From: Dakota Feinstein, Arbitrator of Fine Taste in Daily Life
To: Martha Stewart
Should you be convicted and sent to prison, I (what a nerve) have an assignment for you.
Every woman in jail has experienced trauma, if not before her incarceration, from the incarceration itself. When a person has been traumatized, they are hypervigilant and autonomically hyperaroused. This causes them to continually survey their environment for possible danger, like a rabbit or a zebra.
It is difficult to see beauty when you are looking for something quite the opposite, and you think your life depends upon finding it. Many of the women in jail have never known any other state of being. For most of them the experience of beauty would be entirely new. The experience of creating something beautiful with limited resources, would be most empowering.
Martha, you have the gift of being able to create something beautiful, often out of nothing. You could teach that in prison. You would have to loosen up on that perfectionism though.
Corrie TenBoom in her memoir, " A Hiding Place" describes the jail cell of her visually gifted sister. [They are arrested for their participation in the resistance, and held in a Dutch prison before being sent to a concentration camp.] Each item in her sister's spare cell is positioned for maximum aesthetic impact. Bedding and clothing are folded, rolled, hung and color coordinated --the presentation is beautiful.
Teaching traumatized women to create and perceive beauty in the environment is healing. Their attention is always on dark possiblities, danger, so that their projections into the world are ominous. The practice of consciously looking for, or creating beauty, enables the traumatized person to perceive reality ---which is at least 40 percent fine most of the time -- a big improvement, from 100 percent dangerous. Experiencing beauty is a challenge to frightening memories from the past which, so often, get projected and superimposed onto the present.
Remember Jean Harris , the Madiera School headmistress, who was sentenced to prison for the murder of Dr. Herbert Tarnower of Scarsdale Diet fame? She published three books while imprisoned, as well setting up education programs for parents who were prisioners.
Maybe you won't be there long enough to have an impact, but I know you can do something fabulous with blue and white mattress ticking and those orange jumpsuits.