During the summer holidays, my mother sent us to an aunt’s garden in a village. As we traveled away from the city, the colors changed. They seemed richer and more alive, perhaps because I had longed for them through months of desert heat. I searched the landscape eagerly, afraid that even one unnoticed shade might be lost.

The garden contained ancient plane trees with massive trunks, a broad irrigation channel we sometimes crossed with difficulty, and water alive with small, colorful fish. When I caught them, they slipped softly through my hands and vanished among the red and green algae on the channel floor. Everywhere I looked, the world was in the process of becoming something else.

A small green leaf could hold sunlight so completely that it seemed to contain the very beginning of life. Nearby, a thick brown leaf curled on its branch, preparing to fall. I did not experience one as beautiful and the other as its failure. Both belonged to the same movement. Nature joined beginnings and endings without explaining them, and a child could look at each without being required to turn away.

I was free in the garden, and freedom became a form of instruction. More than once, I climbed onto a branch too thin to carry my weight because the fruit beyond it looked better. The branch bent, and I fell. No one struck me or humiliated me. The consequence was already complete: I had chosen poorly, the branch had answered, and the next time I climbed with greater care.

This was very different from what I knew at school. Punishment often left me with fear and resentment, but little understanding. Nature allowed action to reveal its own result. It did not protect me from consequence, yet it did not confuse pain with education. Later, when I had to help a child learn abilities that could not be forced, this distinction would return with greater importance: growth requires discipline, but discipline is not the same as severity.

The village was not only gentle. At night, especially beneath a full moon, it became uncanny. Wind passed through the trees and moved the almost-black leaves. Wolves howled beyond the garden. My imagination loosened the ordinary shapes of things and turned them into wandering spirits. Fear would seize me, and I would run toward the house—terrified, yet also thrilled. In childhood, fear could still be entered as a game because safety waited at the end of the run.

I carried that attraction to the ruined fortress near the village. Eagles cried overhead, and wind whistled through openings in the stone. The corridors were dark, the walls half-fallen, and we believed treasure might be buried there. Part of me wanted to flee; another part needed to know what the darkness concealed. I entered, dug in the earth, and found nothing that could be carried home. Yet the search itself enlarged my imagination. We never found the treasure we imagined, but each attempt made the unknown a little more possible to approach.

Because I lived in a dry, burning city, the sea existed in my mind long before I saw it. I was twelve or thirteen when I finally reached it. One night I sat on a rock beneath a sky full of stars and watched the restless water. Waves struck black stone, and white foam flashed against the darkness. The immense sound of the water filled the surrounding silence. I felt wonder and fear awaken together. They appeared to oppose each other, yet the sea held them in a single experience.

At about thirteen, imagination also drew me toward storytelling. When people enjoyed the stories I told, I began writing them down, wanting to place an image beside every page. The stories were populated by witches, jinn, fairies, demons, and devils gathered from childhood memory. Words created beings that demanded to be seen; drawing gave them bodies that words alone could not supply. From the beginning, writing and painting opened doors for one another.

To write, I needed solitude. I left the room I shared with my sister and moved into the basement of our house—a damp underground place visited by scorpions. On the first night, fear took possession of every sound and shadow. I had left the world of garden color and entered a space where a few candles illuminated only a small circle. Everything beyond that circle seemed more threatening because it could not be seen clearly.

The smallest movement of air made the flames tremble. Shadows broke across the floor, climbed the walls, and changed the proportions of ordinary objects. The cracks between stones seemed to deepen, and my imagination filled them with creatures. Yet morning altered my relation to the night. I used the smoke of the candles to paint those creatures on the large stones of the domed ceiling. Fear had arrived without form; I answered by giving it one. The ceiling became an abstract world long before I knew that such a world could be called art.

In that solitude, I began to ask what beauty meant. Color and form were part of it, but they did not seem sufficient. I also saw beauty in kindness, sacrifice, and courage—qualities that could not be separated from how one human being treats another. I came to believe that learning to perceive beauty might make a person less capable of cruelty. Perhaps the belief was too complete for the complexity of life, but it gave direction to my youth. Art became not only a search for pleasing forms, but an attempt to understand what deserved attention and care.

My childhood had been formed among three schools: the bazaar, nature, and the classroom. The first awakened attention. The second joined freedom to consequence. The third too often demanded obedience through pain. I completed primary school with bitter memories, and secondary school brought little pleasure. Still, even a painful education can sharpen a question. Mine was becoming clear: could I learn without surrendering the way I saw?