About sunflowers and answers

I would say my preferred painter is Van Gogh. Among many others I love, Gogh achieved something in his paintings that I just can’t describe accurately. And if I were to choose a painting, it would be his “Sunflowers”. It happened that I saw it at the National Art Gallery in London. I have spent some time staring at the colors, the textures, the flowers themselves. There’s no big deal on the flowers, one would say; still it’s the most amazing painting I’ve ever seen.

Van Gogh was an ill man, mentally ill. For everyone who, like me, have experienced or experience that kind of thing, even the slightest depression, knows how hell must look like. It might have seem a bit dramatic, but the suffering is real and intense. Sunflowers… Why on earth would Van Gogh paint Sunflowers? Going through pain, despair, loneliness, emptiness, he paints sunflowers. Looking at the original on the wall, I felt sucked in that yellow universe… This is not just sunflowers, is an entire life put on a painting. Still, it’s just sunflowers. It says to me that is something deeper and profound on those flowers, something I can only grasp and, perhaps, try to categorize on my poor, shallow, limited view and conception of things. I could never, ever get a grip of those flowers. I’m not capable of that.

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My time in Stavanger is about its end, something like 3 weeks or so. I’ve seen things and people, I listened to them, walked to them, touched them. I wandered on the streets smelling of decadence at night and were struck but the rain that covered it all y the morning. I don’t think I’ve seen so much happens in such a small time. People falling, getting up, drowning, asking for help, rejecting help… Reality is big and complicated. Simplicity is a lie, nothing is as simples as we think, even a sunflower. Everything is as hidden as It could be, our intentions, longings and wishes are behind our prosaic conversations and other actions. Always something behind something.

It’s a great mystery, nothing is like it seems. Brasilian author Guimarães Rosa would call this the “mystery of things” and I find no more appropriate name than this one. “Living is very dangerous”, once more quotating the author. I’m speechless when it comes to these things. I just can never enter those infinite universes called human beings, I could never grasp that. Relationships, memories, stories… All of this is just too much.

This is something the world keeps lying to us. It says that all we see is all that is, that reality is as big as you see/live it, that things and people are as simple as you get. So we keep on categorizing stuff in order to tame reality. We tame our own experience so we don’t freak out. The world is scary, indeed, and our lives are tough. Our relationships are broken and there’s no one to trust, even ourselves. Too harsh, perhaps, but that just seems like the real stuff: life is not a movie and doesn’t have a nice end, even a funny one. Welcome, anyway.

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I could never believe in something that just ignores this reality; it’s just too painful and untrue to ignore it as a way of evading the responsibility. Our answers, or something like that, should be coherent to what the world demands. We should face the demon as it really is, no excuses. I’ve never seen such an answer as Christianity. Jesus goes to the questions at its core, nothing less than that. We are nude when faced against God, no excuses for out lack of meaning, loneliness, emptiness. We are left with our own broken lives with no protection or way out of it, we need to face it. Christ talks to us in the deep, no in the surface. God talks in the level of the sunflowers, in a raw and pure state of things.

If there’s an answer for our lives, it should address the most inner and profound of our existence. It should address to our infinite desperate void, our dead ends and broken patterns. Nothing is more despicable than an avoiding religion or spirituality. It has to portrait sunflowers. If It is just a way out of reality, it’s a lie.

Grace be with all.

About coming home or Luke 15:11-31

So it is.

Daylight came through the window. Obscured by the clouds, the sun just looked like any other freak on the main street by midnight. Still, she enjoyed when the sun covered her with its warmth and yellowish color. As a kid in third grade, she used yo draw little animals in the summer afternoons of July; her world's garden was never so big, anyway. All her drawings included a tall white man she used to draw, always with a smile and old clothes. Its big hands always were as big as her. On that particular morning, she looked at her fragile hands and half painted purple nails and remembered of those other hands, big as her face. Perhaps she had learned some lessons from those big ol' hands. No point realising the past, actually. Her past never mattered for anyone, anyway.

But there was something on that cloudy sleepless morning that, despite the bleak sun, reminded her of the white house in the fields. (Talking about past again...) Called John the one by her side, at least that was what they've told each other for some days. John never knew, and will ever know, about the white wood house, homemade toys and those big hands. She used to sleep on those hands, so small as she always was. John had medium size hands, as she measured once, very discrete as she was, on some other evening. His fingers were not so big and, surprisingly, were as neatly done as hers. Anyway, that suited well for her, exactly what she thought she needed.

John, as far as she knew, was another dreamer, the one that write poems and have a long curling hair. And medium size hands, of course. He even wrote a poem for her, meaning that she was just what he needed. At that morning she looked at the poem, somewhere between her books, and read through it once more. He was smart, indeed. Cute boy, so talented. There were something usual for her on those words, something she always kept distant. Words are too easy, are a matter of negotiation. John is such an easy word, along with many others.

John, your hands are not that big. Still, you are here, and it is all. John's words could never touch her, that was the truth.

She never slept that night by John's side. There was something heavy on her. She never found that big ol' hands, whenever she was. And she just realised she would never find them apart from home.

And so it was.