Growing up in East Los Angeles, my family’s idea of art was the portrait of a snowy-haired man praying over his loaf of bread. “Give Us Our Daily Bread” was the implication as the image hung over the nook in the kitchen where we ate our meals. It is the only picture I remember on the walls of my youth. It wasn’t framed but somehow stamped on a slice of faux tree stump.

I was in high school when a friend from my theater class invited me to the Norton Simon Museum. The friend had a ‘72 Nova with bench seats. We could fit about 10 theater kids in there if we were strategic about it.

I don’t think any of us had grown up feeling like art was something we could approach. Graffiti, silkscreen and maybe Disney were for the likes of us. But the stuff in museums, that was for kids in John Hughes movies or people who lived in New York. Not us.

Yet we had found a home in theater, a safe place for weirdos: kids from blue-collar families who liked to read poetry and Nineteenth-Century British literature. We attempted Shakespeare in our Chicano accents and although most of us had never left the state of California, we identified with Eugene Morris Jerome in Brighton Beach Memoirs: Why not venture into other arts and see what they were about? Norton Simon was free for students and if we each threw our pocket change in the ashtray, there was enough for gas.

The Nova shook and lurched as we pulled into the museum parking. The car seemed far too loud in the rich Pasadena sunshine. We waited for kids in the front seat to exit before those of us in the back began to unfold out of the car.

I had expected to feel out of place at the museum, but it felt sacred. I felt as if me, my friends and other patrons all arrived as equals, empty, expecting to be fulfilled in some way. The museum felt not unlike a church. In fact, it felt like what I had always wanted church to be, quiet, clean, high ceilings, not the putrid school gyms my church rented for weekend worship.

I glanced at the pictures in the first room.  A large painting of what appeared to be a homeless man rendered in a palette of grays and browns hung at the far end of the room. Closer to me, I saw a small still life of apples and pears, long past their prime. Many of my friends stood around a colorful painting of a dark-skinned boy with his mother.

I turned to the right and felt as if someone had just kicked me in the head. I felt dizzy, nauseous, a little faint. Before me, a painting of a tree moved. I sat down to catch my breath on a bench in front of the painting and realized it was Vincent Van Gogh’s The Mulberry Tree doing this to me. It was not moving, of course, but gave the illusion of movement.

The painting was simply a picture of a tree. The branches and leaves twisted in yellow, gold, and orange. The colors were nearly violent in the way the yellows of the tree contrasted against the cobalt blue of the sky. The tree moved. It pulsated. It vibrated. There were no figures in the painting. No story to engage. Not even a dog squatting by the tree. And yet I felt that the painting told me a secret about its artist, whose name I didn’t know at the time, and that the painting knew secrets about me too, secrets it found beautiful and lovely.

I wanted to sob—deep guttural sobs of relief and knowing. But I was in a public place, a quiet place. So instead, I took in a deep breath and let it out very slowly to control my reaction. I didn’t expect such a visceral response to art. It felt like an assault but at the same time, the sweetest pain.

I became obsessed with this painting and learned Van Gogh painted it during his time at St Remy, an asylum. He had begun to wake up in odd places, sore and disheveled. It is unclear if Van Gogh was undergoing a psychotic episode or suffering from epilepsy or another ailment altogether, but after his infamous ear-cutting incident, he entered care at St. Remy. At the hospital, painting became his own treatment and he painted over 100 canvases, including this one in the year 1889.

A closer look at the painting revealed thick, dense brushstrokes. In some places, Van Gogh globbed paint directly on the canvas, using a technique called “impasto.” Without thinning or diluting it, he pushed the paint around with his brush or, in this case, the handle of his brush. Even after 130 years, there is a wet quality to the painting.

The result is exuberant. The tree appears as if it is on fire. The tree trembles as if it represents Van Gogh’s own state of mind, shuddering with the lack of control he had of his own tremors. Fellow painter Camille Pissarro fell in love with the painting too. He traded one of his own for it and was its first owner.

This first connection with art left me in a state of ecstatic joy, akin to a spiritual elation. It fulfilled me in a sacred way I had both wanted but didn’t expect. How could I feel so connected to this artist I would never know or meet? Was it a spiritual connection? Or the art itself? All I knew is that I wanted more. I wanted to fall in love again.