Day 04

Day 04 – A picture of your night.

Oh. It said night, not knight.

Well, so there’s my night. Once again, a highly interpretive little thing, “a picture of your night.” I tend to like to sleep at night. Thus, a picture of the inside of my eyelids. But you know, part of sleeping is dreaming, so I thought I’d share something else. I dream in color. Not always, but when I do it’s pretty cool. And it looks like the ceiling of the Opéra Garnier in Paris. Without the goats.

I really love the colors that Chagall uses, only, the floating goats are a little too much. In all fairness, though, this is actually my favorite Chagall painting:

It’s called Self-Portrait with Muse and I fell in love with it when I first saw it almost 30 years ago. In fact, I had been rather tepid about the Chagall museum until I saw this painting up close and contemplated the origins of inspiration. I explain it a little here, and am reminded of another painting, too. Many years later I  would go full circle and encounter a very different painting, this one by Rembrandt, St. Matthew and the Angel, and I suppose, with my refined (read that older and mature) sensibilities, found it moving, more so than when I first saw the Chagall. I was drawn to this Rembrandt painting at a traveling Louvre exhibit in Atlanta, and circled back to it several times, drawn to the Angel.

Years passed between the time I saw the Rembrandt painting and I thought about writing again. Something remarkable happened and I started making a connection between my own writing and the Divine source of that inspiration. It wasn’t a cascade or domino effect, but a gradual awakening, guided a little by a mortal muse, but a muse nonetheless.

By the way, the real picture of my night, in case you missed it, is a little trip into my head…