Finding numbers in my abstract painting about grief

My mum and I at my Christening.

My mother had died in May of 2013. I had a two year old toddler at that time, and I was beside myself in grief.

In an effort to release some of the emotions I held inside, I grabbed the largest canvas I owned. I laid it on the floor of my kitchen. I poured some random paint on it, and invited my toddler to help me paint the canvas.

He had fun, you can see his little footprints from waddling barefoot across the painting.

I went into a state of indirect? painting. I wasn't conciously aware of what I was doing in the sense that I let my emotions take over, and I just painted absentmindedly. I just let myself feel the music and the emotions and didn't try to control the outcome. I let the paint fall where it would. I cried and set free some of the pent up rage on the canvas. Mum had been sick with cancer for years. This deep grief was a long time coming.

Then we were done, so I picked up the canvas, and hung it up on the wall.

The Heartache. May 2013. The largest handprints belong to me. The middle sized handprints are my son's. The tiniest ones belong to my daughter, I added her prints in 2015. Rowan experiences an extension of my mother's death heartache through me. She never got to meet my mum, but knows of her just the same.

One morning, I found myself staring at the Heartache painting, as I often do. It's hung in the kitchen, a high traffic spot in my house. I feel the memory of the rush of emotions each time I see it.

This time however, I picked up on something different about the painting. I noticed there was a number 4 in among the random splotches of paint! A very clear number 4 at that. It definitely wasn't intentional on my part. It was purely random from the paint strokes that happened during the unconscious painting of grief.

Not far below the first “4” discovery, I found a second number 4 in my painting. What did this mean? I didn't consciously put it there, and my son wasn't writing numbers yet.

Seeing one accidental number within a random abstract painting was a surprise. Spotting 2 of the same random number in the abstract painting was now too much of a coincidence.

I immediately searched the rest of the painting. I would find another “4”

This one is the largest but the less defined. It bears the brush strokes of intentional strikes.

So that's 3

number #4’s,

randomly found in my greif painting about my mum.

What did this mean?

Using Google to search the meaning of the number 4, I would find that “four” has surprising significance in my life. I would learn about intuitive painting, and yes I do that without realising it sometimes. From there, came the start of an understanding in Numerology. Like a domino effect, I would plough through spirituality with determination for my own truth, and I’m still on this journey 10 years later.

A journey that started with the worst grief I'd known, and some craft paint and a canvas.