Today I’d like to share a poem with you.
I read it yesterday and was utterly moved. In my imaginative and flighty mind, I’ve often tried to consolidate my state of being into a coherent verse — and this poem did it for me.

If you’ve watched my videos, you may have noticed that even though I speak about painting, there’s always something deeper flowing beneath the surface. What I speak of, paint through, and live by, all stem from this poem.

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Love After Love by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

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This place — the love after love — is where I can gratefully say I’ve arrived.

And believe it or not, painting has been my path to this homecoming. This beautiful place lives in each of us, waiting patiently. You might wonder what painting has to do with this kind of transformation, but let me assure you: it has everything to do with it.

Learning to paint — to really see, to understand the foundations, to build something from nothing — mirrored my own healing.

As painters, we study composition, value, color, perspective, atmosphere, and edge work. But these aren’t just technical skills. They’re metaphors for life. Once I began to grasp them, I saw they were also gateways — into deeper creative expression, and into a deeper knowing of myself.

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I used to think I wasn’t talented because I couldn’t “see” a good composition. I thought I lacked something essential. But after many failed paintings, a small crack opened. And through that crack came light. I began to realize that subjects in a painting don’t exist in isolation — they relate to one another. They form a structure, a story. That’s what makes a composition come alive.

Now let’s exchange painting for thought.

Most of us think the same thoughts every day, on loop. Often negative. Often unnoticed. But when a tiny crack appears in our thought pattern — when awareness comes in — we begin to see our mental landscape for what it is: cluttered, sometimes chaotic, but also full of potential.

And just like in painting, we can learn to compose our thoughts. We choose what to include. What to leave in the background. What deserves to be brought forward in rich, expressive detail. We begin to craft a mental composition that supports peace, clarity, and love.

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Can you feel the parallel?

You can’t move forward in your life without learning to arrange your thoughts.
To curate your mind.
To know your focal point thought — the one you want to build your life around.
This is deep inner work. But painting can help guide you through it.

If you think of yourself as an artist — which you are — then you are capable of painting any masterpiece you desire. Even if your canvas seems ruined or overworked, it is never beyond repair. In fact, failed paintings become rich ground for new compositions.

You can begin again.

Not by erasing everything, but by layering. By using your past not as proof of failure, but as texture — as depth — in your next creation.

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This has been the most difficult and most fulfilling painting I’ve ever worked on:
the painting of my own life.
And it’s not finished — no masterpiece ever is.
It continues to reveal parts of me I’d forgotten. Parts I abandoned in my teens.
The walls were covered in others’ paintings. None of mine.

But not anymore.

Now, my painting takes center stage.
My voice. My expression. My life — as it is, imperfect and unfolding.

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Read the poem again.
Read it with the knowledge that this life you’re living is a canvas.
That the stranger who has loved you all your life is waiting.
And that you are the artist — the only one who can feast on it fully.

With love,
Vida