Painting a Connection

I would read a poem. I would read an essay. I would watch a documentary. I would look at a picture.

It had always been conveyed to me that art, writing, film, performing, that all were forms of self expression.

Yet no matter how hard I tried, I could not replicate the satisfaction within my own work, within my own portrayal of myself, my emotion.

It is not that I have never been moved before or overcome with a surge of emotion, of tears, of fear, of happiness, of relief, when I view a painting or when I read the last few pages of a long journey. It was just that I did not understand.

I did not understand how someone could create something so strong, so powerful, so universal, something so heavy that it drips with emotion. I did not understand how someone could pour so much of himself into his work that I felt as a viewer, as a reader, as he did when he carefully stroked his brush across the canvas, when he described the connection he felt with the fading sunset.

I shiver when I read her recollection. Her vivid detail, the horror of her situation, the innocence that was present on one page but wrestled from her hands like a violent wind of trepidation tugging a misguided ship from the safety of the shore, in a matter of seconds, in a matter of words, in matter of a lifetime. The helplessness.

I did not understand how someone could create something so terrible, so sorrowful, so universal, something so heavy that my heart bleeds with each second I stare.

And with each leaf -- each worn, each delicate, each carefully-crafted and now broken leaf -- each leaf that falls, I stare. I wonder.

I have yet to understand.

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