Maria R. (EII) - The importance of family

In my childhood, I loved playing “family.” Back then, I didn’t understand that what I was really playing was harmony itself; now I realize I was playing an ideal, harmonious family.

A family is a feeling of warmth, kindness, and love, of coziness, quiet, and peace — a place where you are understood, where everything is done gently and calmly. It is a sense of support and protection; it is light and joy; it is the feeling of an embrace when everyone is together. It is a sense of something beautiful.

I often played this way: I would take books with beautiful illustrations, flip through them page by page, and start telling myself a story, imagining things. If there were portraits, I would tell myself who the person was, what they were like, how they fit into my story (a father, a brother, a sister, a husband, etc.).

If it was a landscape, I would tell how this family, or one of its members, went somewhere on vacation, or that their estate was depicted, or that it was their walk through a garden or a park. If it was a still life with fruits and berries, it meant this was what they were served at the table for lunch or dinner. And if it was flowers, then they were flowers for a “beautiful lady.”

Paintings that depicted some scenes with many people, I narrated as if they were the same people from the previous pictures — but now celebrating something, or getting ready to go somewhere, or fighting, or drinking tea, sailing on a ship, riding horses, discussing something. I described everything in detail, yet the family was always one and the same for me. And it didn’t matter that their faces didn’t match at all — I paid no attention to that and created one continuous story that flowed smoothly from page to page.