Before Linda passed away, she and I (Wim) agreed that she would inspire me, if possible. After her death, when I finally felt ready to start painting months later, my inner question was, “Would she inspire me? And if so… can I notice it? How does that work? Is it really possible?”
In February 2002 (two months after Linda’s death), I visited a spiritual fair in the same community center where I had learned folk dancing with Linda. There, I met several mediums, but I didn’t learn much from them, rather that there are many mediums who do not deliver what you might expect from them. However, I also met Marianne, who had been Linda’s therapist. She was there to promote her therapy, and I started a conversation with her.
During that conversation, I told her that she still needed to issue an invoice for all the treatments, so I could pay her. She had worked all that time for nothing. I also told her that I wanted to create a logo or something for her practice, as a token of gratitude for her great help during Linda’s last months.
But that ‘logo’ turned out differently than I had expected.
I wanted to do something with the name Marisun, and I felt that the number 5 needed to be incorporated, for example, in the form of 5 stars. But where should those stars be placed on the painting?
I placed them randomly, with a chalk in my hand and my eyes almost closed to make it as coincidental as possible. I didn’t care… as long as they ended up in the right spot, very coincidentally in the right place.
In the evening, when I finished the painting, I looked up Linda’s constellation book and, just for fun, I searched to see if the randomly placed stars might be positioned correctly enough to form a recognizable constellation. That was not easy. Try it for fun to connect a number of dots to the many constellations that exist. It’s almost impossible. I gave up and went to bed.
But the next morning, I picked up the book again, and this time I worked strategically. How many stars had I drawn? Which constellations have five stars? That left only a few. And what if I held the book upside down?
And so I discovered the constellation Aquila or Eagle.
I then searched online for the mythology of that constellation. I found it in ancient Mesopotamia, where the constellation Eagle was connected to the legend of Etana, who flew to the heavens on the back of the Eagle god Shamash to find a pain-relieving medicine for his pregnant wife.
That was remarkable, because during Linda’s illness, we visualized several times that Linda was taken by a gigantic eagle and, sitting on its back, was carried to Atlantis beneath the waves. We were essentially looking for a way to combat her pain, as she suffered from terrible pain in or around her uterus. We too tried to move Heaven and Earth to find a pain-relieving medicine.
When I gave the painting to Marianne, she mentioned that she had always felt like a shaman, but that she now worked with a modern device called StarLight. And the most powerful medicine of the shaman is a feather from the Eagle, which represents the power of the Great Spirit.
In the painting, you see the name Marisun in angular and curved lines, separated by the heavenly ladder, a vortex of Light, containing the colors of the rainbow.