Remembering Who You Are

The image on the left was created in 1654, hangs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and inspired Donna Tartt’s brilliant novel, The Goldfinch. The one on the right is a photo I took a couple weeks ago, while sitting in my garden, staring aimlessly at the building next door.

In free countries, our social contract requires that we consider ourselves Middle Class. Full stop. Admitting that we don’t work for money, because we inherited a small nation-state, is not a thing we do. Neither is revealing that we regularly have to choose between paying the electric bill and buying diapers.

Socioeconomically, we are not all peers, but we all have to fake it.

In any aggressively unequal but theoretically classless society, one group of people can pass among social strata like smoke. Who are these magical pixies?

You guessed it.

Artists may be the bottom feeders of society, but we get to experience ALL of it.

We catch a lift on a patron’s private plane one week, and sleep on the floor of a condemned building the next. We wear the same pair of work boots and paint-stained coveralls for six months—preparing for an exhibition—and appear in vintage Schiaparelli at the opening. We’re CEO and janitor; equally at home in penthouse, dive bar, and Amazon jungle.

Because at our cores we understand that all beings are created:

1) Equal.

2) Unique.

We express our uniqueness by inventing our own life path, independently of Social Scripts. We express our equality the same way.

And you are one of us, because of course you are. 

–excerpt from my book in progress: The Eccentric Genius Habitat Intervention; Interior Design for Highly Sensitive People