Move the mountain
Like other recent posts, this is unrelated to dreams. It is, however, strange. This incident occurred in 1990 during the summer or fall. It happened at the OK Harris art gallery in the Soho neighborhood of Manhattan.
My wife, Kitty, and I had gone in to look at some paintings. Like all galleries, there is much more to see in the back room than in the main gallery floor reserved for exhibitions. We knew the gallery director, Ethan Karp, who was the son of Ivan Karp, the gallery’s owner. I asked Ethan if he had anything interesting in the back room that he could show us.
One of the first paintings he pulled out was a $250,000 oil by Photorealist Ralph Goings. It was nowhere close to our price range, but I enjoyed seeing the painting. He also showed us a very nice Robert Bechtle which, at $40,000, was also well outside our range. Actually, just about everything beyond the one dollar post cards in the gallery were out of our range. Still, it was fun to imagine owning one of these beautiful paintings.
The last painting we saw was a framed watercolor by Richard McClean, a well-known painter of equestrian subjects. This painting was only $10,000. I asked Kitty what she thought of it.
“I like it.”
“Then I think you should have it.”
At the precise instant I completed my answer, I saw a blur of motion moving left to right, and then Kitty was holding the painting. Ethan had his mouth open.
“It looked like a ghost picked it up and dropped it on her.”
Kitty said, “It just jumped up in the air. If I hadn’t caught it, it would have fallen on the floor.”
All three of us were too far from the painting to accidentally touch it. This was on purpose, and is fairly typical for viewing paintings. You want to be far enough away to see it clearly, and you don’t want to accidentally touch the painting and risk damaging it.
Also typical was the deep six inch shelf the painting rested on, and the two inch lip that held it in place. When the paintings you sell are worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, you don’t take chances. There is no way the painting wasn’t secure where we’d been looking at it for a few minutes.
The painting somehow projected forward and up several feet in order to reach Kitty. If it had simply tipped over, it would have landed on the floor below the shelf.
So, had did this happen? My favorite theory at first was that a truck outside had hit a deep pothole. That could have caused a vibration that shook the shelf, causing the painting to jump up. However, nothing else in the gallery moved. Ethan kept saying, “it looked like a ghost picked it up and dropped it.”
Oddly, the painting moved right after I said, “I think you should have it.” And then, Kitty literally had it in her arms, though we hadn’t bought it, nor did we later. It was as if I’d casually said, “I want that” and an invisible and obedient dog had gone and fetched it, not realizing that it had to be paid for.
This isn’t the only time in my life that something like this has happened, though it may be the most spectacular in some ways. On the rare occasions these things happen, I am not trying to make them happen. Indeed, the idea that they might happen isn’t on my mind at all.
This incident, and others like it, remind me of Matthew 17:20, “Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”
Sometimes, I think it might be related to a commitment to truth-telling. At a certain point, if you are habitually truthful, then what you say can become true on that basis alone. I don’t know if that is what happened or if it is related, but it is an idea I’ve had more than once. I do make an effort to be truthful at all times, even when it comes to being aware of what I don’t know and projections into the future.
Maybe Ethan was right. I don’t think he was, but don’t know how else to explain it.