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Wife, Teacher, Student, Writer (Recollected Life and Schooler Doola) with grown kids and a job at the library.

I am a woman old enough now to know how very little I know about myself, and finally wise enough to enjoy that fact. The things I know are these. I am part of my husband of twenty-five years, and he is part of me, like breath in my lungs and blood in my veins. I know I found a true life in raising my children to understand that flexibility in life has a lot to do with compassion, and that if they really want something they must go get it themselves. I know I am a teacher. At long last, I also know I am a writer. What I do not know is what all those things will look like when they start to dance together tomorrow – or the next day.

How has your Style Statement been useful to you?

Whenever I remember to stand firmly on a Foundation of all things Genuine, I calm down inside. Whenever I sit back to look at the interactions between people or seasons or environments, or move deeply into myself to mine for exactly the right words, I can recognize the threads of new creativity coming into my own hands. My Style Statement has become both a way to figure out where I am, and a way to figure out how to go on from here. Now I know that the recurring sense of “disorientation” is signaling a disconnection from something Genuine – and that I can soothe and replenish a feeling of “emptiness” with some sort of gloriously Dynamic flow.

Where in the world have you, or do you, feel most at home – and why?

I am most at home when I am completely inside my own self. Outside of that, the living room in my house is my home for everyday.

When I was pregnant with our third child, and also in a very difficult emotional and psychological place, my naturopathic doctor asked me some very specific questions, and then made a cassette tape for me of a sort of birth mama-empowering guided meditation. One part of that meditation was a walk into an imaginary house and the things I saw there. Years later, when we moved into this house, I realized I had moved into the house of my meditations. This is where the living room was when I dreamed it up. This is where the front door was. This is the scene through the windows. Here, I am at home.

For immediate and uncomplicated contact with all things Eternal, though, I need to be in our parish nave. I have often wondered how I would react to places like the Cathedral in Durham, where the Mass has been offered for more than 900 years. Where we are, in the Pacific Northwest of the USA, our own church’s 130 history is about as “old” as it gets. It doesn’t matter, though. Being on my knees or sitting in my accustomed pew, under and in the midst of all the iconography and statues, surrounded by the bricks that hold the prayers of all those people for all those years, I can know for sure that the veil between the seen and unseen is very thin. To be at home, for me, is to know myself to be a part of the Eternal.

10 Things that you love…

1. The light coming over and through the fir trees around the field outside my living room windows at sunrise or sunset, and the Lanvin Blue sky behind them.
2. Exactly the right word.
3. Textiles made of wool or silk or cotton or flax.
4. Fire.
5. The joined voices of a multitude of people in song.
6. The courage of children.
7. Open windows, opening doors, passageways, paths, anything that might lead somewhere.
8. Good wine paired with good food served well to appreciative people.
9. The love of my husband.
10. Deepest prayer.

What would you like to revolutionize?

Our modern world’s concept of schooling and education. We need more Maria Montessori and Charlotte Mason – more genuine contact with the creatively dynamic real world, and less mechanized, standardized, bureaucratic sterility effective only for producing cooperative standers in line and fillers out of forms.

If you could only wear one outfit for the rest of your life, what would it be?

As much as I love to dress up all sparkly and polished and go out for the evening, if I could only wear one outfit it wouldn’t be dress-up clothes. I would live every day in flattering jeans and a white blouse. As little as possible on my feet, sans jewelry of any kind, and probably with my sleeves rolled up.

What are you known for?

This was one of the hardest parts of the book for me to be honest about. I think I have figured it out, though. I am known for knowing. I have finally learned to hear from other people that I am unusually creative in writing, arranging (things, décor, events, publications), understanding, and teaching. I have enough of a reputation for being clear (kind, but still very, very clear) in my responses that the people who want only to be mollified or validated do usually not ask me for my opinion.

Books, Movies or Music That Have Inspired You?:

1. Anatomy of the Spirit: The Seven Stages of Power and Healing, by Caroline Myss.
A book which unites the Christian Sacramental life to the Hindu chakras and the Kabbalah’s Tree of Life. Biology holds biography.
2. Personality Type: An Owner’s Manual, by Lenore Thomson.
Jungian Myers/Briggs personality types and their growth and development in normal, healthy people – this book gave me and my daughter a vocabulary with which we could cross the divide of our radically different personalities.
3. The Triumph of Individual Style: A Guide to Dressing Your Body, Your Beauty, Your Self by Carla Mason Mathis, Helen Villa Connor.
The female form as Art – seen through museum masterpieces. This is the book that finally broke through my inability to really see my own body and clothes.
4. Emily of New Moon, by L. M. Montgomery.
No kidding – I know it’s for “children,” but this book by the author of the Anne of Green Gables books is about a lonely girl whose personality was so much like mine that I wasn’t as lonely any more after I read it. Emily is a writer too.
5. The Scent of Water, by Elizabeth Goudge. Like all of Goudge’s books, this is a book about the beauty and triumph of conscious love, and the nobility of duty well done. It is also a story within a story within a story, which is one of my favorite kinds of books to read, and the prose is so eloquent that it is refreshing to the soul.

Read more on Stephanie’s journey to finding her Style Statement.