the emergence of pollinated prayers
In ancient times, bees were said to be the birds of the muses — sacred messengers of the goddesses of inspiration. The Greeks believed they stirred the arts and sciences, carrying transmissions between the divine and the human. Perhaps they still do.
The bees have been with me for over a decade now, showing up through art, dream, ritual, and prayer. They arrived in 2010 when I opened the doors of my first creative business, and they’ve been guiding me back into deep listening ever since.
This collection is not just about bees. It’s about emergence. It’s about the quiet courage it takes to follow the soul’s whisper — especially when it doesn’t make sense. It’s about devotional creativity, interconnection, and the unseen hands that guide us home.
For most of my life, I was running. From my grief, from my body, from my creativity — and ultimately, from my Soul.
But that began to change when I rediscovered a slower, more sacred rhythm of creation.
Through the slow art of craft — silk painting, papermaking, tracing, mandala-making, gardening, and more — and the presence these forms required, I started learning how to stay.
These gentle, sacred practices began to unravel the grip of perfectionism — the fear of making “bad” art, of not being enough, and the paradoxical angst of visibility and being unseen.
They mirrored what had been awakening in me since discovering yoga years earlier — the capacity to be with what is, to soften control, and to root into a deeper trust in life. As I slowly began connecting with nature's rhythms and the rhythms of my body, listening and attuning to life’s emergent unfolding, I began coming home to myself.
It was 2008 when I first stepped inside Judy Goetemann’s silk painting studio in Rocky Neck, MA.
Sunlight streamed through the harbor windows, dancing across shelves of brightly colored dyes arranged like glowing alchemical vials. Something in me stirred.
The way she spoke of silk painting — as a discipline of presence, patience, and nonattachment — echoed the yoga practice I had discovered in art school. Both taught me how to breathe through discomfort, to soften control, to stay in the fire of transformation. And both awakened a quiet joy in me — a memory of how it once felt to create, before fear and perfectionism took over.
That visit cracked something open. I went home and ordered my first silk painting kit from Dharma Trading. I didn’t know it then, but that kit would change the course of my life.
Silk became a sacred teacher — a way back to my creativity, and a way into my own unfolding.
I painted my first bees not long after that.
I had just left my hometown, moved in with my then-fiancé, and was aching to find my place in the world.
The bee became my Wayshower — a symbol of devotion, community, and dharma.
Three years later, on 10/10/10, I opened my Etsy shop and began selling hand-painted silk scarves locally and online. That same year, the Bee appeared as the very first trinity motif in what would later become part of the Emergence Oracle deck — a tool many of you helped bring to life in 2022.
Titled Dance With the Queen, it emerged as a new method born of play and experimentation: combining hand dyed silk with wax medium and various paint media that I couldn’t find any other examples of online.
The painting won the Juror’s award in a national exhibit through the Attleboro Arts Museum, and was later acquired by a collector through the former Hive Archive Feminist Art Collaborative’s exhibition in Providence City Hall, “She Works Hard for the Money,” curated by Rebecca Siemering.
It lives on today as The Hive card, the card of Service & Contribution.
But it was 2020 when everything began to weave together. That year marked a spiritual and creative reckoning.
I was living in the garden that had witnessed so many of my soul-prayers over the years. I turned inward, away from the noise of the world, and toward the living intelligence of nature. I began creating from stillness, from reverence, from curiosity.
Inspired by a quote from Rudolf Steiner, I created a 108-bee mandala — a number sacred in yogic and celestial traditions, reflecting the relationships between Earth, Sun, and Moon.
Around the same time, I began tracing the path of Venus as she danced her 8-year, Five-Petalled Rose across the sky. I didn’t know it then, but she was tracing the mythic imprint of my own descent and return.
The bees became a practice of presence — a way to soften the grip of fear and root into the frequency of devotion, and the 108 Mandala and the Rose have been with me ever since: helping me ground, integrate, remember, and affirm the truth of my being.
That summer, I also rediscovered my childhood papermaking kit. For the first time, I pulped my old journals — filled with years of Artist’s Way writings — and turned them into handmade paper. I painted a bee on one of the first pages. That bee lives in the Emergence Oracle too, as the card of Devotion.
Later that fall, I painted the Queen — a golden figure nestled inside the Seed of Life. She lives on in the deck as the card of Sovereign Divinity.
At the same time, I began a deep exploration of ancestral healing and feminine mythologies. I was steeped in ritual, in daily creative play, and in somatic meditations seeded through Joseph Campbell’s words: “Follow your bliss, and you’ll be met by a thousand unseen hands”, giving way the emergence of the Generations, Legacy, and Crown cards.
So much of the artwork within the Emergence Oracle deck was born from that prayer — a Soul-led whisper to follow beauty wherever it led.
In 2023, the whisper led me me again.
This time, to a papermaking residency on Martha’s Vineyard, seeded through a dream and made possible through acclaimed artisan and teacher Sandy Bernat of Seastone Papers, and he generous support of Emily and Dan of Seeing With Your Heart. It was a dream — but also a stretch.
Money was tighter than ever before. I was afraid to trust. On my first day in the studio, all my old conditioning roared back: the pressure to perform, to produce, to race against the clock, to prove I was “worth” the opportunity, to extract all I could from the experience and "get my money's worth."
I spiraled.
But the next day, I showed up honest. I admitted my struggle to Sandie, my teacher and studio guide, and she held me with such warmth and humanity.
Through Sandy's compassionate mirroring and empathy, I could feel the struggle softening, just as the shreds of paper we had ceremoniously given to vessels of water the day before, were transforming into something pliant, malleable, and receptive to the journey that lay ahead.
I didn’t realize the papermaking would lead me deeper into my own transformation, but looking back, it couldn’t have been more obvious:
I was so humbled to be meeting such rigid and controlling parts of myself, so imbued with fear and scarcity-based programs of force and domination — so embarrassed and ashamed to realize they were “still there.”
Yet, this process was critical in helping reveal and unravel myself from “spiritual” constructs I had once believed I “needed” to aspire towards:
Rather than trying to scrub, deny, or split myself off from these parts, I was getting to transform my relationship with them: witnessing, holding, forgiving, releasing, and accepting myself within it all, unconditionally.
And to be witnessed by Sandie within it all — to be seen and accepted within my own seeing and acceptance — not as anything broken or needing repair, but as something wild, woven, and worthy of belonging, was perhaps the greatest nectar of all.
In papermaking, there’s a process called charging, where you stir the pulverized fibers into a vessel of water with your hand, prior to the pulp being re-shaped, strained, subjected to the weight of 6 tons of pressure, and laid to rest for three days in a warm, dark incubation chamber.
Along with my own tears of forgiveness, I was charging that water with prayers — for honoring and releasing all that was dying and being reborn in me, for fierce devotion to tending the Soul's unfoldment no matter the sacrifice, and for presence and compassion — rooted in faith and a commitment to embodying a more regenerative, life-giving, harmonious way of being and relating within myself, and the world around me.
I couldn’t see it then, but I was weaving the frequency of the Bee into the very fibers of Creation.
It felt like a resurrection — not only of the journal paper, but of the parts of me that had become split off.
These stories of transformation, rebirth, and renewal are literally woven into the fibers of this blossoming body of art.
And, as Venus recently began a new eight-year Rose journey in the heavens above us, a new geometry is blooming in my creative practice — not for performance, but for attunement and devotional tending of the Soul.
One bee at a time.
At a pace and rhythm that feels sustainable, life-giving, and joyous - eventually culminating into another 108-petalled flower.
This emerging series is called Pollinated Prayers — a collection of transmission-paintings created on the very pulp of old journal pages, rebirthed as sacred art.
Some bees rest on raw handmade paper. Others live in hand-painted silk, waxed and mounted like little altar icons.
And the best part is, you can bee a part of the pollinating and blossoming.
You can weave your intentions and prayers into this emerging unfoldment, together, co-creating with the Inspiration that guides.
“ We are the bees of the invisible. We… gather the honey of the visible in order to store it in the great golden hive of the Invisible.”
The great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke spoke these words in a 1925 letter, regarding the artist's task in transforming objects into art.
I believe we are all artists: artists of life. And these Bees are an invitation to the Way of the Bee: to listening and tending the Invisible hive that guides.
Pollinated Prayers is a living offering.
A devotional practice. A prayer for emergence.
A whisper to your Soul:
You are not lost.
You are already whole.
Stay with what’s here.
✨ Want to keep receiving sacred storytelling, creative rituals, and behind-the-scenes from my journey?
Subscribe to my Substack