Creator's Mind

It took three attempts this year to get back to Quinta da Regaleira. The first time, traffic out of Lisbon turned a forty-minute drive into something that ate the entire morning, and we turned around before reaching Sintra. The second time, we made it to the gates and saw the line snaking down the hill, hundreds of people waiting in the sun, and I knew we wouldn't make it through before closing.

The third time, last week, we arrived early. My wife beside me, two friends visiting from Canada with us, our tickets already booked, the late morning mist still hanging in the trees. I felt the same quiet anticipation I had felt five years ago when I had visited the last time, when I first came to Portugal and this place cracked something open in me. I had been carrying that memory around, wanting to know if it would still feel that way.

It did.

Quinta da Regaleira is the newest of the major castles in the hills outside Lisbon, built only about a hundred years ago but designed to look five hundred years old. One man inherited a fortune and decided to spend a large chunk of it expressing his ideas in stone and garden and tunnel. Winding paths, hidden caves, underground passages, wells that descend instead of towers that rise, lookouts that open suddenly onto views that take your breath.

Nothing was optimized for efficiency, a rare experience in modern times. The estate was designed for people to get lost in, physically and mentally. We spent hours there and still didn't see everything.

Walking the grounds, watching our friends discover it for the first time, I started paying closer attention to what was pulling me. I kept noticing the same things I had noticed five years ago. The man who built this thought outside the box. He did things that weren't the norm. He took real risks with his money and his reputation to make something that didn't have to exist. Those qualities are qualities I have spent my whole life reaching for. Seeing them expressed at this scale, in this permanence, felt like permission.

My wife was moved too, but by something different. She kept talking about the forest. The fact that he chose to build in the middle of a mystical landscape, that he wove the trees and the mist into the architecture. She was drawn to the dark caves, the sense of mystery and the unknown. The little towers reaching up into the sky toward some higher energy. Those are the details that she felt drawn to.

We were walking through the same place. Same paths, same stones, same light filtering through the same canopy. But we were each having a completely different experience. She wasn't noticing what I was noticing. I wasn't noticing what she was noticing.

I had always thought of art as a way to step into someone else's mind. When you stand inside a building someone designed, or read a book they wrote, or hear a song they composed, you're inside the architecture of their thinking. You get to feel what it was like to be them, briefly. That alone is one of the great gifts of being human.

But something else was happening at Regaleira, and it took my wife's response for me to see it clearly. What I was actually doing was walking through this man's mind and noticing the parts of him that matched the parts of me. The risk-taking. The willingness to be strange. The choice to be inefficient. I wasn't absorbing his creation neutrally. I was finding myself in it.

My wife was doing the same thing, but with different parts of herself. The mystical, the nature, the reach toward the higher. Those things were also there in the design, but I had walked past them barely registering. We were each receiving from the same creation only what we already carried.

There's something humbling in this, and something liberating. Humbling because it means I was never seeing the whole castle. I was seeing the version of it that confirmed who I already am. Liberating because what moves me is telling me something about myself I might easily forget.

What we notice in other people's creations are what we are most inspired by in ourselves. They are the qualities we are reaching for, the qualities we maybe haven't fully given ourselves permission to live out.

That man built a castle to express the parts of himself he couldn't say out loud. A hundred years later, I walked through it and felt my own unspoken parts being named back to me. My wife walked through it and felt hers. The same walls. Two different mirrors.

The reason I keep coming back, the reason I planned around traffic and lines and poor timing for three attempts, is that it's one of the few places where I can hear that reflection clearly.

The creative parts of me were already there. I just needed someone else's creation to help me see them.