I swirl my fingers in the red paint sitting on a paper plate in my lap, and as I lift my eyes to the blank canvas in front of me, she says to me, “Have you ever stopped to look at a pansy. I mean, really look?”

I think about all the changes we have been through in the last year, the For-Sale sign in my yard and the taking down of pictures on walls. “I can’t say that I have”, I respond.

Putting yellow paint to blank canvas, she says, “The colors are absolutely amazing. If you get close enough, and look down into the center, you will see some that seem to have faces; others have streaks of color that run throughout, and then there are the ones that just have white tips. They are all so different. I love taking the time to look at them.”

Unsure of the form my painting would take, I began creating as I told her about the picture I took a few years ago of a white flower on my Magnolia tree. How, upon closer examination, I noticed that its center wasn’t white at all, but streaked with pale pink that extended from the center to the tip of the flower. “I was amazed”, I said, “that what I thought was just a white flower among hundreds of other white flowers, had a unique design all its own. How easy it is for us to miss the true beauty in all things when we don’t take the time to look closely.”

In the midst of the stories and laughter of a dozen women and their paint stained hands, I catch a glimpse of her canvas, and it is filled with green vines surrounding a large yellow pansy. My eyes are fixed on the orange and red streaks coming from its center, adding a new dimension to the large yellow pansy, and at once I realize that this is what it means to be known and seen.

I pause for a few minutes to collect my thoughts. “When are you moving?” another woman asks. “Two weeks” I say. Noticing that my painting has taken the form of a tree, and the tips of each branch have been dotted with different colored flowers, I sense that it is completed, and that it’s time to move on, but I struggle to let it go.

For it is in this place that I am known. Through bearing children and soul, these relationships have grown up around me, their colors imprinted on my heart, adding a depth to life that cannot be found until one looks. I mean, really looks.

Sensing that I am finished, the instructor walks over and takes my painting. As she walks away, I glance up in hopes of seeing my picture once more, but in its place hangs a blank canvas.