Letter from Paris: The Bear in Exile

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My dear,

This afternoon I write to you with the steady hum of traffic rising from five floors below on Boulevard Voltaire. On the table before me rests a cast-iron bear I unearthed from the back of Vero’s closet, its weight startling me like a relic that had been waiting.

My name, Beerhorst—“bear’s forest”—has always carried its own myth. The bear alone in his cave, breathing through the long winter, hidden yet alive. I feel the truth of that image in my bones now.

I came to Paris from Mallorca in the spring with hope burning quietly in my chest, ready for my second solo exhibition—this time with the El Habibi Galerie. But the opening passed without a single sale. Month after month my account drained while the paintings leaned against walls in silence, like mute companions.

Then came the night of rupture—dragged into the street half-naked and bloodied, stripped of safety and certainty. Since then I have slept on a friend’s couch, my small thirty-by-thirty canvases stacked in the corner of her storage room, an orchard of fruit still waiting for its harvest.

And yet, even in this exile, myth comes close. I think of David—anointed but driven into caves, hunted by Saul, kept alive by the wilderness. His story whispers that I, too, am not only displaced but prepared. That exile is not the end but the apprenticeship of kingship. That the cave is not only a refuge but a forge.

This is what myth does—it presses depth into our days when the surface would otherwise swallow us. It tells us the bear is not only an animal but a mirror, the bloodied man in the street not only broken but becoming. In a world dazzled by surfaces, myth reminds us of the subterranean currents shaping our lives. It turns our ache into an anvil, our wandering into initiation.

Even here, especially here, I trust I am still being shaped for more than I can yet imagine.

Yours,
Rick