I remember setting out from Old Town in Pasadena one late September afternoon quite a few years ago. Pasadena's famous brick facades and tree-lined streets, with their mix of cafés and bookshops, carried the gentle hum of a chilly autumn day. The walk itself was a prelude. By the time the Norton Simon came into view, Rodin’s figures were already waiting, their bronze limbs half-dissolving in the slant of afternoon light. They stood not so much as monuments but as questions—of weight, of longing, of what it means to be human on the verge of something larger than ourselves. The museum, low and quiet, seemed less an institution than a threshold.
Inside, the silence deepened.
Then came the shock of recognition—a Van Gogh that seemed less painted than breathed into being. The swirls of color did not stay on the canvas but moved outward, absorbing me, pulling me into their restless calm. For the first time, I realized how art can dismantle you, wordlessly. I found myself shedding copious tears in the midst of strangers, unembarrassed. I was entirely caught up. Degas, Picasso—each in their own way—lifted me out of the known world and yet delivered me back to myself, as if art’s great trick is not escape but arrival. That afternoon filled me with this otherworldly detachment, but also with total connection to myself and to the One who made the world beautiful.
Later, in the café, I sat with a cup of coffee, watching light pool across the tabletops. It was the ordinary made extraordinary, another still life rendered in steam and sun. What the museum gave me was not only an encounter with beauty, but a subtle reminder that to stand before a painting is to stand before your own interior world—colored, in motion, unfinished. By the time I left, the sky turning toward dusk, I realized the art had not merely shown me another world.
It had shown me my own, more vividly than I had ever seen it before.
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