My Life on Four Continents

by Shereen Miller 1990

Metaphysical and theosophical concepts absorbed during my early life in India – where thought patterns have remained unbroken for 4000 years, gave me a strong sense of identity not dependent on material acquisition or surface value systems.

An introduction to spatial consciousness and to moments of sublimity came as unexpected gifts under a profusion of desert stars on warm Arabian nights. The dark, vast expanse of the sand and sky weighed by an interminable silence attuned my inner ear to those barely perceptible whispers from the soul of life. Intuitively, I strove for survival on the higher planes of Being and began my search for the quintessence of Life and the Self.

Paris appealed to my young bohemian spirit, idealistic and incurably romantic, unfolding an awareness of the aesthetic phenomena in art. With Parisian artists we enjoyed the sidewalk cafés once frequented by Dali and Picasso – airing our precocious minds and expounding on theories of art as though the world lay at our feet. The French Surrealists aroused my sense of adventure but it was Poussin who became my mentor. His ingenious employment of plastical solutions excited both the eye and the intellect. The French School of Art, rigorously traditional, grounded me in the application of the Golden Rule for years to follow.

Primordial, evocative, the African environment awoke unexplored depths and facets of the self. Understanding the microcosms of life in order to comprehend the universe and breaking barriers of prejudices and superstitions became more than a fleeting obsession.

London’s Slate Academy of Fine Arts proved that sustained creativity was possible within it’s haloed walls. Creative energies from past geniuses trapped within its ambience inspired me to vibrate intensely. In an ongoing endeavor to search for the purest expression of my creative instincts, without preconceived ideas that cataract the vision, I searched for ways to strip the mind to its virgin innocence. A true perception was valued above all else.

Art history at Yale University led me back to the Greek philosophers and to Platonism at the core of Western Thought – and there is no other place like Texas. It was here that an apocalyptic awareness of the cyclic patterns of time within the eternal and one’s relation with nature, ceased suddenly a melancholic preoccupation with the brevity of life.