CommentsCommunity Notebook
Spiritual Inventory
Mirabai of Woodstock
A handcarved Buddha from Bali.
“We’d never been to Woodstock before,” says former Manhattanite Jeff Cuiule.
“And we’d had no intention of ever coming to Woodstock,” says Audrey Cusson, his wife and business partner. “It was not really a draw for either of us. It wasn’t on our radar.”
Yet in spring 2000, the high-achieving, highly stressed couple—Cuiule was a senior vice president in advertising, Cusson a senior vice president of marketing at a large publishing house—left New York City and purchased Mirabai of Woodstock, a bookstore founded 13 years earlier by Anne Roberts for people interested in exploring different kinds of spirituality, with the ultimate goal of improving themselves and the lives of others.
The store’s mission dovetailed with the couple’s own “spirit journey,” a term that Cuiule uses. “I was, for many years, quite content,” he says. “But the more time we spent in our jobs in the city, the more I realized that what I was doing was not really meaningful to me anymore. It was accomplished, but it wasn’t really meaningful.”
Cuiule says that the process of “getting out of my head and into my heart” began in 1984, when he and Cusson adopted Lucy, a German shepherd that, as the result of a marital dispute between a couple in Pennsylvania, had been chained in a yard, set on fire, and left for dead. Although the dog had been helped by a veterinarian, she needed more surgery and constant looking-after to fully recover. The intense, selfless experience of aiding Lucy “sort of started us on the road to getting Mirabai,” says Cuiule.
Lucy’s presence also helped the couple reconnect in their marriage, along with the work they were doing with a marriage counselor who lives in Saugerties and commutes parttime to New Yotk City. On the last day of counseling, the therapist asked them to close their eyes and imagine what they wanted to do together, since they had already told him that they wanted to be business partners.