“Finally, the boy screamed at the men, “I’m digging for treasure!” …He told his attackers that he had twice dreamed of a treasure hidden near the Pyramids of Egypt.
The leader of the group spoke, “Leave him. He doesn’t have anything else….”

… he came back to the boy and said, “You’re not going to die. You’ll live, and you’ll learn that a man shouldn’t be so stupid. Two years ago… I dreamt that I should travel to the fields of Spain and look for a ruined church… [where] I would find a hidden treasure. But I’m not so stupid as to cross an entire desert just because of a recurrent dream.”

The boy stood up, shakily, and looked once more at the Pyramids. They seemed to laugh at him, and he laughed back… Because now he knew where his treasure was….

…”You old sorcerer,” the boy shouted up to the sky. “You knew the whole story… The monk laughed when he saw me come back in tatters. Couldn’t you have saved me from that?”

“No,” he heard a voice on the wind say. “If I had told you, you wouldn’t have seen the Pyramids. They’re beautiful, aren’t they?”

Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

(This painting is part of a body of work about the hero’s journey: Receiving a call to the unknown, moving through the perils and joys of the adventure, and subsequently returning home. Each painting in this series tells the story solely through the trees and foliage of the artist’s hometown, which the artist returned to after spending ten years in the Navy. This particular painting depicts a large scale tree which resides at the humble entrance of the artist’s dirt road, leading to home, and is inspired by the epilogue of Paulo Coehlo’s, “The Alchemist.”)