I lived in India between 1975 and 1985, studying Tibetan Buddhism for 6 years in the mountains. My life there was extremely simple, $100 per month was what I gave myself for basic survival, so I could study and heal from an extremely traumatic childhood in NYC, surviving a violently abusive sociopathic narcissist of a biological 'mother', who I refer to as the ex-momster.
I needed peace and quiet, sanity, kindness, honesty in my life. For the better part of six years I lived mostly in seclusion and isolation, doing meditation, trekking, learning to have some kind of a quiet, thoughtful adult life.
Once a year the ex-momster would airmail a package to me. I almost always asked if she did send anything, please, could she send a down sleeping bag, a down jacket, knee socks, which I couldn't get in India. Year after year she sent me her second hand clothing, her bathing suits, her sequined evening dresses, a trench coat. These things were not only useless to me but inevitably made me feel invisible, that my requests had not been heard, that my actual life was unknown. Year after year I'd make the mistake of taking a 16 hour bus ride to New Delhi, to Palam Airport customs and picking up the box of used whatever for another dose of disappointment.
There were two 'presents' that were beautiful, her own used things but again, useless to the life I had chosen to live. One was a fabulous silk Gucchi scarf. Beautifully designed. I was living in simple clothes and decided that maybe one of my fellow Buddhists could use it as an altar cloth. The other thing was a longer than floor length, sumptuously soft, green Halston velour lounge gown. It wasn't practical at all for me to wear or wash while living in a small stone and adobe house, where I was chopping firewood and lugging buckets of water from the stream.
Once in a while I've thought about those 'presents', which appeared to be loving gestures of extravagant beauty but felt on the receiving end like a ridiculing of the life I'd chosen. Now I know about pathological narcissism, I understand her hurtful and inappropriate 'gifts' were typical of her personality disorder.
From a wonderfully readable and interesting blog, called
the eye has it
The “Flora” print has become iconic for Gucci and in the history of textile design. Created by artist Vittorio Accornero in 1966, the scarf’s history is as fabled as Gucci’s past. The story is that Rodolfo Gucci commissioned Accornero to design an original scarf as a gift for Princess Grace after she visited the boutique in Milan. Accornero painted nine bouquets of flowers dedicated to the four seasons. The intricate botanical print includes a dragonfly, a grasshopper, a butterfly and beetles throughout the design. The naturalistic artwork is comprised of 37 colors, unheard of for most scarves due to the expense of printing with so many screens.
