ticking smoothly. Tables, chairs, music boxes, and other items, including a huge 18th century Vermont secretary. A shallow loft, accessed by a straight wooden ladder, was my bedroom. It was just a mattress. That pup-tent space was really my home for many months, as I gradually sold off and gave away my inventory. I often go back to that happy space in my mind.

Penetrating and sustainable beauty isn't accessed by reading Architectural Digest, in my opinion. It resides within mind and healthy body. A beautiful environment reflects the beauty of its designer's interior. Spaces of others which linger with me are spaces infused with the creativity and expression of their designers. The smells of their cooking, detergents and cosmetics, the play of light on a wall, the odd piece of salvaged furniture in just the right corner. This is the beauty I relish. It reflects the intelligent interplay between a special person and his/her environment.