Last night, a painting came home to me. She traveled across years, across losses I forgot I grieved, delivered back into my hands by a friend whose loyalty proved deeper than memory.

The painting slipped back into my life like a whisper from another time — a piece of myself I hadn’t realized was missing.

It had been decades since I asked Laura, a healer, an artist, a fellow traveler beyond the veil, to keep this ‘Sweet Mystery’ safe for me. I had tucked the memory away so completely that when Laura appeared at my door, cradling the framed painting in her arms, it was as if the universe was completing a circle.

The image was like a dream remembered: a young woman wrapped in soft white, holding a black Persian cat against a stormy backdrop of shadow and light. The girl’s direct, mysterious, almost impossibly tender gaze stirred something ancient in me.

She looked like the beauty I once aspired to be, back when the world rewarded and punished it in equal measure. And the fluffy, defiant, loyal cat reminded me of my feisty Shamus, lost to me long ago, another silent keeper of my secrets.

At the bottom of the painting, almost hidden unless you knew to look, was the artist’s inscription: Louis Icart. Icart’s works have long whispered of an era where elegance and mystery coexisted, where beauty was both armor and offering. Somewhere in that delicate scrawl, it felt like another voice was reaching across the years to bless the moment.

The Sweet Mystery of Friendship

On the back of the painting was a handwritten note. A birthday message from my friend MJ, who once walked beside me along the quiet streets of our small town, both of us in our kindergarten shoes, not knowing yet how long the road ahead would be.

Her message was simple, unpolished, full of heart: a birthday wish, a vow of friendship, a little “sweet mystery” tucked between the lines.

I wasn’t moved to tears as I stood there, feeling the painting’s energy hum in my hands. Instead, waves of magic shimmered through me. The kind of magic you only recognize when you’ve lived long enough to know that not everything is lost, and some treasures, miraculously, are only waiting.

Friendship, I realize, is a rare and luminous gift in a world that so often shifts, stumbles, and forgets its own heart. It’s a kind of alchemy that transmutes memory, distance, and even silence into something enduring.

Quiet Miracles We Rarely Speak Of

Through my years as a meditation teacher and mentor, I have sat with countless women who confessed, sometimes shyly, sometimes with a raw kind of grief, their loneliness. The feeling of being without real friends. The sting of competition, comparison, and cruelty dressed up as casualness. The longing to be loved without being secretly envied.

I have been lucky, or blessed. Or maybe it’s something entirely woven from the invisible threads of choosing and being chosen. Today, I easily count a circle of twelve women, each friendship spanning two decades or more, each rooted in something older and deeper than mere convenience.

And yet, another memory surfaced recently. Raw and unexpected. Buried deeply in my teenage heart. Something about being ‘the pretty one’ opened an old wound. I remembered a long-ago cruelty, flashes of jealousy and betrayal that left a mark. And for a moment, the old question stirred: Was being pretty a curse? Had beauty, that fleeting, dangerous thing, made me a target rather than a sister?

In my seventies now, it’s easy to smile at the memory and think the storms of jealousy have passed into someone else’s weather report. But sometimes, I ponder. Are women still turning their sharpest arrows against the ones they find beautiful? Are we still mistaking someone else’s light for the theft of our own?

The Living Tapestry of Memory

My lived experiences now fill me with a quiet optimism. The friendships that endure are not untouched by pain. They are simply the ones who refuse to turn it into a blade. They are the places where beauty is admired, not envied; where success is a celebration, not a competition. They are the friendships that survive the silent wars most people never find the courage to name.

The painting now rests safely in my home, but I haven’t hung it yet. I will wait for MJ to visit, and together, we’ll find the perfect place for it to live. A spot where its sweet mystery can ripple outward, a silent witness to what is never truly lost.

Some gifts are stitched into the fabric of our lives in ways we don’t always see. Some treasures wait for us across time, patiently, fiercely, lovingly, until we are ready to receive them.

The Journey Unfolds

As I venture deeper into these bittersweet mysteries, my friend and creative partner, Daniella, whispers about Pleasure Alchemy — the body as temple, the art of learning, unlearning, softening.

And I wonder: Will my circle of friends widen once more? Will beauty, once a burden, become a bridge?

Only a week ago, during Easter brunch with my friend Linda, I remembered how she adopted two of my beloved white cats twenty years ago, during the hollow ache of a difficult divorce.

A few years earlier, I celebrated my birthday in Pt. Townsend, with Malonie, my dancing partner from our wild years at the Vegas clubs. A friendship still lit with the music of laughter and survival.

And now, as I write, my cat Bellissima curls beside me, a tender inheritance from my friend Marcia, who left this world only months ago.

It’s not merely age that makes us wonder: Where am I going — and who is going with me? Somewhere in the liminal spaces, we’re listening. The call enters our dream space, asking us to transform the old shadows of envy and elitism into a rising chorus of tenderness and truth.

Copyright, 2025, Ellen M. Laura

Author’s Note: The artwork referenced in this story is believed to be “Sweet Mystery” by Louis Icart. Icart was a French artist renowned for his ethereal portrayals of women and cats in the early 20th century.

Originally posted on Ellen M Laura’s Substack