These diaries articulate redemption as I have experienced it in my life. My passion for beauty and my need to express the specific beauty that I value is a product of my God-given nature and the events that shaped my life. Mine is a story of Christianity, abuse, and redemption.

I do not value canned experiences, so I mean for this site to provide cheap raw material for you to use to express your own beauty. I take the concept of Do-It-Yourself to the furthest extreme. My willful independence, which is expressed not only in where and how I live, but also in every choice I make in my life, hour by hour, is certainly rooted in my young life experience.

My husband and I left the US a long time ago to live and work overseas. Eventually we had a baby, born with the help of a medicine woman on the tiny island where we lived back then. We have lived in many countries since then, with our only son, who graduates from international school this year.

We are building an off grid house, an Earthship, where we currently have a regular on-grid home on the remote island of Islesboro in Maine. Islesboro is our favourite place on the planet, and though we are rarely in the US, we will live permanently on Islesboro after this year. (We will be filming the Earthship building process and I’ll publish the link here.)

I am the daughter of a Jewish heiress and a NY businessman who were briefly married. The 6 year-long physical and legal connection between my mother and father ended in 1969 when I was three, my father fleeing my mother’s psychotic anger, leaving me to her care. For the next 10 years I saw my father rarely and only outside of the house for brief visits.

Beginning the very night of my father’s departure and for the following 10 years I was compromised in every conceivable manner by my mother, often while also being filmed. As a result, at 3 years old, I began displaying odd behaviors: an unwillingness to speak in public, hyper anxious, I continuously rocked in my seats like a child with autism, and I had and retain serious cognitive disability regarding geography. I could not, and still cannot, tell my left from my right. I am so permanently disoriented that if you spin me around very slowly, I am likely to fall down.

My mother was finally caught, not by the police, but by a male lover of hers who  discovered, accidentally, what she was doing to me. My mother’s taste in adult partners at that time ran to gangsters, and this man ran some kind of operation out of New York City. He had an instant, violent reaction to his discovery of what my mother used me for, and I was whisked out of our house by my mother while that poor man, in a nearly incoherent rage, tore my mother’s fine jewelry to shreds with his hands, smashed things in the house and chased my mother’s station wagon down her own driveway with a log from our woodpile in his hands. Had he caught her, he would have beaten her to death.

After that night, my mother was finished with me. She made quick arrangements to send me to live with my father who had moved to Texas to run a beer company. In the few weeks between her exposure and my departure our house was repeatedly vandalized, with evidence that people had entered, left notes, and then departed. And my little black dog, Lucy, was stabbed through the chest with an ice pick and then tied to the front door of our house. I know, now, that this man pressured my mother to let me go as hard as he knew how. I only know his first name, and I’m sure he’s long dead. But I am grateful to him for saving my life.

My wealthy mother arranged, successfully, after sending me away, to abduct my best friend (K’s family was large, headed by two alcoholics who had no resources to combat the bold cunning of my mother.). My mother held K in slavery similar to mine until K, obviously old enough, finally fled the country altogether. That story is for some other time or never.

My life in San Antonio, Texas was a ridiculous one, but that first year there I met a boy, John, who was a Christian. I was raised in the synagogue, but my father’s family on Long Island were Episcopalian, so I was exposed to that church.

At 13 years old I had no recall of any of the events I just described. I arrived in Texas with only the enduring disabilities and a whole panoply of self-destructive behaviors that tormented me. John introduced me to Jesus, and, scurrying in the hallway of the swanky house where my father now lived with his second Jewish heiress, I found a copy of the New Testament in a slim little book. I started reading. I knew I was in a heap of trouble, and that there ought to be a way out. I began my diary in New York, but continued it in earnest in Texas. I have kept one now for almost 50 years.

These pages will be about what I have learned about how to use God to recover from sadism, torture, rape, incest, and from all of the things you then learn to do to yourself because of the abuses you suffered. The agony of a dysfunctional childhood is not the staggering betrayal of those who ought to have loved you, but rather how, in consequence, you incessantly betray yourself. You get in your own way so that you hurt people you mean to love; you impede your own chances at any kind of meaningful work in the world, and, always, you hurt your body and mind with destructive behaviors that you cannot control. Self-hatred, once learnt, is devilishly hard to overthrow.

But you can. I have.