Wednesday evening, some people treated me to getting out of town and going to see the movie Seraphine. It's a French movie with English subtitles, about a woman who cleaned people's houses, did their laundry the hard way, back when it was done by the river, etc. Alone in her apartment, she painted. She also loved nature and gathered materials to grind some of her own pigments. And, she went to church (Catholic) and sang as loud as she could, frequently singing hymns while painting alone at home.
In the movie, Seraphine is funny, caring, and a bit determined to do her painting no matter what. There is precious little about her online to read to see exactly how she was, but, it doesn't matter, I saw the basics of myself reflected in her character in the movie: love of nature; faith; desire to create; desire to be kind; and, never quite like everyone else and because of that, treated very badly by the majority simply because they could.
I was the most emotional one at the theatre. Maybe not, but it seemed like it. I wanted to cheer loudly and clap (which I did do, but quietly) when the art critic had to tell the stuffy woman that yes, he DID want to see Seraphine and more of her paintings. All through the movie, I laughed, I cried. And at the dramatic end, when I was crying, she did something that was so much like what I might do in the situation, that I was laughing while tears were still seeping down my cheek.
I saw myself mirrored on screen. And, because I saw myself, I also saw "the others': that vast majority who have used every available method at their fingertips to try to get me to stop my creativity. Their shaming. Their guilt trips. Their "face reality". A lifetime of cowtowing to persons who perceive their superiority to me, with gifts inside of me so strong from God that I go crazy every time I don't get to work them, to nurture them.
I saw these people, finally, for what they really are.
It's changed my perspective.
I'm convinced that God wanted me to see this movie and chose the timing. The very next morning, I had a horrible e-mail in my inbox that told me how oversensitive and rotten I am, because I had dared to send an e-mail standing up for myself. At the end of this person's e-mail, in BIG TYPE was a demand that I not write anything about the situation in my blog. (so of course I am, generically speaking)
Nobody--not family, not fellow church members, not well-meaning other persons--nobody has the right to tell me what I can and cannot write. What I can and cannot draw or paint. What I can and cannot sing or play on my cheap tenor recorder. What I can and cannot photgraph and print out.
On the way home from the movie the other night, something started growing inside of my soul. All my life, I've wished that I had died either in the womb or at birth. It started with my parents who let me know how I ruined their lives by being born and went on from there But now along has come Seraphine, not only the person, but a movie that is a work of art in its own right. In viewing this movie, for the first time in my memory, I want to live--to live to write and paint and photograph and draw and sing and play John Denver and my own music on my tenor recorder and hug trees and talk to butterflies and run barefoot on the rocks of the Osage HIlls.....or the Rocky Mountains if I ever get to go back there--to dance before God and say, "Look at me, I'm LIVING!!!"
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