+ my story

Beauty is it. The imperative, the desire, the point, the problem. I must find it, must create it, pursue it, please it. At first it was the word. I wrote poems about the heart and loyalty and faith and won awards that sent me to Stanford University where I wrote long essays in the English Department.

The “Summer of Love”, Gloria Steinem and Mary Tyler Moore turned the tide and women wanted less to be teachers and more to be reporters and commentators. So, I clipped my writing in graduate journalism studies at Northwestern University that was known for its program to combine arts and the press. But they didn’t combine them enough and my graduate advisor from the Chicago Sun said my writing was too evocative for the news rag. Once a poet always a poet. Go and chase the essence of art, he said, instead of the bite of the byline.

So, I did. Ran after beauty again until one step became another step and that became the dance. Back to Stanford for graduate studies in dance and education until it moved me to my own company and collaborations with other artists. “Inside Out Arts” was born in which I conducted and performed the creative imaginings of myself and another artist who was a musician, poet and actor. As the company was my brain child, the production and direction relied entirely on my efforts. It was the most public expression so far of my bicameral way of life.

At that time, paper started to dance, too. I moved copious cuttings around on a page searching for the common element, the one component to which all could align – not unlike discerning the core from the pattern of exercises or that one compelling, demanding note of poem. They became collages until the mystery inside all of these artistic pursuits required a bigger mystery to be encountered. One that moved and then moved me to another clime altogether.

On a sure and certain impulse, with only what I could pack into a Honda Civic, I Ieft San Francisco and made my way to Santa Fe. I dissolved my company, the administrative position I held at Stanford University for 13 years and headed for a great unknown. Little did I know that I was going from ocean to desert, from the City of St. Francis to the City of Faith, from a place where one could lose all faith while living on the grave of an ocean and find it again in the halleluiah of a sunset sky.

Little did I know and much did I learn. Art became less metaphor and its metaphor became life. I was used to patterns, rhythms and forms. They were absent in Santa Fe. Beauty became the reassembling of chaos. I improvised as I never had to before. Every plate was thrown into the air and where it fell I planted a stake until the wind would toss everything into the air again and the dancer scrambled to find her footing. More than once I found myself up righted in real estate – where people ground, hunt for a refuge, secure an oasis or sequester in a castle.

So, beauty – like the sky in Santa Fe – had to stretch, defy its container and genuflect to a transfiguration. She had to adapt to survive. She learned it was not just a poem, a dance or even a picture. It is life. It is the foundation of life and it seeks order constantly. My work in real estate is alive to its impact and direction. As much as any other art form, to manage an operation requires discipline, grace, diligence, and commitment. It is service meant to touch others with beauty in the places where it goes largely unnoticed. Work that is honest, sincere, clear, informed and thorough brings Beauty near and makes her tangible. She is a well-ordered contract as much as she is a perfect design. She is accuracy and timeliness as much as she is a harmonious song. She is attention and responsiveness to a client’s need as much as she is the burnish on steel.

Beauty is it and she is grace. I seek her impulse and her voice and to convey her touch in all that I do.