When I Met Cy

A couple of weeks ago, I finally met Cy Twombly, the American painter, sculptor and photographer. First, I didn’t even notice him, because I was so spellbound by his painting “Untitled (Say Goodbye Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor)” that greeted me like an old friend in one of the first rooms when I entered the Cy Twombly Gallery in Houston.

But then I noticed his energy. Even though from what I know, he must have been a very gentle soul his energy was so strong that it not only brought tears to my eyes, but it brought me literally to my knees. So for a while I was just kneeling there and having an invisible force tugging and pulling on my heart. It was as if God himself had put his finger into my heart and was stirring it all around, causing an extreme rawness to surface that was so overwhelmingly deep and beautiful that it almost hurt.

After a while, (and after God had removed his finger out of my heart) I poised myself. I got up and just stood there and stared at Twombly’s painting in front of me. I heard the rain gently pouring down outside, creating a beautiful lullaby for my already straying thoughts to venture out even further. The soothing sound of rain and the grey light that had veiled the entire day might have contributed to the strange thing that happened next. For, all of sudden, I found myself sitting in one of the boats that Cy Twombly had scribbled over so madly with harsh vertical lines. I was navigating the ocean with a white cotton ball cloud sailing all along. We were passing by signs written into the sky that read: “Orpheus”, “Amun” and “Maat”, and each one gave us their blessing. Eventually, we – the boat, the cloud and I – touched land.

It must have been then, when I entered into the black spiral that I somehow connected with Cy, or with Source, or with Source within Cy. It was a very profound encounter as you can imagine, even though neither of us spoke a word. What else was there to say anyway? We were simply floating in space, carried by the bliss that was pouring through us and every fiber of the canvas: Cy, the creator, and me, the devotee; connected within this marvelous creation. And then, before I could float too much afar or even think of raising my hand to wave good-bye, I got spit out on the other side of the spiral: a neon yellow spot in the middle of other bright orbs that I sensed to be traces of other souls that had been illuminated previously by similar encounters inside of the black hole.