My husband’s parents recently traveled from the Midwest to visit with us and to meet their first great grandchild, Eloise, just two months old. We had last been together 15 months earlier, just before the start of the pandemic, back when we took hugs, travel, and many other things for granted. Now we had a healthy baby, and four generations of vaccinated family together in the same room, which, after all we had been through, felt as reassuring and hopeful as a soft summer morning with a hermit thrush singing in the nearby woods. Even tiny Eloise appeared to understand the specialness of their visit, as her dark eyes locked on her great grandparents’ faces with a look that conveyed, “You are my people.“

Months earlier, when Eloise was still nestled in the womb, I started a second painting after a long break (I wrote about this in my last blog post). It was early February and I was already dreaming of spring, so I began with a desire to showcase one of the most treasured native plants in our spring woods, the lady slipper, Cypripedium acaule. As happens when I work intuitively, other elements arrived into the painting, most significantly and not surprisingly, a young woman who was ‘with child’. 

I didn’t set out to do so but I instinctively chose a warm brown skin tone for the woman, and when I finished her I felt a stirring, as if I already knew her. It was then that I recognized her posture as that of Amanda Gorman’s, the inaugural poet who had stunned me—and much of the world—with her brilliance, confidence, and grace at the presidential inauguration a few weeks before I made the painting. For days after the event I had watched her performances, listened to her interviews, and read articles about her story and creative process, all which gave me more hope than I had felt in a long time. It delighted me that she—and all that she symbolized—had materialized in the painting.

In exploring the topic of hope for this post, I came across hope researcher Shane Lopez, whose work revealed that the default position of the brain at rest is ‘thinking about the future.’ “Daydreaming is our natural state,” he said, “And when we think about the future, we are making memories of the future.” I loved hearing that hope is not an emotion, but rather, a practice, and that we can encourage our hopeful daydreams to shape our future. I learned this (again) around the time I was working on the painting featured in this post, when my son’s partner’s pregnancy took a serious turn for the worse, leading to long weeks of nail biting and dread for all of us. Caught in the recurring loop of angst, I realized that I could try to stop worrying about my future daughter-in-law’s mental and physical health, and instead picture all the ways she could heal and become the loving mother and partner she longed to be. (That was months ago, and while the process is ongoing, the little family is bonding beautifully.)

Intuition guided me to include another element in the painting: a fawn who ventured onto the same path as the woman. The animal’s presence provided a moment of wonder and delight. In addition, the soft, warm colors and ethereal light of the image render a daydream quality. Who wouldn’t want to wander into this scene? I now realize that I was intuitively creating a vision—or memory, as Lopez describes—of the future, one infused with the hope I needed to feel during the uncertain weeks before Eloise’s birth.

One other tidbit stood out in my research on hope—two lines from a poem by Emily Dickinson:

Hope is the thing with feathers 
That perches in the soul. 

In other words, sometimes hope lands unexpectedly, like Amanda Gorman with her stunning words; like the pink flash of the lady slipper along the woodland path; or the surprise spotting of a fawn in the forest, all which lift your heart and remind you of the expansiveness that pure, uncontrived beauty convey.

Though it is always delightful when unexpected hope arrives, it helps to cultivate the mindset of a receiver. I do this by making space in my mind and heart each day, by noticing the signs of stress—impatience, small-mindedness, rapid speech, irritability—that crowd out my intention to be soft and open. If I’m aware of one or more of these elements, I try to slow my breathing or movement for a few moments, or, if there’s time, a few minutes. It helps to step outside at some point each day and listen. Is there a bird or chipmunk chattering? A breeze brushing past my cheek? Sunlight on a leaf—anything that brings my attention to something simple, real, and in the present. When that isn’t possible, usually in the deep of night, I hold my hands over my heart and picture a flow of loving warmth entering me. With years of practice, I’ve trained myself to believe in and receive that universal love. We all have access to such comfort and to the hope that sometimes perches alongside it.

Two years ago I finished a series of Wyoming scenes made over two painting seasons. I learned a lot from making those big canvases with so many mountains, but eventually I felt pulled to move on to a new theme. 

I waited for inspiration but instead started to question the validity of my work, a climate made worse by two false starts in late 2019, when I couldn’t finish either painting for lack of connection to their topic. 

I decided instead to use my limited studio time to try something artistically different: to make a film with my husband about our 2019 hike in Wyoming. I had observed how he had made his two other films and had coached him on writing the narration for them, so I wasn’t starting from scratch.

During the nine months of putting the film together, I learned many of the technical skills needed, and was very pleased with the end result (By the Waters of the Winds on YouTube), but I found that the process did not stimulate my creative juices in the way that making paintings did, and I missed that.

Then came Covid, which did little to bolster an artist full of self doubt. By January, I recognized  that I was becoming increasingly judgmental and ungenerous, to others as well as to myself. It was if I were detaching from the world and shrinking as a result of all the isolation. 

Around this time I listened to an interview with the photographer Cig Harvey, whose enthusiasm for color and beauty coated me with an optimism as vivid as her photos. The interview brought such a lightness that I listened to it twice. Her conviction that gratitude and positivity can “foster conversation, help a person find the tools for living, and even have the power to repair and mend“ struck a deep chord in me.

“If you work from intuition,“ she said, “your world expands, and if you don’t, your world and your work grow smaller.“

I knew this to be true and I knew that I wanted to return to creating canvases led by intuition as I had done years earlier.

Creating the first painting after such a long break was like rehydrating a dry sponge. With each brush stroke, I grew softer and more pliant, and by the end of the process I felt as bright as a stand of garden phlox, lifted and greened by a soaking rain.

I’ve now completed six paintings, which I’ll share in the coming months, starting with the first painting I made this past January.

Traveler, There is No Road

The pandemic had reduced my world down to one relationship that allowed touching. I was about to welcome my first grandchild into my life—and to a world weighed down with questions, many of which made me anxious or sad. I needed to grow my heart—to feel braver—so I sorted through quotes and images in my studio and was drawn to a poem which became the title of the piece, and a photograph my daughter took of me as I lead our family through a dense jungle on a wild-goose-chase hike on a trip we once made. We had been waiting for good weather for the hike, but it never came, so on our last full day, I said, “Let’s just go for it.“ Being brave means moving forward through uncertain times and events even if you’re scared or don’t know the way.