Me & The Masters
Penny Lane famously advised us that if we ever get lonely, we should go to the record store and visit our friends. While I love a trip to the record store, I feel more power in impressionism. When my head or heart are a mess, I need a field trip to an art museum so I can mentally Mary Poppins my way into the works I’ve admired my entire life. No matter what chaos is happening inside or out, a sense of peace, calm, joy, and contentment return to me in the heavily guarded walls of a gallery.
I’m a girl that tends to look too far ahead to enjoy the present, or stares too closely at the task at hand to see the big picture. I rarely get the perspective just right. Impressionists remind me to take a step back, relax my mind, and admire the brief moment captured instead of obsessing about specific details.
When life gets chaotic, the stress starts to get to me, or something is really really bothering me, I find myself needing a trip to a museum. Being cut off from that outlet as the world was going to shit between Black Lives Matter, the AAPI hate crimes, the election, and the pandemic, really did a number on my mental health. Every single self-care method in my bag of tricks was off-limits and I found myself eyeball deep in my vast collection of impressionist coffee table books on a daily basis. It’s a weird coping mechanism, I know, but I suppose it could be worse. As SOON as I felt comfortable enough to travel again, I plopped as many art museums as possible into my plans. Every single one refilled my cup until I felt refueled to carry on.
I planned a massive museum Marathon last weekend. Saturday I did a double feature of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and MOMA . Having done that, I wouldn’t actually recommend it, that’s entirely too much museum time for one day. I walked 12 museum miles. That’s almost a half marathon of wandering in circles in museums.
There’s been a lot on mind lately. I’m a bit resistant to change, and I need proper preparation and conversation to feel comfortable with major shifts in my life. It took me several years to work through my fears and reservations to take this crazy adventure of mine, and I had counted on certain things staying the same so that I could deal with all of the other change and uncertainty in this chapter. I was a bit blindsided by some things that forced me to process some pain I’ve been silently shoving down for many years. All of the little things I didn’t speak up about came to a head in a great rush of overwhelming hurt that I couldn’t keep ignoring. I had to say something, though I didn’t get the timing or the execution quite right. There is a lot about my childhood that indelibly shaped who I am as an adult. Despite many many years of therapy, I cannot seem to master speaking up about things that hurt me in real time. I’m much better at brushing it under the rug until it explodes out of me in an overwhelming quick sand of emotions. I’m still working on it, but like perspective, I rarely get it just right. Once I start letting those feelings out, and peeling back those layers of band aids, I get to some dark icky stuff that needs more attention that it would have had I dealt with it sooner.
I’m not sure if it is a generational thing- but I am absolutely one of those people that mentally rehearses what I need to say for hours (and sometimes days and weeks) before I can actually voice them aloud. My internal monologue was a constant loop of small hurts that had festered and converged until I was kind of a wreck. Another round of texts unleashed another round of smarting behind the eyes, and I stood in a room surrounded by some of the most famous and favorite works of art in the world, and lost the battle with those pesky onion chopping ninjas. I sat on a bench and cried until a sweet elderly lady offered me tissues from her purse. She said “Van Gogh makes me emotional too, there’s so much feeling in this room.”
The Starry Night, made by Van Gogh in the midst of his madness in the asylum, is turbulent and emotional. You don’t get to see it alone, you’re surrounded by people wishing on those stars too. They shimmered a little extra with the tears in my eyes, and it took a lot longer than usual to feel the flood of relief and comfort it usually brings me. I had to revisit that particular gallery three times before I could finally soak in the magic and healing powers of one of the most beloved masterpieces in the world. It made the anguish and his surfeit of emotions that much more palpable as I stood before it processing my own. The power and pain in the strokes were far more prominent to me than they had ever been before. I wandered down the hall, still lost in my thoughts and pretty wrung out. I really didn’t know how I was going to enjoy this day that I’d been looking forward to for so long with so much on my mind and my heart so heavy.
My brain didn’t know what I needed, but my feet did. I’m not really much of a Modern Art fan, so MOMA was never high on my list to visit as a kid. I actually went all the way to Amsterdam to the Van Gogh Museum before realizing that Starry Night lived a lot closer to home. The first time I went, I was bowled over by Starry Night and gobsmacked by the massive Monet across the hall. On this day, I found myself a seat on the bench, hit play on the audio guides and caught a few magic moments of unfettered views of the jumbotron sized homage to light and Monet’s pursuit of passion.
The perfect audio companion began. It snapped me from my funk and forced me to appreciate my present. The exact right words at the exact right time is my favorite form of kismet.
“I realized that much of our anxiety and suffering in this world is about feeling that sense of loss from the past and dread of what might happen in the future, which, if it overwhelms us, can distract us from experiencing fully the present moment.
I began to think about how a chord in music, when the notes are played separately, becomes a melody, pleasing because our minds immediately remember the note just played, hear the present note, and anticipate the note to come and combining these sensations in the mind, the chords form in harmony, even when the sound has passed or has yet to be. So too, when revisiting the Water Lilies, do I slip into a sense of completeness. Surface, depth, and reflection converge, just as past, future, and the present moment become one. And I've realized I've lost nothing. I feel no anxiety or dread. I simply luxuriate in the joy of color and celebrate this present moment. This to me is the healing power of art.”
I don’t know how you could escape that room without experiencing a bit of buoyancy. It definitely worked to lift my spirits. Sunshine on my face and a stroll through Central Park in peak autumn colors worked a bit more magic too. Discovering new treasures and revisiting faithful friends at the MET brought me further from the funk. Sunday I hit the NY Historical Society to see the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Exhibit. This time the tears in my eyes were of pride and joy. She was not afraid to voice a dissenting opinion, and she had no trouble telling men when they were wrong. Since I was on the Upper West Side, I made it a point to go visit some of my other favorite feisty female’s hallowed haunts. RBG and Nora Ephron are without question two of the most formidable female icons of my life. They are two of my biggest heroes. They both made the world a much better place, and they speak to my heart and soul every bit as much as the fabulous french painters. They stuck to their guns, worked to improve the lives of women, and did it with grace, fortitude, and the tremendous power of their pens.
The reservations were made weeks ago, so I had no way of knowing how much I was going to need the combined power of those visits. Meetings with the masters aren’t a silver bullet magic eraser. I can’t say the mess in my mind is gone, but the perspective has returned. The load feels lighter. I feel refueled and stronger, I’m excising the hurt and building back better. As the darkness threatened to drown me, the men with the magic brushes and mastery of light brought it to my heart. The women with all the right words helped me find my own. They say you should always look to the experts for guidance and assistance. I don’t know that the adage had mine in mind… but it works for me. I hope you’ve found a good way to calm the storm within. We could all use some peace and self care in this wild world we’re living in.
