Shocking truth

I don't want to bore everybody with clouds photos but if you are keen on them, there are some I took during our walk yesterday afternoon HERE

Today the sky was back to immaculate blue

Still no bugs to be seen so I looked for leaves again. It's amazing how different they look from yesterday when they get a lot of bright light on them

Project 365+1 - Day 103 : Shocking

This morning I was having breakfast and watching the news, when they talked about the painting " The Scream " by Edvard Munch that is to be sold soon. It brought me back many years ago.

I spent 15 years in Germany and certainly would still live there hadn't I met my British hubby, but that's another story. In Munich they organize once a year  " Die lange Nacht der Münchner Museen " : The long night of the Museums and for a very small fee, you can visit some 70 participating museums that stay open all night for the occasion. It is a fascinating event and you can learn and discover so many things about Art, paintings, sculptures . ..

It is during one of these nights that I discovered Edvard Munch. It was in a small museum and half of it was celebrating his life and paintings. I remember looking at the Scream and being extremely shocked by the bright colors and the pain and horror on that face. It was one of the most disturbing things I had ever seen.
All his paintings looked more or less the same, I mean with the same atmosphere in them and it was highly depressing and uncomfortable to say the least.

Munch wrote of how the painting came to be: " I was walking down the road with two friends when the sun set; suddenly, the sky turned as red as blood. I stopped and leaned against the fence, feeling unspeakably tired. Tongues of fire and blood stretched over the bluish black fjord. My friends went on walking, while I lagged behind, shivering with fear. Then I heard the enormous, infinite scream of nature."

I remember thinking he was a complete nutter and all I wanted was to go out of there and breathe some air.

As of today, I have a very different point of view. The Scream is Munch's most famous work and it has been widely interpreted as representing the universal anxiety of modern man. So Munch wasn't a nutter, no, he was suffering from acute anxiety. It's something that happened to me and luckily I recovered, it's something that can happen to any of us, without warning. Mine just came from a fall downstairs.

It's not something we chose, it's nothing different than catching a cold or having a broken leg. It is just something in our body that stops working properly and needs to be repaired. It is just that repairing anything having to do with " brain " can be much more challenging to both doctor and patient, than plastering a broken leg !

As of today, Much's painting makes so much sense to me and I must say I really like it, because I've been there, not to the extent he was, but enough to catch a glimpse of how bad he must have felt. I have spent some days with my head in my hands, being scared of my own shadow, so somewhere, I think I can understand his distress.

On a positive note, I am pleased to say that last Tuesday I was officially " discharged " from Therapy. It looks like I've done a good job and I am OK to fly on my own again. I do feel like I am almost back to my " normal " self and I am obviously over the moon to recognize whom I am talking to in the mirror.

It has taken 8 months and a bit after the fall. It can be seen as a very short time in a life time or it can be seen as roughly 250 days, what's a lot of days.

A while ago, I was talking about our fingers or other body parts that we take for granted until they stop working correctly. From the chaos I came back from, I also learnt that being sane is a lucky blessing and we should respect people who are not as lucky to be in this position, because they certainly didn't chose to.

Take care everybody, xxx