For the last week, Caterpillars kept showing up in or outside my apartment. This conspicuous sign arrived around the time I got the sense my soul required cocooning. My word of the year, cultivate, had seemingly sent my system into a shocking need for inner cultivation—especially after I fell backward into old habits for comfort and consolation for my painful grief and depression.
In 2025, I had sent out to keep blooming (my word of the year in 202), not realizing that in order to bloom brighter than before I might have to go within a dark womb to tend to some of my buried wounds. So, when I landed on Cultivate for 2025, I saw how perfect this shelter might be for deep soil restoration.
“Blooming requires fertile soil. The growth sustained last year was due to the soil I planted myself in through habits, intentions, goals and bondage-breaking. But when I wasn’t planted firmly in good, Godly-soil, I back-tracked.”
The issue at hand was: I desperately wanted to blossom without tending the soil I was trying to prematurely sprout from. Without any recon work on my wounds, I was going to grow more weeds where I intended roses to bloom.
skipping the work
Skipping ahead to bloom without ever fertilizing my tender inner world wasn’t going to serve me in the long run. No it was only avoiding pain short term. The scars had settled for so long inside that they’d been atrophied over by so much tissue because I insisted on running from my pain. The pain is so excruciating at times that it feels far easier to ignore it and turn to what soothes the pain.
So I took the theme scattered tangibly and intuitively, taking the time I had during the long, scorched-summer-months to do some cultivating. Excavating what was deeply rooted inside me was excruciating. I didn’t want to face what had been buried for so long in my psyche. But it was ready to be uprooted.
I could tell I was ready because of the courage I begin to muster up . My consciousness had already determined it was time by bringing it to the surface after a long dormancy in my subconscious. The restful slumber it had was now over. And I had run from what I knew for a long enough.
Safe in the Storm
Comforted by God‘s promises to be with me in the storm - facing my fire without being scorched - I started to experience the turmoil I felt, raw and exposed. Turning to an age-old medium that saved me in my darkest storms prior allowed me to safely process pain. Painting feels safe to me because I can seemingly process what won’t be felt because it seems to scary. But while I am painting, I put deeply-seated emotions into the brush.
I found myself wanting to paint after a long hiatus; I even finished old paintings from my first bout of grief and added sacred hearts on top to reveal my healing journey through the Sacred Heart of Jesus. I wa in the process of being saved from myself when I took up painting, and the hearts adorned the old paintings as a symbol of my healing journey in Catholicism.
I returned to the Catholic Church in 2021 when I was hired as a full-time substitute at a local Catholic High School. I didn’t know at the time this was going to be so much more than a job. While it was clear teaching is a vocation I was called to, the religious aspect of my vocation was the part that truly renewed a dead spirit inside of me through ancient practices and receiving the Eucharist regularly.
I spent three years at this school, regularly attending church once a month until I joined a Young Adult group at my parent’s parish. That group helped me feel welcomed into a community I needed and had desperately missed when I aged out of my previous Young Adult community at Impact Church.
When it became how clear my need for Jesus in such an intimate experience of Eucharist, I knew I had come home to where I needed to be. I found such comfort in the Sacred tradition that I grew up with, and even more comfort in the confines of the Sacred Heart of Jesus through prayer and adoration.
My artwork doesn’t just represent the Heart of Jesus within me; it reveals the comfort I found when I became willing to trust Him with the process of healing—a process God knew would require a revival of painting.