The Minotaur

Minotaur, 46 x 60 inches, oil on linen

The boy was angry. Like all humans, he was born with the capacity to be angry, but his anger was worse than most.

His parents could not teach him how to soothe his anger, because they did not know how to soothe theirs. His anger was never soothed and so it grew.

His anger grew until it became a beast with hooves and horns, hot breath and cold unblinking eyes. The beast was afraid of nothing except nothing. It raged against the terrifying raw emptiness of life. Almost everything it did in life was done to keep the emptiness away.

Since it did not know how to guide itself through life, the beast kept going in circles like it was stuck in a maze. It made many bad decisions that led back to the emptiness it was trying to escape.

It blamed its mother for being cold and distant. It blamed its father for teaching it to kill. When it found its parents wandering in the maze, it raged and killed them.

The beast soothed itself by consuming the lost women it found in the maze, but they always left it feeling even more empty. Raging and emptiness, it kept killing.

It tried everything it could to fend off the emptiness.

Its life became a search for a way out of the maze until one day it realized that emptiness was always on the other side of the anger. If it wanted to leave the maze it must let go of anger and tolerate the feeling of emptiness. No one else was to blame for the emptiness and nothing could remove it.    

This path was very lonely, and it often felt like the emptiness was growing.

Eventually something good and unexpected happened. It was just a little thing, and the beast clung to it, hoping it could find more of what felt soothing.

It searched not for an escape from emptiness, but for the feeling of hope.  After years, it found that the search for hope was just another maze.  

The beast starved in the maze until it gave up hope. When he finally gave up hope his horns fell away because he did not need them anymore. The beast shrank to the size of a dog and released the little boy.

The little boy always knew what the beast could never learn. He knew that his true mother never left him. His true father did not hurt him, and so he could forgive his parents. The little boy knew that we are all born from the same place, but most of us forget as our anger and fear overtake us.

The little boy practiced forgiveness and compassion toward all beings and the maze melted away, and the dog became just a dog.