If there’s one who gives words to everything that I feel, then it is my brother Vincent Van Gogh. Perhaps, in the end it is Vincent’s art that has been the way to his most valuable gift- The Truth found in his collection of letters to his brother, family and friends.
I love Vincent and I am incredibly thankful to know this beautiful soul and humbled by his fragility, vulnerability and weakness. It has only been a few years ago that I discovered Vincent’s letters and found in him the divine truth that only flows through desperate people to encourage other desperate people. Vincent Van Gogh was incredibly courageous human being. Thankful for Brainpickings who helps us to remember these great witnesses of truth who shared with us their experience, strength and hope through their struggle with rejection, loneliness and melancholy.
“In the springtime a bird in a cage knows very well that there’s something he’d be good for; he feels very clearly that there’s something to be done but he can’t do it; what it is he can’t clearly remember,and he has vague ideas and says to himself, “the others are building their nests and making their little ones and raising the brood,” and he bangs his head against the bars of his cage. And then the cage stays there and the bird is mad with suffering. “Look, there’s an idler,” says another passing bird — that fellow’s a sort of man of leisure. And yet the prisoner lives and doesn’t die; nothing of what’s going on within shows outside, he’s in good health, he’s rather cheerful in the sunshine. But then comes the season of migration. A bout of melancholy — but, say the children who look after him, he’s got everything that he needs in his cage, after all — but he looks at the sky outside, heavy with storm clouds, and within himself feels a rebellion against fate. I’m in a cage, I’m in a cage, and so I lack for nothing, you fools! Me, I have everything I need! Ah, for pity’s sake, freedom, to be a bird like other birds!
An idle man like that resembles an idle bird like that.
[…]
You may not always be able to say what it is that confines, that immures, that seems to bury, and yet you feel [the] bars…” Vincent Van Gogh
DeeAnn Dean 