MINIMALISM – ADVENTURERS IN LIVINGNESS

My possessions in Saratoga Springs now appear as decorations from a former celebration, like side dishes of over 20 years of mixing and matching prints, drapes, sofas, chairs, tables, vases, and artwork. Now they’ve been removed from my experimental minimalistic living. A former lifecycle that began twenty-five years ago, and are boxed up in a big POD storage. And I refuse to meet them in the present. Friends ask me, ‘when are you bringing your furniture here?’ I can’t answer in words, it must crystallize like it has this past week, when I missed my wardrobe and art hangings. Within the admired art, clothes, and sixty-two boxes, (I looked at my inventory) are a haunting of memories tied in see thru knots of Dodger, my x. As a confirmed refuser of goodbyes, in any relationship, this one has to be nurtured with precision, and that means, no reminders.

The stark white walls and Amazon assembled furnishing are stationed without emotion, memory or love. Functional, practical and unfamiliar. Ive created a new palette, like my first studio in Los Angeles in 1976. Then the others, studios over the years, small, compact, easy to maneuver and clean. Internally, the walls and shelves are cluttered with decisions. The edits on my book from the publisher, when will I find employment? How to engage in new friendships, clubs, gyms, meetups.

Singleness in a city, that was once my home for twenty years, evolved through generations, adding new policies, laws, regulations, real estate development, customs, and an impressionable celebration of the arts and culture. It has no resemblance to the San Diego I met in 1983, except for the ocean and the bordering cliffs and seawalls. That is where a continuous rolling of memory waves sear my view, and I see my youthful delight in San Diego. I’ve always been impressed with people who truly live in the present, can’t figure that one out, maybe I’m just a past time girl.

My Follies House Bedroom

SPACIAL dimensions define a lifestyle. I walked into a room of four hundred and fifty square feet, and begin designing a new nest, where I could rest, write, and regain a root. I brought two suitcases, a box of paperwork, and my laptop. In a tote bag: one coffee cup, a fork, knife, spoon, one bowl one plate, a wine opener, a razor knife, and two scissors.

That was one week ago, today I have a room of Amazon: a, bistro table, two chairs, one bedside table, one dresser, and a free-standing shelf for the bathroom. I’ve never seen a bathroom without a hook, a shelf, a few rods, it’s like a prison bathroom. All of this is what I’ve named experimental living. I have a 16ft POD in a lot in Saratoga Springs, and to transport twenty years of collections and spend months separating, what goes to storage and what I can use made no sense one sleepless night. I’ll leave it there until I am positively positive I’m staying here. I know you are out there, the gypsy wanderers, the unsettled, the ones whose address changes like the seasons.

Choosing to buy furnishings online is cost-effective. If I go into a consignment shop or furniture store, I’ll pull out the credit cards that I’ve sworn off like I have going out in the sun without SPF seventy. This is all the first layer of experimenting with a lifestyle that I lived when I was hey nineteen not seventy-three. Am I proving something to myself? Probably, I deny convention, and ultra comfort because then I wouldn’t think, I’d lay around and be satisfied.

Bedroom, living room, dining room and entry

” The writer lives between the upper and lower worlds, he takes the path in order eventually to become that path itself.” Henry Miller.

I am digging into something unknown, it’s as if someone has taken charge over my decisions and I just met her. Fragments of who I was in Santa Fe, or Saratoga, pop up in the annoying half wall mirror that invades my privacy. I intend to buy a lovely Asian or Moroccan divider to hide myself. I wish there was a mirror to my emotions, so I know what I am hiding, and refusing to face off with. I made a note yesterday in my journal,

‘ I’ve always been a misfit.’ Where I am now, is a succession of experimenting with the unknown, at an age when my peers are in the known.

Just took another walk outdoors, one of ten to twelve every day, to remove the scenery of too heavy unopened boxes, that Simon, my assembler will turn into furniture Friday. He is Russian, and was one of the lucky ones to leave, two weeks before the war began. He can assemble twenty-five pieces in a NY minute.

The outdoors, familiar from twenty years ago, with a whipping gentle wind, sun, joggers, walkers, skateboarders, and surfers pass along, and I feel a newly planted root.