The Painting
Early one morning late August (or early September) on my way to my room I walked past the hospital café and when I looked to my left, I saw the world as a painting.
No, seriously: I saw that the world and everyone in it was just a painting, where if you looked up you saw God and Good and Heaven and all those wholesome things your grandmother tried to teach you and when you looked down you saw the Devil and Evil and Hell — the bad stuff.
I don’t know where the painting sprung from, but I know that I was on a mission to find the truth that everything proves — only a truth meeting that criterion would be the real truth went my reasoning. For if everything, with the exception of a single ant’s third left leg proved an isolated truth, whether discovered or reasoned, it would still not be the ultimate truth, for there was this one ant’s leg that threw the equation out.
No, to be the capital-T truth, it had to be proven by every-thing, through all time: nothing short of that would be the capital-T Truth, the one I was looking for.
The painting I was now looking at was densely populated by trees and flowers, birds and animals, and people, everywhere: people. Many of them looking up either in wonder or supplication — in prayer; many looking down at unwholesome thoughts or deeds: planned or done — grinning like the Devil, my grandmother Olga would have said, look at them. Most, though, were looking neither up or down, they were watching television.
Two amazing certainties came to simultaneous fruition: I realized that I was not looking at a painting, I was in fact looking at the world — and, so strange, the world itself was a painting, it was painted.
And thirdly, in order to perceive good above and evil below you had to be part of the painting, within that frame (pun intended) of reference. Should you stand outside the painting, regarding it, you could see neither good nor bad, all you would see was the painting.
What a strange setup. Like a movie. Who was directing? I wondered. God? Brahman?
And another notion blossomed: when I found the truth, the truth I was looking for, this painting would sprig to life and step out itself, laughing.
And me along with it.
© Wolfstuff
