🌊 The Mercedes Matter Years — The Threshold of Vision

Where seeing became a form of consciousness.

There are thresholds you step into…
and thresholds that claim you.

Meeting Mercedes Matter was the latter.

She was already a legend —
a woman whose gaze carried geometry,
whose hands held the lineage of giants,
whose presence felt like standing inside an era
that had cracked open what art could be.

I was barely more than a girl —
still learning where to place myself in a room —
when she noticed something in me
I did not yet know how to name.

And she let me in.

Into her private studio.
Her sanctuary.
Her inner world.

A place where the air still held the echo of great artists,
their work watching silently from the walls,
their spirits woven through the way she spoke
and the way she saw.

She delighted in my color —
actually squealed —
when I unfolded my Indian saris.
She called it “light made visible.”

This became our secret language:

How cobalt violet breathes beside pale lemon.
How marigold radiates in the presence of deep rose.
How the weight of black anchors an entire plane.
How the space between forms
is sometimes louder than the form itself.

In her presence, I discovered something essential:

Art is not made.
Art is perceived.

And perception, at its highest frequency,
is a devotion.

Geometry was her religion.

“Everything is triangles,” she’d tell me —
with a fierce tenderness —
as she traced the invisible scaffolding
beneath faces, landscapes, questions, emotions.

Suddenly the world triangulated itself:
horizon lines, tree trunks, sorrow, longing, desire —
all revealing their inner angles,
their true structure,
their coherence.

It was the first time I understood
that seeing is not optical.

Seeing is ontological.

Seeing shapes who you become.

She told me to go to Europe.
“Study the masters. Let them teach you how to see.”

So I did.
I stood for hours before Giotto, Titian, Velázquez, Cézanne —
listening for the movement beneath stillness,
the dissonance beneath harmony,
the geometry beneath flesh.

I didn’t know it then,
but I was training for the work I do now —
learning to enter a painting
the same way I now enter a human being’s world.

Color made me an artist.
Geometry made me a seer.

And then —
as if life wanted to seal the initiation —
she made her last three drawings
in my sketchbook
on the day she died.

Her final offering.
Her final transmission.
The passing of a lineage.

Something rearranged itself in me that day.
Not broken — expanded.
Not ended — transformed.
Not silenced — deepened.

Mercedes taught me how to see.
The Threshold taught me why.

The birth of my art —
which began with my grandmother’s hands —
had now matured into something else:

The ability to perceive the Self in another.
To read coherence.
To sense truth before words form.
To feel the geometry of transformation.
To guide leadership from Presence, not performance.

This era wasn’t a chapter.
It was an initiation.
And every threshold I guide others through now —
every reinvention, every exploration, every crossing —
is infused with the exact precision
Mercedes awakened in me:

The light between colors.
The truth beneath form.
The Self beneath identity.

This was the Threshold of Vision.
And it changed everything.

With love and presence,
🌊 Gitanjali

Threshold Journeys
Where the inner crossings reveal the architecture of Becoming.

Leadership & Transformation Coach | Human Design Guide
Founder of Vision. Power. Presence.

If this spoke to you, share it with someone standing at their own threshold.
I write about leadership, identity, and Human Design — where transformation becomes art and reinvention becomes remembrance.

Image Credit: Gitanjali Koppikar, My Mother’s Sari, 2025