The Painter's Apprentice: Emilio Rojas

While traveling through life, Little Friend came to know a wanderer called the Painter's Apprentice. This man was always surrounded by people asking him about paintings he had yet to paint.

The paintings he described were so ethereal that they resembled music forming in air. The Painter's Apprentice said that the timeless and the eternal could be captured through feeling and sensitivity, releasing the soul toward the spirit's essence. He described a painting of dancing in which the body was a connection between the earth and the soul.

Then he envisioned a painting made of embossed letters - each one a word, a sentence, a prayer, a book wherein the author had woven tales out of history, imagination and dreams. He wanted to create a painting in which the brush strokes and colors were the essence of all that could be ordered and balanced. He also described a painting in which the motifs were feelings formed from the tiniest elements of life in the depths of the interior world.

Then the Painter's Apprentice said that his true aspiration was to paint people. Not those who claimed greatness and then sank into the mud of oblivion. Not those who spoke hurtful words or performed acts of hypocrisy. Not those who used others to climb to the top or exchanged Love's treasures for trinkets, popularity or material wealth. The people he wish to paint were simple folk without disguise, those who were at once ethereal and steadfast. They were the ones whose wings could carry them to the horizon.

Such people teach us how to walk through the valleys of each day. They draw a smile from our hearts and say to us: "To Live is to learn what we were, what we are and what, with the setting of the sun, we shall be. To live is also to understand the human being and the universe, and thus to become a maker of stars. To live is to look at our outstretched hands, one of which contains nothing, the other, everything. To live is to be the immortal energy and light that flow from the Rose of the Heart."

This is how the Painter's Apprentice talked about the pictures he was going to paint. But he never made a single sketch. Curious to see what these paintings would look like, Little Friend followed the Painter's Apprentice for a long time. Finally, when the Painter's Apprentice produced nothing, Little Friend, disappointed, left him. After some time had passed, Little Friend realized that the word was the brush of the Painter's Apprentice and each person part of his canvas.

Poem: by Emelio Rojas, Beloved Author of Latin America. This allegory captures the essence of my passion for this blog. I could easily swap out the word Painter, for Writer, Muscian, Photographer, Fashion Designer, etc......