A Journey of Faith and Hope

A woman who built her life across continents tells her story through her very first painting: a landscape divided between Norway and Cyprus, held together by a tree whose roots reach down to a heart. In colours and forms she had never before used to speak, she finds a language for loss, transition, and the quiet courage of planting herself somewhere new.

STORIES FROM CYPRUS

6/14/20262 min read

She had never painted before. That matters, because the canvas she faced was not simply white. It held everything she had not yet found words for: two countries, several losses arriving at once, and a faith she had carried across every border without ever setting it down.

On the left side of the painting lies Norway. Not as a postcard, but as a life. Years of finding her footing in a country that eventually became home, not by geography alone but by the slower accumulation of belonging: a community of faith, familiar streets, the particular quality of northern light, the way a language that is not your first can eventually begin to feel like yours. Norway gave her a rhythm. It gave her people who knew her name. It gave her the experience of arriving somewhere strange and gradually, without a single dramatic moment, feeling held.

Then several things shifted at the same time.

The painting does not name the changes one by one. It does not need to. The composition itself speaks of simultaneity: the tree growing upward between two worlds, its branches reaching into both without fully belonging to either, its roots pressing downward into soil that has not yet finished settling. When multiple significant transitions occur together, grief does not arrive in sequence. It layers. And so does courage.

The move to Cyprus brought warmth she had not expected. She says this plainly, and the right side of the painting reflects it: lighter tones, open sky, the sense of a horizon that has not yet closed. But warmth and uncertainty can live side by side. Beginning again in a new country means re-learning small things that are quietly exhausting: systems, sounds, the social codes embedded in everyday exchanges. It means noticing, again, that you are foreign, even when people are kind.

At the base of the tree, she painted a heart.

Inside it, protected and central, is her faith. She takes the verse from Proverbs as both instruction and description: guard your heart, for from it flow the springs of life. For her, this is not abstract theology. It is the practical knowledge that when everything external is in motion, something internal must remain anchored. God, for her, is not a comfort she reaches for in crisis. He is the root structure. The thing that holds while the branches move.

The tree produces fruit. This too is deliberate. She is not painting a story of endurance alone, of surviving relocation and loss and the hard work of starting over. She is painting a story of continuity and growth: of connections and memories and possibilities that do not stop because a life has changed geography. The roots stretch across both sides of the canvas because she belongs, in different ways, to more than one place. Norway shaped her. Cyprus is shaping her. Neither erases the other.

That she painted this for the first time, with no prior experience of the medium, is itself part of the story. The HERS process gave her a space and an invitation. What she brought to it was everything she had been carrying: the grief and the growth together, the loss and the hope held in the same hands that mixed the colours, that made the tree, that placed the heart exactly where it needed to be.

HERS

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.

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hers@odyssea.com