Slid back home over icy paths, red-nosed with chattering teeth. Decided tonight was not a night for running. Instead, tonight was a night for story-telling: and I have something beautiful that I'd like to share with you today.
What drives people, do you think? What inspires? This varies, of course, from person to person, but there is a common force within all of us that elicits profound response at particular moments. Everyone has felt it: the sensation of being overcome with awe, with bliss.
When asked, a colleague relayed her moment of elation in seeing a Holbein sketch for the first time; another described sitting on a pew in the Pantheon, bathed in the light cast by its central oculus. Holding a niece who’d just turned one, warm toothed smile pulling at the drawstrings of my heart. Snuggled close beneath a tarp, listening to owls cry out in the night. Fiddlers a-chanting, the River Forth lapping beneath their feet. A deep hug in paint-splattered, grout-encrusted, plaster-matted clothes, celebrating the end of a laborious renovation. These things. These moments.
The meaning cast on the relationships we harbour with people, places, things, paint us human. We harken after those little kernels of powerful feeling.
Today someone special came to visit us in the painting’s conservation studio. Her ties with my workplace stretch as far back as fifty years. In her youth, she embarked on a journey from Scotland with her beloved – farewelling one painting in particular: a Spanish panel of Saint Michael vanquishing the devil. She carried only a sepia print of the masterpiece, which she placed on the mantlepiece in her new home in West Virginia.
A promise was made to see Saint Michael in person again… Yet the passage of time slipped by – one, two, twenty, sixty years – without the golden panel materialising in front of her. Saint Michael lingered on the periphery as a tapestry of other joyful moments came and went. Family, children, a career. A happy, full life.
Recently, her husband passed away and she returned to Scotland in a daze. Embraced by the solace of her siblings, she was gently encouraged to rediscover another source of great joy: Saint Michael. After learning that the painting was undergoing restoration, she realised this gave her a unique opportunity. At the ripe age of eighty-one, a private audience with the work was sought.
Today, clutching that dog-eared sepia photograph in one hand, she shuffled into our studio. And when her eyes met the archangel’s haloed golden head, the dear began to cry. A narrative of enduring connection spanning decades had finally reached its close.
Seeing this lady reconnect with her painting was a moment that I will never forget. It made me realise how much we take granted. The preciousness of time. The preciousness of little things. And profound moments of bliss.