I grew up as one of four kids on a small farm in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. My parents struggled to support my three siblings and myself, accepting brown bags filled with nicely folded second-hand clothing and relying on our one-acre garden to provide food that we canned, froze and dried. My sisters and I rose early, milked the cow, gathered eggs and lived in the abundance of apple harvests and buckets of blackberries gathered by our hands.

Although I still enjoyed the occasional pretzel or soda, there were many times when my parents had to get really creative just to keep us afloat with the basics. They worked hard and demanded the same kind of hard work and perseverance from us kids. I think this creative, persistent attitude is what kept me swimming so fiercely when, at 34 years old, my life and the Disney dream of “someday my prince shall come” was realized to be an unfair summation of marriage, and my life, as I knew it, fell apart.

In 2004, I found myself at the end of my marriage — savings diminished, without my house and furniture, living in an apartment provided by the County Housing Trust for women who find themselves without resources. I had very little income. I was on food assistance, waiting my turn at the food banks, and my physical health was in shambles.

I spent countless hours with my face buried in my hands, unable to fathom what had gone wrong in my life.

My sister Heidi, who has been a gentle support for me in so many ways, stopped by one day and said abruptly, ”You know, I really see you choosing ‘victim’ most of the time.” Instantly, I felt defensive and self-righteous, unable to see myself in her words at the time, but the next day the words resonated, and I found myself no longer able to hide from the fact that I was choosing to be a victim. I saw it everywhere: in the way I held my head, the way I over-explained myself, the way I postured to make my 5-foot, 11-inch frame smaller and turned my toes in like a small child. Even how I felt when I had to pay for my own lunch…. Everything everywhere was laced with a view of myself as victim, and I was angry. I felt like I was being put upon by the world.

Finally, I could see it, like someone rubbed the fog from the mirror. It rendered me exhausted to see how I had lived my entire life from the standpoint of a victim. But just my willingness to ask, “Is she right? Am I choosing a victim stance here? And what about here?” opened my world, and I saw that I was inviting this attitude into every aspect of my unexamined life. Just the noticing of how painful it was to live my life in this way created space for another way for me to exist and live this precious life.

With this insight an amazing abundance and autonomy began to flow.

I started to work tirelessly towards my passion, my art. I had always painted and created since before I was in school. I took after my grandfather and my uncle, who were both fine artists. I learned that every time things would get particularly tough I would paint. Not enough money for rent? Paint. Health in decline? Paint.

I cannot explain how this works. All I know is that when I did what was true for me —my art — things always seemed to work out, and even more than that, it brought me peace.

I entered competitions and submitted my work to galleries, museums and magazines. Mostly, I got declined or my submission letters went unanswered, and so, once again, I would paint. At first, I thought that if I could just win this one award or get in this one museum, then somehow it would straighten my life out. It would be some sort of answer, and suddenly the life I had always imagined would finely come to fruition.

But, slowly over time, I realized that each one was just a baby step toward the next one, building strength and trust in this self and a beautiful, liquid momentum in my career.

An art teacher told me to not take my painting so seriously: Each painting is just an experience, a practice, for the next one. There is never a final painting — as it is in my life. No one thing is going to solve my problems or make it all run smoothly or finally take away insecurity. I just allow each day to be my practice, reveal itself and learn from it.

Another great teacher in my life, Joseph Goldstein, said, “Trust is the ability to tolerate not knowing.”

One of the greatest gifts that I received when things looked really bleak in my life was that I did not know. I honestly believed, before my marriage ended, that if I worked hard enough, I could make my life go in the direction I wanted it to. So, it completely confused me that the harder I worked to make my life look like what I wanted, the further it seemed to be from what I wanted.

It turned out that the difficulty was not coming from an unwillingness to work hard enough at my goal, but from the attachment to the outcome. I just really wanted — with arms crossed, furrowed brow and stomping foot — life to be the way I imagined!

I started to learn to let go of having everything I wanted, and instead, I started to focus on wanting what I have. My life started to flow, and oddly enough, as I felt satiated with what I had, more and more came!

Before I moved to Seattle, I had a studio sale, selling many of my older paintings that were no longer showing in a gallery. I did not have an attachment to how much I made, but in the back of my mind, there was an intention to make around $2,000 so that I could afford the move to Washington. I hung posters and sent out some e-mails to friends and patrons.

In the next two days I made $14,000 selling art. My sister and I wept in my studio on the evening of the second night, unable to believe what had just happened. This was two times my yearly income from the year before!

Not knowing how things are going to be has become a motivator, instead of a crippling fear that causes me to stagnate. I could never have imagined my life as it is right now, so thank goodness, life does not follow my dictates, or I would be limited to my own thoughts. This is a simple way to live but by no means easy to do.

In spring 2008, for the first time in my life, I left the United States. After a three-day journey I stepped off a Kenya Air jet in Malawi and walked down the steps to the tarmac. I laughed and cried simultaneously, unable to believe the way in which this journey was looking in this moment compared to four short years before. Breathing in the warm, green, complicated smell of Africa, I would spend the next four months painting the beautiful people of this small and beautiful country of Malawi. I felt strong and healthy and beautiful and ready.

It felt like the culmination of my life, but now, as I plan my next trip to Africa in 2009 — where I will deliver books for a library in a Buddhist orphanage in Malawi and then travel and paint the people in Ethiopia — I realize it was only just a first step. This amazing wild journey is unfolding before me like a carpet of flowers.

To learn more about Olivia Mae and her art go to http://www.hollypendergast.com