He had taken a humanities class in college while I was gone, and something in it had cracked him open in the way that only happens once, if you're lucky. Van Gogh first — page after page, painting after painting — and then the real museums in Washington DC where he lived, where he would stand in front of a canvas and simply be unable to move on. Not performing appreciation. Not being polite to the art. Actually, unable to leave. As if the painting still had something to say and he was not going anywhere until he heard it.
I remember feeling guilty at first. His passion moved faster than I could follow. I didn't have the language yet — the technique, the history, the way of looking that turns a painting from a pretty thing on a wall into something that speaks directly to whatever is oldest in you. I couldn't keep up with him emotionally and I felt the gap between us.
So he taught me. Not with patience exactly — more with contagion. He showed me what he was seeing, what he was feeling, why this brushstroke and not another, why Van Gogh's skies move the way they do, why you have to stand still long enough for a painting to stop being decoration and start being a door. And slowly, standing beside him in those museums, I caught some of the fire. Not his fire. My own. But lit entirely from his.
I have been thinking about that ever since I read this poem.
I walked backwards, against time and that's where I caught the moon, singing at me.
I ended thought, and I ended story. I stopped designing, and arguing, and sculpting a happy life. I didn't die. I didn't turn to dust. Instead I chopped vegetables, and made a calm lake in me where the water was clear and sourced and still.
And when the ones I loved came to it, I had something to give them, and it offered them a soft road out of pain.
I became beloved. And I came to know that this was it. The quiet power.
— Tara Sophia Mohr
I haven't recovered yet after reading this. It has lingered the way my brother used to linger in front of those paintings — not ready to leave, not quite able to explain why.
What stopped me was a single word. The poem doesn't say find a calm lake. It says make one. Those are not the same instruction. Finding suggests it's already there, waiting to be discovered. Making means it is work. Intentional, daily, unglamorous work — the chopping of vegetables, the tending of water, the keeping of a bench for someone who might need to sit.
I knew immediately that I wanted that. And I knew in the same instant that I was the one keeping myself from it. Not circumstances. Not other people. Me. My own ruminating, my own designing and arguing and sculpting. My own weather moving through my own soul, stirring up the silt, clouding the water I most wanted to be clear.
That is an uncomfortable thing to own. But there it is.
My brother didn't lecture me about Van Gogh. He didn't hand me a reading list or explain why I should care. He just loved it so completely, so openly, so without any interest in being impressive, that standing beside him I gradually learned to see what he was seeing. The fire jumped because he wasn't guarding it. He had made something clear and still inside himself around that passion, and it had room for me in it.
That is the quiet power. Not the loudest person in the room. Not the most persuasive. Not the one with the most answers or the sharpest philosophy. The one who has tended their own water carefully enough that when you come to it, thirsty and tired, there is something real to drink.
You know people like this. Their names come to you easily. They don't get in their own way. They don't need you to see them seeing. They have simply, quietly, made something inside themselves that has room for you.
I want to be that. Not someday. Now.
Not so I can be impressive in my stillness. But because the people I love most deserve a soft road out of pain when they come to me. Because I have not always given them that. Because I have sometimes been the turbulence when I meant to be the calm. Because I am still learning — slowly, humbly, with significant backsliding — to stop designing and arguing and sculpting, and simply tend the water.
My brother showed me how to see a painting by loving it first.
Maybe that is all any of us can do for the people we love. Not explain. Not instruct. Not hand them our conclusions.
Just love something so completely and so openly that they catch the fire themselves.
Tend the river inside.
Keep the bench.
Keep the water rich and deep.
They will come.
