Golden Rays Of Sunshine

Wake up... wake up... A voice makes its way through my sleep, feeble and far away first, then stronger and stronger. Finally it pierces the sleep's membrane, passes beyond the veil of unconsciousness and reaches me there where I sank to forget the world and its sorrow.

I open my eyes in the dark of my bedroom. A dream... You're not sleeping any more. I open my eyes wide and spring up, seating on the bed. The room is not so dark and I can see the objects around me: the bedside table, the door ajar, the wardrobe. I can even see the pattern of my bed cover. At this point I realize that a ghostly luminescence emanates from the painting hung on the wall facing my bed. And... the painting seems to move. The images in the painting are like they're moving, like rippling, the paint used to draw them stirred by a liquid flowing to and fro in placid waves underneath.

The ram at the centre of the painting stares questioning at me, asking me to follow him. It's been this feeling to drive me in buying the picture. The feeling that my totem animal was waiting for me, waiting for me to find him. And finally I've found him, represented in the work of a painter who I didn't know and who could know nothing about me. Still, it's like the painting has been drawn exactly for me. Aries, my zodiac, waits for me, with a questioning stare, puzzled of me needing such a long time to find him. A distant destination, a goal to reach, that place I search for but I'm not able to find: this is in the painting too.

It's time for you to come with me, he says now in the silence of the night. Why do you still linger in this Middle World? This isn't your place.

I know that what he says is true. There's nothing here for me. No more. Maybe never been. It's a land of transit, a doorway. But... should I go through in my own? She's still in here...

In your own you have reached this Middle World. In your own you will leave it. You can't linger waiting for her. She has decided to walk with you no more.

But I still love her...

And forever you will. My thoughts were bare. But your world is waiting for you and you cannot stay here. I know that his words are not wrong. A shiver runs down my back, shaking me whole. My heart aches in my chest, like caught in a grip. I stare to the landscape in the painting, with the spheric and woody hill beyond the ram. Spheric, like it's a planet in its own, ready to rise in the sky and leave forever the orbit of this world. Ready to follow its own path.

Suddenly I open my eyes in the dark of my bedroom. The wall in front of me is a wall of shadow. The painting is just a darker rectangle. I dreamed... I dreamed and the emotions of the dream are slowly flowing away from me, into the darkness and the silence, for my inability to keep them with me.

Golden Rays of Sunshine is a painting by Cyndi Speer.