“I need to be silent for a while. Worlds are forming in my heart.” —Master Eckhart

My husband and I regularly take care of our baby granddaughter, and one of my favorite parts of each day is putting Eloise down for a nap. She might fuss momentarily as I zip her into her sleep sack, but once I start singing she looks up at me and her face melts into a smile that conveys the pure contentment of release, a softness that lingers even as her eyes close.

The ease with which she slides into sleep is reminiscent of what nature does each autumn, giving us a lasting, golden smile, then loosening her grip, letting go of much of what she worked so hard to create all spring and summer. As her leaves and petals drop to the ground, nature’s forces turn inward, to wait and wait until the angle of the sun and the warming of the air signal that it’s time to begin the cycle again.

When I started painting years ago, I recognized the wisdom of claiming the non-growing half of the year as my time to turn inward, too. Redirecting the extra hours I spend outside in the warmer months as studio time, I gather stories to tell on the canvas as my antidote to the shorter days and muted tones of winter. I reach for the colors and imagery that express what I’m feeling, or longing to feel. In a good session, the brush flows freely, delivering a cascade of shape and hue that seems to have arrived from someplace wiser—beyond me. 

Because I work incrementally on a painting over a period of weeks, I’ve learned to liberate myself from the pressure of getting things right on any given day, to trust that, in time, my intuition and intention will lead me forward on a true course, a decade-long practice that has evolved in my life as well. Painting blunders and distressing situations often hold the seeds of something worthy and beautiful.

Unknowingly, my mother showed me the value of letting go when dementia dimmed her memory during her final years. Freed from the grief she had carried most of her life, a heaviness that often led her to judge those she was closest to, she returned to her original joy, and, like baby Eloise, was buoyant more often than not. 

I think of all this as I sit at my writing desk and observe the trees in the woodland by our house. I imagine being like the maples, who let go of their leaves effortlessly, while they are still saturated with color. They are like my mother was, offering bright moments of happiness to anyone in their presence, ephemeral reminders of being fully in the now. And then, there are the red oaks, who hold on through the winds and rains of October, their leaves shriveling on the stem and eventually falling one at a time through the month of November like snowflakes floating to the ground. And if your goal is tenacity, look no further than the young beech trees, who keep their leaves all winter long, until they are translucent and brittle, a term scientists call marcescence. Last February, while walking on a woodland trail with a friend, we both spontaneously stopped as a long, slow wind moved through a stand of such beeches, marshaling a symphony of rustling parchment that lasted for minutes and left us speechless. 

The beeches’ letting go occurs in the flush of spring on a still, warm day when no one is watching. I’m not sure if the papery leaves detach on their own or are pushed to the ground by the newly minted ones, but I like to believe they work together, the old ready to offer its carbon to the earth, and the new to start the cycle once more.

But that is months away, and here we are in the early days of the march into darkness, when there is time to reflect and call upon our inner resources, often while making soup or delighting in the fact that we have long evenings that allow us to pursue our quiet hobbies, which is the greatest benefit of living in a place with a true winter. After such a mild autumn, this year I’m noticing the effort of unhitching from the warmth, but there’s no turning back. Better to bundle up and take long walks, catching vibrant sunsets (at 4 pm!) through the bare trees, a perspective we have access to thanks to their letting go.

Guardian of the Heart, 2021

I couldn’t stop staring at the photograph in National Geographic: two refugees—a mother and her teenage daughter—locked in a seated embrace. Their faces held weariness and melancholy, but the way their arms so perfectly encircled each other emanated tenderness, belonging, and protection. I was preparing to begin my third painting of 2021, and this image stirred me so deeply that I felt called to try and bring its essence onto the canvas. 

In my first studio session, I laid out the mother and daughter under a dark, moonlit sky, with trees on either side and a palette of cool-toned blues and pinks. The next day when I reviewed what I had done, the painting felt flat and too literal; only the girl, the moon, and one warm patch of yellow drew me in. Thanks to the opaque quality of acrylics, I can paint over areas that aren’t working. Following my intuition, I soon transformed the mother into a white wolf, who even in her earliest stages, held such a strong sense of sheltering that I knew she would remain.

As I described in my last blog post, I was spending hours each week at that time offering support and companionship to my son’s pregnant partner, who was two months shy of her due date, recently diagnosed with preeclampsia, and reeling from her doctor’s orders to quit her job and limit nearly all activity, which she worried would weaken her for the rigors of childbirth. During our afternoons together, she shared stories of past challenges, both physical and emotional, helping me understand the lingering effects of trauma, and reminding me the importance of being a listening sanctuary, to focus on being peaceful in my heart so that it could resonate with hers. 

Of course, I needed that solace, too, so I turned to my painting-in-progress, and slowly found my way into the arms of protection. Night became soft dusk; the dark, cold background transformed into rich purple mountains; and the shadowed trees shape-shifted into glowing saguaro cactuses, standing like sentinels in the golden light. With each studio session, the palette grew warmer, and each layer felt like another sheath of reassurance. More than any other image I created this year, this one brought the deepest emotion, a cascade of relief as I handed over my worries to the canvas.

My artistic practice has taught me that an image, a talisman, and especially color and light can truly help a person feel a comforting or empowering shift. Initially that person is me and I often turn to imagery when I am lost or troubled by a situation. When creating a scene, I listen to the painting, allowing it to evolve and guide me into the feelings that I may not have words for, but which are safely expressed—and lifted—into the beauty of the colors and forms that manifest on the canvas. 

When I leave the aura of my studio, I hope to carry that same gesture of presence and listening to others. Being a defender of the heart is a mission I hold sacred. When at a loss for how to be near someone in emotional need, I do well to be like the wolf in the painting, who offers unconditional acceptance. “I am here with you at this moment as your witness, comforter, and champion.“

May you be safe and protected from inner and outer harm.

May your heart be gentle and serene.

May your body be healthy and strong.

May you take care of yourself with grace and ease.

-The Buddhist Metta prayer

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.

Maureen created this introduction to her solo art show at the Camden Public Library in March 2021.

Artist of the month at the Camden Public library in March 2021, Maureen shared an art presentation along with a film about hiking in the Wyoming wilderness that she made with her husband, Tim Seymour. (58 minutes, including Q&A)

To view only the film, click HERE to watch on YouTube

I have my mother to thank for the highlight of my childhood — a five-week, cross-country camping trip our family took in the summer of 1969, the year I turned 8. After seeing a neighbor’s slideshow of a similar trip, my mom began her multi-year campaign to convince her book-loving, school administrator husband to devote his entire summer vacation to driving a car and tent trailer — packed with six kids and camping gear — from the south shore of Boston to the south coast of California and back, for a total of just under 7,000 miles.

Before she married at 29, my mother’s intrepid spirit had led her hiking up Mount Katahdin in Maine; sidestepping up and skiing down Tuckerman’s Ravine on Mount Washington; and road-tripping with friends from Boston to Aspen to experience the thrill of skiing in powder. The idea of hauling a 6-, 8-, 10-, 11-,12- and 13-year-old (five of them wiry boys) across our great country, motivated rather than daunted her.

She plied my dad to build a wooden roof carrier and a custom-designed camp kitchen with cubbies and drawers that held all the cooking items she would need to feed her family of eight during the trip. (We ate out less than a handful of times during the five weeks.) She pinched pennies for two years from dad’s meager private-school paychecks to fund it all, including a trip to Disneyland in California. Gas was only 35 cents a gallon, but it still took every scrap of her clever frugality to manage the budget.

Early on in the trip, mom figured out that we would never achieve her ambitious itinerary if we stayed at the pace we were keeping. (Picture six scrappy kids playing hide and seek in the woods when it was time to break camp.)

“Starting tomorrow, it’s 100 miles before breakfast,” she declared in her don’t-mess-with-me voice.

“What does that mean?” we all asked.

“That means we break camp like soldiers, get on the road by 7 a.m., and drive two hours or 100 miles before we stop for breakfast at a rest area,” she said.

“Mommmmm….noooooo!,” came our chorus of groans.

“That’s right, NO more lollygagging around. We’ve got an entire country to see and we’ll never make it at this pace. Walter, tell them we mean business,” she said.

“Your mother is right, children,” my dad said, clearing his throat. “Tomorrow is a new dawn, and a new plan.”

My mother purchased a Golden Eagle card from the U.S. Government for $7, which would gain us entry (including camping privileges) into any National Park in the country. She was not about to waste any of her investment, and her adventurous legs knew no bounds as she led us up the Rocky Mountains in sneakers, down Bryce Canyon on horseback, into the Pueblo dwellings like hunchbacks and along the precipitous paths overlooking the mile-deep Grand Canyon on sturdy legs. It was mom who doled out ice chips in our oven-on-wheels as we crossed the Mohave dessert, where I think we almost ran out of gas.

Mom was the only one able to re-pack the tent trailer with all our gear at the end of each stay. It was she who figured out that a tall, plastic, covered pail, when filled with water, clothes and powdered laundry detergent, could squeeze into the back of the station wagon and slosh all day, leaving just a quick rinsing and hanging once camp was made to produce clean laundry. Mom even kept a separate suitcase, packed with one clean outfit for each person, to ensure that her brood would arrive at church each Sunday — in Denver or Las Vegas or Yosemite — dressed appropriately. Let it be known that Marie Egan’s family never missed Mass.

We spent two of the five weeks near Los Angeles, camping at Dohaney Beach, close to mom’s brother and his family — six kids similar in ages to our own. We got to know our groovy California cousins and the waves of the Pacific, and that was pretty great, but the road was calling and my mother wanted us to taste it all — the bark-covered towers of the Sequoias, the fearless bears at Yellowstone, the mighty lakes and mountains of the Grand Tetons. In all, we made it to 15 states and 10 national parks. We almost lost 10-year-old Joe, who climbed over the fence at the Grand Canyon, and 13-year old Jerome, who got tired of pit toilets and wanted to hop the bus back home—but my mother would have none of it. She pulled us through with her spunk and her spark, and only a few boxes of band-aids.

I had hoped to take my two kids on a similar, life-changing trip, but every time I pictured it, I got totally overwhelmed. I didn’t have the iron will and selfless gumption to forge such a heroic odyssey. Mom was one of a select few who could pull off that legacy trip. My brother. Leo. said it best at the end of his eulogy to her last October, eyes moistened with the adoration we all shared, “Love you mom…If anyone deserves a rest, it’s you.”

 

©2014 Maureen Egan

Published in PenBay Pilot, April 14, 2014