There was a season of my life when I was looking for answers everywhere except the one place they could be found.

I had just bought my first house on my own. The walls were filled with the artwork I couldn't bear to leave behind. The future felt wide open and uncertain. After years of surviving, I was finally free enough to ask a question I hadn't had the luxury of asking before:

What now?

While photographing older work for the website, I uncovered a painting I created in 2012 called As Summer Recedes.

I thought I was just cataloging inventory, but I found a breadcrumb!

Lately I've been thinking about how artists leave clues for themselves.

We make a piece because we are fascinated by something in the moment, then we move on. Years later we discover that the same questions have been quietly following us all along.

There is always a strange moment when a finished piece is wrapped for its journey.

For days, weeks, or sometimes months, it lives here with me. It hangs on a wall, rests on a worktable, or waits quietly among other works in progress. It becomes part of the landscape of my daily life.

Then someone sees it.

Something resonates.

And suddenly it is no longer mine to keep.

There are seasons in life when change arrives uninvited.

A relationship ends. By choice, by destruction, or by death.

A door closes, and a dream has no choice but to change.

The landscape beneath our feet shifts before we've had time to understand what is happening.

And then there are the other kinds of transitions.

The ones we choose.

There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes from believing everyone else has left.

And then there is the quieter realization:

Perhaps the person I have been leaving most often was myself.

This piece began with symbols that have followed me for years. The eye. The moon phases. The butterfly. I have used them separately before, but while working on this piece they began to tell a different story together.

The eye became The Witness.

The studio continues to evolve.

Over the past few weeks, I have been reimagining the space to better suit my mixed media, magical heart. Some things have been packed away. Some things have found new homes. Much of this process has been less about acquiring new supplies and more about …

There comes a moment when becoming yourself requires less effort than pretending to be someone else.

Sunflowers have always fascinated me. Long before they bloom, they know where to look. Day after day, they turn toward the light without needing permission, certainty, or proof…

The Heirloom Jewels series began as a way of honoring the emotional weight we quietly place inside ordinary symbols, animals, memories, and objects. Each piece in the collection explores personal meaning through layered color, ornamentation, and symbolic imagery inspired by nature, home, ancestry, and transformation.

Many of these works were created during…

Barefoot, I have danced

through the mangled ruins of promises,

Collecting light in the folds of my skirt when love forgot to stay.

I am made of thunder and fire,

Of long nights that I did not let break me,

Of empty hands that continue still to paint. To hope.

I carry stories in my marrow,

lifetimes of loss and return,

of kissing silence like a friend,

of holding children who were never mine…

Long before modern language, humans used symbols to tell stories, mark transitions, honor grief, call for protection, and make meaning from the unknown.

We still do.

A wedding ring.
A flag.
A cross.

A…

I'm Rachel — a spirit-led artist, teacher, and mom who’s spent a lifetime using creativity as a way to heal and connect. In this post, I share what it means to be a Spiritweaver and why I believe in blending art, intuition, and everyday life to create something meaningful.