“Blue Bayou” – watercolor by Marilyn Wells

Dear Reader,

Books are written about how to Find Your Signs through Nature to Hope, Peace, and Joy. The reason is because Nature is so richly showing us our Signs. Nature wants you to Behold Her and Know You Are Being Held. “See the lilies of the field…Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these.”

how to find your signs through nature – to a new life

A friend of mine tells how a Sunrise guided her to hope, peace, and joy. 

Jane, a friend of mine, tells about her young life as a hippie in the 70s. As such, she lived a life of free love/sex, marijuana before it was legal, drugs, rock and roll and misery in a communal house.

One Sunday she woke up after a night of revelry and the ongoing sense of despair the next morning; she got up and walked out of the house, serape and guitar in hand.

The morning sun was just breaking on the horizon. The day was bright and clear with bird song.

Immediately, she stopped on the front steps of the big, group-house she was leaving, had a sudden realization of the grace and glory of God. She kept on walking, forever leaving behind the lifestyle that was so prevalent for her then, the days of Kent State and Woodstock.

Ever since, she has been a devout Christian and artist. Today she has a lovely life with a good husband, which she attributes to the moment of insight that the Sign of the fresh morning gave her as she walked out of that house.

henry david thoreau – how to find your signs through nature

Henry David Thoreau on How find your signs to Hope Through Nature.

The entire book named Walden is a story of how Thoreau found sanity in a frantic world of 1854 away from the little village of Walden. In fact the entire community and area have become known as the “New England Renaissance”. So many great minds were there, filled with transcendental inspiration and stories.

I visited the Pond 30 years ago, before highways had encroached nearby. At that time, we each left a stone by the site of his cabin.

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars.” – Thoreau, Henry David

Fish in the sky. He learned transcendence of this earthly life through his deep study of nature and the small world around him. In fact the famous residents of Concord are known as Transcendentalists!

thoreau’s less known way on how to find your signs through nature

His other book, far less well known, “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” (a neglected work of genius) records their mystical experiences through analogy on the trip he took with his brother, John. The River and the Mountains. “The river runs all through Thoreau’s life, at once his highway and his wild way. It remained a resourceful metaphor for the passage of life…”

A above note from Thomas Blanding in the Introduction (1987, Parnassus – apparently out of print at the time of this writing) reminds us who the Transcendentalists were. 

“Most proponents believed in an intuitive faculty through which a person directly identifies his inner, central self with God. According to the Transcendentalists, the individual who develops this intuitive faculty can perceive and interpret the identical Universal Intelligence…as it manifests itself symbolically in natural laws…For Thoreau the effect of the transcendent experience was a certitude of sympathetic kinship with all creation.””

This movement appeared in the 1830’s. As you can see, how contemporary the concepts are now.

This is exactly what I am talking about here, and which you know intuitively yourself as a reader. You can find your signs to hope, peace and joy through Nature.

Thoreau found the stream of time and the passage of all things in time, signs in Nature. Water…the universal, archetypal symbol of the restorative spirit…the journey to Mt. Washington the highest peak in New England, Agiocochook, “the place where the Great Spirit dwells. – the symbol of the ascent into the realm of spirit. Silence becomes a metaphor for the ineffable experience of the transcendent.

Sadly, his beloved brother died shortly after the trip, causing this book to be even moreso, for Thoreau, a metaphor for the passage through this time-space to the Eternal.

“Man in a Boat” by Winslow Homer

how i find signs to hope, peace, and joy in nature – the sun and the moon

For me the moon and the sun always have brought me messages. Only recently, I was settling into a meditation on my kneeling pad where I have a candle, a Kuan Yin, some incense, and a bronze singing bowl from Tibet. I was preparing, somewhat reluctantly, for the morning silence time.

Suddenly, the sun found its way through my East window at such an angle that it totally lit me from my right side, and my space, which is usually just a shadowy hallway. It stayed with me through my 20 minutes and just began to fade away at the last gong.

For many years, when I seem to be having doubts or consternation, sometimes at bedtime, often something has moved me to go outside or find a window where I see the sky. So many times there will be a full moon, or a special crescent moon, smiling right in on me. At those times I know I have been summoned, and I know it is telling me, “God loves you. You are Loved.” I try to remember to always curtsy to the moon, as the ancient Celtic women are said to have done in Ireland. Along with St. Bridget.

I have seen the moon from every side of my house, From the East to West, the North to South. The North West is the most surprising. This message always comes to me.

my sign to hope beyond the sun and moon in nature

Reminiscent of the Moon, the Sun, and their halos, here are some interesting photos. I was studying Redón for a painting one day and took these two photos of paintings of his as reference and inspiration for my next painting. This process always takes me some time to silently mull on before a new image comes to me.

The next morning, I caught myself in the morning light, in a striking similarity of radiant halo effect in the morning light – to Redón’s paintings.

When something like this happens, I always know I am not alone. The Universe speaks to me and calls me by name. I find my Signs to Hope, Peace, and Joy.

Redón “The Boat”

Redón Pastel “Sita”

“Marilyn With Halo” Self Portrait after Redón

find your signs to hope through the divine feminine and nature

Although I have always worked with figures of Woman, I’ve had new revelations about how sorely needed are pointers to these Signs that Lead us to Hope, to Joy, and to Peace. Such work has historically been associated with the Feminine Arts. Even if they are manifesting from man today as well. The womanly nature, in whatever sex, is the nurturing, intuitive, loving, caring side of all of us.

 I’ll tell you about the role of the Divine Feminine, the Womanly Art of Reading Signs and more stories in these coming blog pages. Visit my previous blogs for more.

coming next:

find your signs to hope, peace and joy through journals and sketchbooks with nature

Now it’s time to get your journals and sketchbooks handy and make use of my prompts. The next blog and a coming video will be about how to make best use of  techniques in a systematic way, plus various forms of writing, poetry and prose.

Start looking for your signs, write them down, write them to me. Let’s share these stores with the world in our search for Meaning through this Feminine Divine Art of Finding Your Signs in the Universe, which is helping us evolve beyond our old, time-worn, linear way of thing.

Blessings and Light,

Marilyn