Lifestyles Blog | What does it mean to have a life that is exotic, adventurous and artistic?
In this monthly blog I plan to share lifestyle tips about living life as art. In this post, I encourage you to explore your surroundings with eyes wide open and build your home around small artifacts from your experiences. Invite someone you barely know to share a walk or meal with you. Their stories are theatre for the mind.
In 2010, I settled in Beaufort, NC, after living abroad with my husband and two children for 23 years in six countries. I think of this new phase in my life as an opportunity to use what I've learned to live my best life. Living abroad was certainly exotic and adventurous, but I always longed to be a skilled artist, creating works of beauty.
Pre-Covid, I was sitting in my Beaufort back garden, sipping wine with a small group of friends who are painters and musicians. We were talking about how to manage life's competing priorities to allow space and time for our creative energies to flourish. My friends concluded that we should form an Artists' Breakout Group that gathers as a sounding board to help each other overcome creative obstacles.
I responded sadly, "I would love to be in such a group but I am not an artist." One looked at me in surprise and declared, "Deborah, your life is art."
The declaration was a turning point for me. I began to reread the cache of letters I sent to my parents and friends from far off lands over 23 years.
At the end of our first overseas posting in Puno, Peru, I skimmed through my personal journal. I wished that I had kept copies of my letters home during that period. My letters provided more vivid details of family experiences, whereas my personal journal entries recorded internal reflections about my life. The total picture of my life abroad included how I interpreted my experiences to my family and friends (my letters) and how I internalized these experiences (journaling). So I began to save a copy of most every letter that I wrote.
I thought that letters from the first two years abroad were lost until my mother gave me those letters, bundled in pastel ribbons.
Everything was new to my family in the six countries, so we approached life with eyes wide open. If we needed a piece of furniture or art for our home, we sought out and befriended skilled artists, so the décor in our home was not only aesthetic but also storied.
We invented weekend family diversions. In the Andes, our favorites were picnics in the ruins of a colonial cathedral guarded only by a wall of stinging nettle, hiking to pre-Inca burial sites and collecting ancient pottery shards along the path, or oaring through the thick reeds of Lake Titicaca. Today, we eat breakfast on the Titicaca reed placemats. A clay replica of an Andean colonial church in our dining room and the shards in our curio cabinet speak to us of these experiences.
The most picturesque memory from each country was the gathering of strangers and friends, young and old, wealthy and poor around our table. On Wednesday nights my husband, two children and I invited anyone of interest we came across during the week to join us for this family meal. I'll never forget the night our son's guest, a wandering Baul minstrel wearing saffron robes, played for us on his ektara, a one-stringed "plucked drum" carved from a gourd, and sang ancient songs and poems to the god who dwells within us.
When I think of those years, I see our life as a series of paintings, made vivid by the visual, tactile and auditory artifacts that fill our home today. I began to think about writing a memoir and I knew its theme would be living life as a form of art.
Shortly after, I visited the gallery of a local painter, Heather Sink (Cravingartstudio.com). I saw a painting, entitled "A Place at the Table for You." The painting spoke to me. In fact, the figures in the painting reminded me of my husband, our children and friends enjoying the everyday in an extraordinary way.
I decided that it would be the cover of my memoir and its title the name of my book. Now that I am reflecting on the artful life I lived, I have become more conscious of what I brought from these experiences back to my home in North Carolina.
The way I see it, each of us can elevate our lives from the mundane by mining the best of who we were over years past and never giving up on what we might become. It's never too late to live your best self.
In this monthly blog I will write about the value and methods for living life as art. I also look forward to hearing the reflections and experiences that my readers bring to the discussion.
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