The Portrait
"Create a beautiful watercolor for the website."
That was the assignment.
Nothing more.
Nothing less.
An illustration for my profile on the website. For the Healing Collective. For an international directory.
How difficult could that be?
That turned out to be an interesting question.
For every new version was technically better than the previous one.
The colors became more beautiful.
The hair seemed better and better.
The greenhouse gained more atmosphere.
The orchids bloomed more exuberantly.
And yet, I heard myself say again and again:
"No… this isn't me yet."
Remarkably enough, that was almost never about my nose.
Or my eyes.
Or my hair.
It was about something completely different.
The woman in the image seemed to view the world differently than I did.
At one moment, she radiated an almost sacred tranquility.
Another time, she reminded me of Queen Elizabeth in the famous James Bond video during the London Olympics.
Beautifully painted.
Completely the wrong person.
Slowly, the assignment changed as well.
No longer:
"Draw my face."
But:
"Who is the illustrator actually trying to meet?"
That turned out to be a much more difficult question.
And perhaps a much more interesting one too.
We rewrote the assignment again and again.
Not to change my appearance.
But to change the illustrator's gaze.
At a certain point, a sentence appeared almost casually that changed everything.
The illustrator is not painting a portrait. The illustrator is witnessing a conversation.
From that moment on, everything changed.
My gaze.
My posture.
The greenhouse.
The notebook.
The coffee cup.
Someone else's hand even appeared at the edge of the image.
Suddenly, it was no longer a portrait.
It had become an encounter.
And then something happened that I hadn't seen coming at all.
We stopped talking about illustrations.
Instead, we talked about ecology.
About evolution.
About anthropology.
About the question of how people actually learn.
How groups regulate themselves.
How safety arises.
How a community sometimes functions just like an ecosystem.
It wasn't until much later that I realized we hadn't been dealing with a profile picture for a long time.
We were searching for words for something that had been present beneath the surface for years.
If someone had asked me a few weeks ago what I did professionally, I probably would have answered:
"I am a Brainspotting Consultant."
That is still true.
But by now, it no longer feels like the whole story.
Perhaps I am at least as much someone who is fascinated by the ecology of human regulation.
By what happens between people.
Through the circumstances under which people can grow.
Not just individually.
But together.
The funny thing is that at some point I started worrying about my hands.
"My hands are so old."
Of course I have old hands.
I am sixty-nine.
They have written.
Pointed.
Holded.
Comforted.
Carried coffee cups.
Filled notebooks.
Perhaps they ultimately tell more truth than a smoothed-out face ever could.
At the end of this unexpected journey, one thought lingered.
A good portrait might not be about a face at all.
Perhaps a good portrait is about the way someone pays attention.
Not how someone looks.
But how someone truly sees.
And perhaps that is ultimately what my work turns out to be increasingly about as well.
Not about answers.
But about attention.
I closed my computer.
The watercolor was on the screen.
And suddenly I thought:
"Funny…"
We had started with a portrait.
And ended with a landscape.