An Old Woman Showed Up on My Easel
There’s an old woman sitting on my easel right now.
Her face is a familiar one. I’ve seen it in many dreams and visions in my life.
In 2023, in one of my first painting courses with Whitney Freya, I had the idea of identifying and painting my dominant archetypes.
An archetype is like internal software that all humans share. These are patterns that have been handed down for thousands of years, and almost every human understands them… which is why stories from movies and literature feel universal.
For example, one well-known archetype is the Hero: the person who risks all to save the day. The Hero archetype is recognized across time periods and cultures, from Odysseus in ancient Greek mythology to modern examples such as Harry Potter.
According to psychologist Carl Jung, each human carries all of the archetypes, but some of them are more prevalent in our personalities than others. As I was identifying my dominant archetypes, I realized that one of them has appeared to me over and over in my life… the Wise Sage.
I have named her My Helper. She is the wise, calm part of me that I can call on when I need to offer a safe, non-judgmental space for myself or someone else. She is the truth-seeking part of me, the one who discerns.
So when I was in Whitney’s class, I wanted to try to paint her. But the problem was that I wasn’t much of a painter. I didn’t have the skill set to make my painting look like the person in my imagination. Nevertheless, I gave it my best shot, and this is the archetype I painted then.
My Helper Archetype by Lori Poff Kellogg, June 2023
I imagined her much like the Hopi people imagine their Grandmother Spider… the wise counselor who weaves the world into existence. So I placed her in the cosmos as a weaver, holding a prayer stick, and opening portals to new understanding.
She hung on the wall of my studio and watched me as I practiced my painting skills over the last three years. And recently, I decided that she was ready for a makeover.
(One of my favorite things about acrylic painting is the ability to paint over. I repaint old canvases all of the time.)
Often, my creative process takes layers and layers to realize what wants to come forward, but not this time. I had such a clear picture in my mind of what she looked like, and now that my painting skills can actually render it, she appeared very quickly. My hands knew exactly what needed to come next.
I still wanted her to be weaving, but this time she isn’t weaving the whole world. That has never been her mission. This time she is weaving something new.
She is weaving a dreamcatcher.
And she is telling me,
“It’s never too late to weave some new dreams.”
But she really isn’t weaving new dreams… she is reweaving dreams that I have had all of my life that I thought were dead.
The dream she’s weaving right now is of writing my memoir. The story of how I built my house on someone else’s blueprint. And when it was almost finished… the house was blown apart. And how I rebuilt my house, brick by brick, but a house of my own design.
And the universe is preparing me. Back in November 2025, I became a full-time content manager, so now I make my living by writing every day. I’m learning internet marketing, social media, coding HTML for websites, and tons of AI automations. It’s been a huge learning curve over the last several months.
It’s the answer to a prayer I didn’t even know to pray.
The thing I’ve wanted to be since I was 10 years old, a writer, is what I am now and what I am still becoming.
Maybe that’s what My Helper is trying to show me.
Sometimes a dream doesn’t disappear because we missed our chance. Sometimes it changes shape. Sometimes the path to it winds through experiences we never would have chosen or recognized as part of the dream while we were living them. And sometimes, years later, we discover that we’ve been gathering the threads all along.
“It’s Never Too Late to Dream New Dreams” by Lori Poff Kellogg, August 2026
So I hope you can receive the message from My Helper, too:
It’s never too late to weave a new dream, or to pick up the threads of an old one.
What dream have you quietly decided is too late for you?
Maybe you don’t have to know how to make it happen yet.
Maybe you can simply pick up one thread and begin.