The Feeling of Freedom

I was born and raised in a Catholic family. I went to a Catholic school, attended mass during the week, sat through mass almost every Sunday…I was raised to know and love Jesus. I started working in high school, and that was the end of going to church. At times when perhaps my faith wavered, He always would prove to me that He was still there, and that in the most alone moments of my life, I was not alone, there was beauty on the other side, and I didn’t have to work through anything alone. 

At the end of last year, before I started working on this collection, feeling overwhelmed and lost in the process of making the plans for changes I had coming in 2025, I asked for guidance and help. For the first time in so long. That night I had a dream, and all that I remembered from it when I woke up was “Psalm 36.” I made a note so as not to forget to read it sometime, and went about my morning. 

A few weeks went by before I was able to actually sit with my dusty Bible and read Psalm 36, and I wasn’t really sure what it all meant. 

I started this collection, which for weeks before I put paint to canvas, I knew I had wanted it to contain birds. I’d been doing lots of bird drawings, and they seemed a little more exciting than butterflies and bees I’d painted so many of recently. 

Working through the collection, I shared each painting, along with the meaning and story I thought was behind each piece. Struggling with the beginning of “Everlasting Love,” I learned that a friend of mine had died, and with Miss Vera in mind, the painting suddenly came together. I struggled with the last painting as well, “The Messenger,” as far as composition and making everything come together. It was a complete coincidence that I painted a dove - a bird wasn’t in my plans for that particular painting at all. It wasn’t until I had added in the bird that the yellow became a Heavenly light casting down on the flowers, and it wasn’t intentional that the bird is kind of surrounded by the yellow in such a way that it seems it’s coming down from the light. 

I completed “The Messenger,” lined all the paintings up in my studio, and realized that they made up a familiar story that I didn’t even know I was painting. A story so close to home that it honestly brought me to tears. 

THE STORY: I wrote a blog post a while ago about losing so many friends and family when I was pregnant with my daughter. And while she’s been the absolute light of my little life, and the reason I get up every morning to see another new day’s excitement through her eyes, it was very hard for a long time knowing that I had lost people I thought I was so close to. Since I had her, as apparently often happens, my relationship with her father has been a struggle. It hasn’t gotten better, he’s gotten more and more frustrated, and ultimately, we decided that it’d be better for all of us if my baby girl and I moved out. While that wasn’t the reason I purchased a home back in July, I felt even then that this would ultimately be where things ended up - moving out on my own with my baby girl. 

In July, I went on a two-day trip to Baltimore with a friend from work. We had such a great time together, and I felt better than I had in a long time. I realized that I wasn’t really happy where I was anymore, and while I tried to deny that I’d really felt that way, it was true. There wasn’t much happiness in our home, and I ended up on a mission to hide the underlying anger in the house from my daughter. 

Since then, it’s been a struggle to find direction. To try and wrap my head around how I ended up in a failed relationship with a man I loved to no end is still something I question every day. The even greater struggle is how I’m going to raise my daughter on my own. She loves her daddy as much as I do, and I can only imagine how she will feel waking up in another bed, another room, another house, where he’s not there to make her breakfast each morning. 

While I know I’m not alone on this next piece of my adventure, it’s not really a “solo trip,” it all still seems dark and confusing. I know there’s a light at the end of it all, that it will all work out, but it’s hard to see when you’re stuck in the middle of it all. 

Looking at my paintings on the floor, I had painted my own story. The one I couldn’t see being lost in the middle of it all. 

The “Golden Hour” full of light, joy and happiness was over - for now. The good times that we had as a couple before Baby Girl were behind us, and there was going to be a new way of life for us all. My trip to Baltimore “Knabe in Bloom” was a turning point in realizing that something had to give in order to find happiness again, but to get to the light on the other side, there had to be a dark period of growth and struggle and “Everlasting Love.” Does a seed in the ground know if it is growing up or down? Does it know if it will ever break through the ground and find the sun’s light? Whether or not the seed confidently knows it is growing in the right direction, it grows because that is all that it knows how to do. And that is all that it can do. 

At the end of it all, the light at the end of the tunnel comes through, and “The Messenger” reminds us that we were never really alone in that dark period. We weren’t really alone on our journey. That seed you were growing in the dark blooms into something more beautiful than you could ever have imagined, and the light and “Feeling of Freedom” waiting at the end is something incredible. 

If you find yourself along a similar journey, this collection is for you. I hope you can find peace in the story this collection tells, knowing that there is a beautiful light at the end of the tunnel I myself am still trying to get to. And if you need to know you have a friend, I hope you can see proof of Him in each, no matter where you are in your journey. There is an underlying Light in each of these pieces that I couldn’t have intentionally painted if I’d have wanted to. That was the connecting link in each painting that I had wondered so much about while painting. It didn’t come together until the end when I could see the collection together - a sense of overwhelming comfort and joy. 

The long and short of it all: There is no light for those that do not know the love of Jesus, but sometimes knowing an eternal and never ending love means giving up things that don’t belong to us, and trusting the pain through the growth and letting go means we are really reaching for something even better. Something more fulfilling than anything we’ve ever known.