I’ve always believed that the most important rituals are the quiet ones—the ones nobody else sees. The brewing of an evening cup of coffee. The way steam curls up into the lamplight. The deliberate pause before the first sip. These are the liturgies that anchor us when the world becomes too loud, too fast, too uncertain.
As a teenager, I didn’t have that language yet. What I had instead was a girl named Christina, a high school sweetheart with a kind heart and an eye for beauty. For my birthday one year, she found a dish set imprinted with Vincent van Gogh’s Café Terrace at Night. I already loved coffee and conversation, and I was just beginning to understand how art could act as a mirror to the soul. That dish set became more than a gift—it became a ritual object, a way of weaving something eternal into the ordinary. The years passed. The set vanished piece by piece. All but one coffee cup, which I kept as if it were sacred. Not for the porcelain, but for the memory it held.
Van Gogh painted Café Terrace at Night in September of 1888, shortly after arriving in Arles, in southern France. He wrote to his sister Wil about the painting before it was finished, describing the “immense blue sky studded with stars,” the gas-lit terrace, and the people walking through the square. What’s remarkable is that Van Gogh painted it en plein air—on the spot, at night, under the stars. No sketches. Just intuition, brush, and breath. He was chasing something ephemeral: not just a place, but a mood, a moment, a memory still in motion. He wanted to capture the way light spills out onto cobblestones, how darkness can feel alive, how solitude can hold space for communion.
When I look at that painting now, I see it not just with my eyes, but with my life. The glowing yellow of the café calls back the soft light of church foyers where I first learned to love coffee—not for the caffeine, but for the warmth of community. I think of drinking coffee with my grandfather, the quiet companion who passed away the year after I graduated. There was no need for many words between us. Just the presence, the coffee, the moment. A ritual of shared silence.
Van Gogh never had a Christina. He never had a dish set, or even stability. What he had was longing—a deep ache to belong, to find someone who would understand the way the stars moved inside him. In Arles, he dreamed of building a community of artists who would live and work together. That dream would become the Yellow House—a short-lived utopia that crumbled under the weight of mental illness and misunderstanding. But for a moment, in that square under the night sky, he believed in connection. He believed in the unspoken bond between strangers sharing a cup, a laugh, a late-night conversation. Café Terrace at Night is not just a painting—it’s a wish.
That’s where I find the through line: an unbroken café of moments. Christina. My grandfather. Myself. Each cup a quiet prayer. Each sip a thread in the long, glowing tapestry of a life lived in search of warmth and understanding. The yellows and blues of Van Gogh’s canvas are not just colors—they are moods I have felt. They are chapters of my own story, painted long before I was born.
Even now, as I sit with a cup of evening coffee in hand, I’m transported. I feel the hush of late-night streets, the echo of voices long gone, the comfort of having once been known. The cup is not the same. The people are not the same. But the ritual remains. That is the artist’s true gift: to create something that keeps living long after the paint has dried.
Annie Dillard once wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Van Gogh spent his days seeking light in the darkness—sometimes literally, sometimes metaphorically. So do I. So do all of us who hold our rituals close and use them to fend off the cold.
And so I return again and again to Café Terrace at Night. Not to mourn what’s been lost, but to honor what’s been carried forward. Some loves fade. Some cups break. But the light, the longing, the sacred quiet of a shared table under a star-filled sky—that remains.