Find the Artist

During a meditation session, I see a photograph on my wall that I don’t recognize. It’s stunning — the composition is exquisite, the lighting is perfect, the subject couldn’t be better. I’m mesmerized.

It’s so gorgeous that I need to find the artist. I ask the people around me if they recognize it. I describe the photograph, the style, the mastery behind it. No one can place it.

I keep looking. Eventually, someone thinks she might know, and gives me a location. I take a cab across the city and get there — but the guy at the desk tells me I have the wrong address. The artist might be at another location, across the water. I’d need to take a ferry.

I really want to meet this person. So I take the ferry.

I get there and ask for the artist, but he’s moved again. He’s set up a studio at the top of a mountain. I’d need to take a gondola to reach him.

I buy a ticket. It’s high up there, and cold, and the ride takes a long time. But I’m excited. I’m finally going to meet this artist, congratulate him, and maybe learn from him.

I reach the chalet at the summit and ask for him.

“Oh, he’s moved out. Gone back to the city. We don’t know exactly where — but he’s definitely down there, somewhere in this general area.”

The area they describe is close to where I live.

I came all this way for nothing. But at least the artist is near home.

I ride the gondola back down the mountain. Take the ferry back to port. Take a cab back into the city. I find the area, show the photograph around — but no one recognizes it, and no one knows the artist. I’m dejected. I trudge home.

I walk in the door and sit down on the couch, facing the photograph. It’s been a long day. I’m exhausted.

The exhaustion forces me to be still. I sit there, staring at the picture, wondering where the artist could possibly be. And then — something at the bottom right of the photograph catches my eye. Something I hadn’t noticed before.

A name.

Did I miss it this whole time? Did I travel all over while the answer was right here, on my wall?

I get up off the couch and walk over to the photograph. I look at the name in the bottom right corner.

It is my name.

My mind is blown to smithereens. And that’s how the meditation ends.

I write it down in my journal immediately. What did I just experience? What was it trying to tell me?

Two things:

We search for answers everywhere but within. I took a cab, a ferry, a gondola up a mountain — and back again — when a moment of stillness in my own living room held everything I needed. The answers we chase outward are often waiting for us inward, through simple introspection.

We don’t trust our own abilities. That photograph was so good that I couldn’t fathom having created it myself. I had to find the “real” artist. It never occurred to me that it could be me — that I was capable of something that extraordinary. It was me all along.