Claire's Beauty Books

The idea of Claire’s beauty books really struck a chord with me. I have been thinking about it since I chatted with her a few weeks ago. 

Claire is a gardener. That much is clear from the instant you set foot on her street. Her picket fence gleams white. The pink and peach tulips in her front garden stand tall. The porch is freshly painted and the potted flowers by the door are fresh and groomed. All these beauties greet you before you ring the doorbell.  Inside the house the mood is cottage white; a sanctuary. Simple, elegant, meticulously maintained.  This is clearly a woman who enjoys making her house art. 
 

It’s evening when I visit and she pours us each a glass of red wine and we chat. I don’t know Claire very well. She is a new neighbor but as we talk I feel that I have known her.   Sometimes you just have a resonance with certain people. You click. This is one of those moments.  We discover that we are both journalers. She shows me some of her journals.

 In the living room she chooses from  a whole shelf of what she calls “Beauty Books”. She takes down a handful of volumes of all shapes and sizes. “I choose different kinds of blank books that have an appeal to me.   Then I find images that I like and I fill the pages with them,” she explains.  “For a long time I just cut out things from magazines that I wanted to save and it was sort of a mess, Then I began putting the clips into books.“

Some of her books are filled with words or notes, some are just pictures.  There are pages of just gardens or interiors. Each image has an atmosphere, a tone. Claire says,”They are all images that I want to visit again.   Each one that has some element that I love. Sometimes its about color. Or the shape of a garden. Or an idea for the house. Or a place I would want to visit.”

In a sense these books are gardens, a kind of visual and spiritual garden. Each image represents a place that Claire would like to be…a place she would enjoy returning to. As I flip though the page I come across a picture of her house. A perfect California 1910 bungalow.

“Eerie isn’t it? “she says. Only then I realize what she means. This is not her house. This is a photo snipped from a magazine that is almost a perfect twin of her a house.  It was collected because it was a place that she loved. She put the image in her beauty book long before she moved into her home. 

The full force of what she had done hits me.   Her journals are a tool that she uses to create her life.  In her hands, a very powerful medium.  (Though Claire wouldn’t call them a tool, but more a relationship.) 

I know this is true.  I know it because I have used the journal as a tool myself. I have a notebook called Viz. (short for Visualize).  In my notebook is an image of a couple. I collected this image in my thirties at a moment when I was convinced I would never find my Mr. Right.  The image is is a dreamy image of a couple outside…with him sweeping her into a protective embrace.  In a literal sense it is a fashion shot…but to me it had a sprit about it of outdoors, vitality, romance and nurturing that I was sorely missing.  I made a list of all the qualities (about 100 ) that the right guy should have. I dated. I despaired. Found maybe. Maybe not, many times. Then not too many months after locating the image I found him.

Elegant, outdoorsy, vital and intensely romantic. A guy who had every quality save six or seven on my hundred item list.  My friend Peter told me if you find a mate that’s eighty percent right you are doing great. I scored in the ninties.   More than a decade later I find the image in my viz journal…and realize what luck I have had.  But then perhaps it is not luck. It is a kind of power that is possible when you are clear on what you want to invite into your life.

That’s the beauty of Claire’s Beauty Books.