THE GOLDEN THREADS
Volume I: Foundations
Chapter One
God’s Rope
Childhood, sanctuary and rescue
The autobiographical origin of The Golden Threads: a lifelong body of paintings shaped by the animals I have loved, rescued and recognised.
Where the Thread Began
God’s Rope began as a private belief formed through my own lived experience.
Since childhood, I have felt that animals were never incidental to my life. They were refuge, family, protectors and teachers. Some arrived through rescue, some through years spent with horses and others appeared briefly in the wild, but each left something behind.
I came to imagine that every meaningful encounter with an animal creates an invisible golden thread. Each thread carries the love, trust, protection, courage or understanding formed between two lives.
These threads do not disappear when an encounter ends or an animal dies. I believe they remain with us, gradually becoming woven together into something stronger. At the end of a life, those threads form God’s Rope: a bond made from every animal we have loved, strong enough to guide us home.
A Lived Reality
God’s Rope is not an established religious story or a belief I ask others to adopt. It is the name I gave to something I had felt throughout my life but could not otherwise explain.
The paintings grow from real experiences of rescue, sanctuary, loss, recognition and trust. They are autobiographical, even when the figures and landscapes are symbolic.
Through them, I make visible the connection I feel between humans and animals and the possibility that love may leave a lasting structure behind.
Why I Paint Animals
I have lived alongside animals for as long as I can remember: rescue animals, wild visitors, horses I have owned and worked with, and birds that seemed to arrive when I needed them most.
Long before I had language for it, I sensed that animals were not incidental to my life. They were guides.
Animals decide whether we are safe before we speak. They observe posture, breath, patience and intention. They taught me that healing is rarely dramatic. It happens through stillness, lowered heads, quiet companionship and the gradual release of fear.
My paintings grow from these encounters. I do not paint animals as specimens or decoration. I paint them as witnesses and active participants in a relationship that exists beyond language.
These paintings are my record of a life lived beside animals. They are also my thank you.
If animals have shaped your life too, these works are for you.
The Path of the Rope
The paintings form a journey rather than a collection of isolated works. Within God’s Rope, that journey moves through four recurring experiences.
Encounter
An animal appears, sometimes through rescue, sometimes by chance and sometimes during a moment when something within us is ready to notice.
Recognition
The quiet understanding that the meeting carries meaning and that something has passed between two lives.
Guidance
Animals become protectors, witnesses and teachers, offering direction through presence rather than words.
Ascent
The individual threads begin to join. Love, memory and experience reveal the larger path they have been forming all along.
Each encounter adds another thread. The rope continues to grow.
The Animals Within the Story
Each animal enters God’s Rope through a different relationship.
Dogs carry devotion, protection and unconditional presence. Cats embody intuition, independence and quiet awareness. Horses represent trust, partnership and transformation. Foxes arrive as subtle messengers at the boundary between the domestic and the wild. Birds bring movement, courage and communication between visible and unseen worlds.
Their meanings are not assigned simply because tradition associates an animal with a particular quality. They are shaped first by what I have experienced with real animals throughout my life.
The symbolism begins with relationship.
Paintings from God’s Rope
Each painting holds one part of the autobiographical journey. Together, they form a developing record of encounter, recognition, guidance and ascent.
The First Golden Thread
God’s Rope is Volume I, Chapter One of The Golden Threads.
It is the project’s autobiographical foundation: my personal mythology, formed through childhood, sanctuary and a lifetime of relationships with animals.
From this beginning, The Golden Threads expands into ancestral memory and the stories different cultures have used to understand connection. The next chapter, The Celtic Interlace, turns towards my Irish heritage, animal symbolism and the Celtic Otherworld.
God’s Rope remains the place where the wider journey begins.
Follow the Thread
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