Carolyn Goodridge: a mix of art, travel, kids, meditation
Return to Summer/Fall 2002
by Liz McGuinness
Carolyn Goodridge’s life story can make you blink. She was born in Trinidad—one of four youngsters in a family where the father tried to support them all on a $2-a-week job. Yet, today Carolyn holds an MFA, she produces vibrant artworks (check them out on her website, www.AbstractPaintings.com), owns her own home in Brooklyn, has twin daughters she adores, loves to travel, and much more.
It hasn’t been—still isn’t—all easy.
In early 1963, when Carolyn was 2, her paternal grandmother, who previously immigrated to the United States and owned a brownstone in Brooklyn, sponsored the family to come to Brooklyn. “As a young child, my grandmother took me under her wing and took me everywhere she went,” Carolyn recalls. Her grandmother was a pastor at the Power House of Prayer, a Pentecostal church in Bedford Stuyvesant, and introduced Carolyn to a faithful way of life. Carolyn recalls how her grandmother sincerely cared for the old and sick, praying by their bedside for their health to be restored.
When Carolyn’s parents moved to their own home, she added creative interests: first, writing stories; then, playing the piano and guitar and writing songs. As a freshman in high school, she began to draw. And that led to one of the joys of her life, painting. That talent would later take her to the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she studied textile design; then to the University of Florida, where she received her bachelor of fine arts in 1993; and finally to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she earned her master of fine arts in 1997. But woven among all those accomplishments were a lot of tough times, feelings of failure, hard work, travel, good and bad relationships.
After her grandmother’s death in 1976, Carolyn augmented her spiritual studies with alternative philosophies such as yoga, Taoism, and Sufism. But the one in which she found the deepest affinity was Zen Buddhism. And at 19, she moved into the Chogye Zen center in NYC, then located on 32nd St. between Park and Madison, where she studied meditation with Zen Master Seung Sahn for six months.
But, from an early age, a subtext for these positive accomplishments was a major challenge: relationships with men. With both parents away working hard, seemingly all day and night, she was left vulnerable to suffering adults and became a victim of early childhood sexual abuse. That seemed to mark the beginning of a difficult situation. Carolyn says she can now see the truth in a teaching of Zen Master Seung Sahn, “A good situation is a bad situation, and a bad situation is a good situation.”
“I remember feeling very sad for those men who made me feel sad, and only wished that they would not be unhappy,” Carolyn said. The current events challenging the Catholic Church bring sad thoughts, she said, and remind us that such harm to children still exists. “Perhaps this is what drives me to practice Zen and seek enlightenment,” she added, “to save all people from suffering and help adults find their true nature, so they will not do harm themselves or others.”
She married twice. The first marriage, at age 22, lasted for one year; the second, in 1984, just four months. When she became pregnant in 1988, during another relationship, she resolved to be a good mother with or without the support of her boyfriend. The babies were born 2 months early, so tiny that both could fit into one shoebox. “The doctors warned me they might die that first night,” she recalls. “But the next morning they were still alive. They were fighters, so I would fight with them.”
A year later, while attending school in Florida as a single parent, when things became difficult, “I would jump in my car and head for Providence Zen Center.”
Carolyn often finds ways to throw herself into a situation of big uncertainty in order to reawaken the faith in Life which her grandmother instilled. So she would travel to far places like India, Sri Lanka, and Germany “to face life with a beginner’s mind.” Those trips, she said, never failed to restore her belief that ultimately there is nothing to be afraid of.
Today Carolyn can look at her life with deep gratitude. Her daughters are a center of her life. Sometimes they accompany her to the Zen Center on a Sunday evening. She owns her own home near her parents in Brooklyn. She has a job that pays the bills while allowing her to take time to paint and to be with her girls.
“My ideal,” she said, smiling and looking toward the sky, “is to combine meditation, painting and travel. That’s what travel is: beginner’s mind.”