Human Mirrors

A few months ago, we participated in an art show for our dear friend Jayme . Partly by virtue of our friendship and partly because of the character of her art, it was the most personal and touching experience with art that I am likely to ever have.

Over the period of almost a year, Jayme listened to the stories of eighteen individuals and painted what she heard - abstract portraits of their inward journeys and movements of soul. I walked around the room covered with goose bumps. Many of the people she painted were friends and community members, people with whom I eat, laugh, study, party and generally live life with on a weekly basis. Yet Jayme's art opened a window to their inner worlds that seemed all the more sacred because it involved her own response to what she saw.

Jayme's gift to her subjects was that listened to each person for as long as they chose to talk, and then reflected what she heard through artistic expression. Here is you, she said. Here is what I saw. It was her gift of truly seeing these eighteen unique people that gave me goose bumps. Here is you, she said, and you are beautiful. Not in a rosy, pretty way, but in a messy, sometimes bloody-red, sometimes pitch-black way. Glorious. Magnificent.

Ever since Jayme's show, I've thought a lot about truly seeing people. The bursting life and glory of her paintings surrounds me every day, if I look deep enough. Even without looking deep enough, the glimpses of human beauty regularly cause me to catch my breath. Not only artists see others from more angles and in more colors than those others see themselves. Some may disagree, but I'm inclined to believe that we all construct our mutual identities through the spoken and unspoken messages we communicate to one another. We become what we are seen for - from the kid who flunks out of school because he keeps hearing he is stupid to the woman who radiates from the inside because her lover can't stop saying she's beautiful. You know the saying that behind every successful man is a woman? I'd say that behind every successful, happy, fulfilled person is someone who thinks that person is wonderful - and tells them so. I wonder sometimes if this is a big part of why people crave romantic love and partnership - to be truly seen and well-reflected, to be the hero of someone's narrative, to look into a human mirror and see a character we may want to identify with. So what does it look like to pick up the paintbrush and mix some colors? Could it begin with something as simple as saying not just "thank you" but "I think you are"?