I stepped into the first painting I ever bought....

I was still in high school and had used my babysitting money to purchase it. It has been with me for well over 50 years. It spoke to me then for reasons unknown.

The painting is an oil painting on panel by Pat Windrow depicting a man in a rowboat rowing in a "sunny side up" egg yolk toward a single pole that is sticking up out of the yolk. The two halves of the broken egg shell are visible. The egg lays on what looks like marsh grass.

At the time I bought it I knew nothing about the artist or the painting. The marsh-like grass felt familiar to me as I (and the artist I would come to find out) lived on the north shore of Long Island near the Long Island Sound. While the beaches were rocky, there were quite a few inlets that had marsh areas. Poles sticking out of water was a common sight in the marshes and also the harbor areas of the Sound.

The "weirdness" of the painting (I was still unfamiliar with the term "surrealism") appealed to me as did the mystery of trying to decipher the Artist's message. I felt that she was saying something very deep and important about the human condition. I felt themes of isolation or loneliness (the solitary figure), rebirth or creation (the egg), and a sysiphus-like longing to reach, but never quite reaching, something to anchor onto (the pole), all of which spoke to my teenage angst. I was also very drawn to the skill with which it was painted and. I felt a deep need at the time to own a piece of original art. Who knew that more than 50years later, I would embark on an Inner Journey with The Man In The Boat? Ostensibly, at first, I was there to help him, to take over a bit of the rowing and help hem reach that anchor point. But as we traveled together in comfortable silence, I came to see him as my guide, my Ferryman a la Siddhartha, my Shaolin Monk a la Kung Fu, my Wise Old Man Archetype a la Jung. Finally, I came to recognize him as simply a part of me... my inner voice now free to sing loudly! We Blossomed, We Emerged. We Ascended. We became Unmoored. We Merged. We Kissed in total acceptance.

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