The Moment of Recognition

Yesterday was the first day of the Waters Abundance show, and I sold a painting.

And not just any painting. One of my favorites, The Blue Heron.

I was talking with a woman who told me how much she loves Great Blue Herons. I do too, and as we talked, I began to tell her what this particular painting meant to me.

There is a moment I have experienced more than once.

You are out walking somewhere quiet, perhaps near the water, and suddenly you see a lone Great Blue Heron standing at the shore.

It hasn’t seen you.

And you stop.

For just a moment, everything else seems to disappear. There is only the bird, the water, the stillness, and you quietly witnessing something that was already happening before you arrived and will continue after you leave. You’ve entered a sacred space.

You don’t need to do anything.

You don’t need to understand anything.

You simply witness.

I told her that this is what the painting was about for me.

These are the moments that feel like gifts from the Great Creator. Small glimpses of something larger than ourselves that are happening around us all the time, if we are quiet enough to notice them.

I think this is something I have been painting for years without always having the words for it.

I am the witness of the divine.

When I finished telling her this, she looked at me and said she would take the painting.

It was such a lovely moment.

Not simply because I had sold a painting, although, yes, that was certainly exciting, but because something had passed between us.

Recognition.

She understood what I was trying to say because, in her own way, she had experienced it too.

For a moment, the painting became a meeting place between two people who understood the same feeling.

And perhaps that is one of the most important things I am learning about sharing my art.

The story behind a painting matters.

Not because I need someone else to see exactly what I see, but because when I share what moved me to create it, I open a door. Someone else may walk through that door and discover their own memory, their own meaning, their own moment of recognition.

Now Blue Heron will leave me.

It will go home with someone who already understands something about it. She will hang it on her wall and live with it for as long as she chooses. And perhaps every once in a while, she will look at that heron and remember what it feels like to unexpectedly encounter one standing quietly at the water’s edge.

To stop.

To notice.

To witness.

What a special thing it is to make something from a feeling inside myself and then watch it find the person who recognizes that feeling too.

Maybe that is why the heron is so small in the painting. The world around it is vast. The bird isn’t asking to be noticed. It is simply there. And for one brief moment, we are fortunate enough to see it.

This is why I paint.