Honoring My Spirit Guides: Hawks

In January of this year, I simply decided I was going to let in MORE of the good.

I wasn’t going to focus on a stupid new years resolution, or cutting out things in my life I shouldn’t do… I just wanted to focus on adding more good.

So that’s what I did…

And that’s when this painting first began taking form in my mind.

… and good lord did I have other plans at first.

I only wanted to re-create a simple painting I saw on Etsy in my own style, for my own bathroom.

You see, we had just moved into our home and had a baby about a year and a half prior, and we still didn’t really have any art up on the walls at all.

Instead of spending money on some cheap crappy art print that some re-seller was trying to pass off as quality prints of original artwork, I decided to just paint something myself.

How could I possibly bring myself to invest my money in something like that instead of invest my money into myself and my own craft?

I always have wanted a home where the walls are filled with beautiful and meaningful art and decorations.

So I told my husband my plan, and dug my painting supplies out of the basement.

I hadn’t truly created anything (other than our son) in years.

Even though I wanted to create this painting, it was still so painful to actually start the process of bringing her to life.

My skills were rusty.

I had to remember how to trust, how to give myself time, how to learn again… how to lay down my ego and just figure out how to create what I wanted to create.

And as I was creating, while my husband was fully supporting every ounce of this creation… the hawks started coming to me.

To fully understand this, you need to know my history with hawks, and a bit about my spirituality…

I fully believe that The Universe uses animals as spirit guides or totems to communicate with us.

The Hawk is a guardian spirit that carries secret wisdom from another realm. Reminding you to trust your intuition, to see the bigger perspective, and to find strength in your unwavering truth.

The Hawk is a guide on your journey of discovery and self enlightenment.

I’ve come to understand that Hawks are a very direct Spirit Guide… this means that IF Hawks are one of your spirit guides, they only show themselves when they have something very specific and important to tell you. When one appears to you, you better be paying attention because it does mean something and it’s your job to pay attention to the context that surrounds the Hawk’s appearance.

I spent probably 10+ years of my life completely denying any existence of spirituality and anything ‘beyond’ our existence here as we see it on Earth…

After growing up in what felt like a very oppressive and patriarchal Christian church environment, I stepped fully away from the Church and believing in ‘God’ when I was about 18 years old… with no plans of ever addressing the existence of a higher power again.

And it wasn’t until my stepmother passing in 2021, less than a month before my husband and I ‘eloped’, a few months before I became pregnant with my son… that my spirituality came bursting out at the seams.

A piece of me I had shoved deep inside, unwilling and unable to deal with… was screaming too loudly to be ignored after 10+ years.

She was awake, alive, and desperate for answers…

And that’s when the synchronicities started flowing…

When the messages from the Universe began to appear. LOUD. AND. CLEAR.

Those things that are just too specific to be coincidence.

“Emily… are you listening yet?”

The first messenger… my very first spirit guide came to me.

A hawk…

She was always there to tell me I was on the right path.

It was too uncanny to deny.

When I was driving to teach an art lesson… there she was…

When I began to think about how I was going to turn my art into a living… she was there yet again.

Seeming to appear EXACTLY at the right time to confirm “Yes my dear, yes… you are on the right path”

Hawks became a totem of my own commitment to myself and my art, long before I recognized that is what they were.

Always appearing at just the right time, to tell me something so specific.

It was the first undeniable communication from The Universe. They were the first thing that really clued me into being connected to something more.

Flash forward to 2024, in my journey of creating this painting that I have come to lovingly refer to as “Welcome Home Baby”…

As I began painting again, as my spirituality began creeping back out of me after getting a little lost in the weeds of new motherhood… my hawks were the very first thing to come back to me.

This time, it was different.

I was specifically seeing 2 Red Tailed Hawks together, every single time I was seeing a hawk.

This went on for months, in the absolute craziest of ways.

At one point, I stepped out of my car in the parking lot of our veterinarian’s office, a 20 minute drive from home, and my hawks literally SWOOPED out of the sky over my head… both of them together… dancing across the sky.

One day when I was driving home from the grocery store, I thought to myself how I should be seeing my hawks any minute… and there they appeared. One trailing after the other across the sky.

They were showing me what I needed to cling onto to bring my art to the world.

I alone was not enough… I needed to lean on something greater than just myself if I was going to buckle down, create my art, find my voice, and learn how to share it with the world.

They knew I would need to lean on my strong partnership with my husband, all of the things I had learned from him over the past 11 years of our lives together…

Working along side him in his business my entire adult life had given me all of the tools I would need to turn my own gifts from the Universe into a business… to turn my own gifts and my voice into something I could share with others.

I just had to keep leaning into it, talking to the Universe and asking my dear husband for his guidance when I felt stuck.

And they just kept coming as my painting began to take shape. As I continued to learn lesson after lesson about painting, life, myself… all of it… the hawks were there guiding me all along.

I honor the Universe and her messengers she sends me to guide my path.

First, it was the Hawk that came to me all those years ago, calling me home.

Then it became the 2 Red Tailed Hawks dancing across the sky together, reminding me that I am better, more powerful, when I can find strength in the partner I have chosen to be with.

By leaning on my partnership and trusting the messages that The Universe has sent me, I began to find myself.

The authentic version of myself that was buried deep inside long ago…

I am learning how to shed my ego so I can make space for my authentic self to exist.

I am so grateful to the Hawks for guiding my path.

With all my heart, all my soul, and all of my love,

Emily Beattie
xoxo

Artist. Feral Girl. Mama. Wife.