The Long Way Home

A Hidden Sanctuary in the Wilderness: Women as cultural bearers, luminous and composed, carrying history and identity like a crown. I felt these women’s lives, struggles, and dreams, whispering to me, connecting past to present, personal to universal.

By Beena Vijayalakshmy in Ontario, Canada

"Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time." 

— Thomas Merton

I had spent most of the past year living in the shallows. Work, deadlines, and daily duties compressed my days into something efficient but airless. Even a quick escape to New York hadn’t cured it. I treated MoMA (The Museum of Modern Art, New York City) like a grocery list, checking off masterpieces with frantic energy, leaving me more exhausted than inspired.

Times Square. New York

It wasn’t until I drove north to the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, tucked into the Ontario woods as if the trees themselves were guarding it, that I finally learned how to breathe again.

The Quiet Pressure of Dreams

The drive felt like shedding a layer of skin. By the time I stepped onto the gravel path, the city’s urgency had been replaced by the scent of damp earth and pine. Inside, light filters softly through floor-to-ceiling windows, and the silence is expectant, not empty.

The first work that truly arrested me was Arthur Shilling’s Girl with Dreams (1983). The portrait glows with restless internal heat.

Shilling described his creative spark as a volcano, “grumbling and rumbling continually.” Standing there, I felt a pang of recognition. The painting conveyed the quiet pressure so many of us carry—the ambitions we tuck away to stay efficient, the emotional weight of living with constant expectation, the inner life we rarely let others see.

The girl’s gaze is unflinching yet tender, both a warning and an invitation to witness her world.

Walking further, I encountered Meryl McMaster’s self-portrait When the Shadows Fall (2022). This image is luminous and intimate, born of family memory.

McMaster revisits a letter from her great-grandmother Bella, widowed in her forties and left to survive on the land. Bella’s story of resilience, endurance, and quiet courage resonated profoundly. Standing before McMaster’s portrait, I felt the dignity of survival across generations, the inheritance of courage that women carry quietly yet indelibly.

These works, paired together, form a chorus of feminine strength. Dana Claxton’s Headdress—Shadae (2019) continued the thread, portraying women as cultural bearers, luminous and composed, carrying history and identity like a crown. Across the museum, I felt these women’s lives, struggles, and dreams whispering to me, connecting past to present, personal to universal.

 Listening to the Land

In the Indigenous galleries, Alex Janvier’s abstract canvases drew me into their looping lines and vibrant energy. The works capture a profound sense of land, sky, and spirit, each brushstroke a memory of story, music, and creation, reflecting his Dënesųłįne heritage and inspiration from the natural world.

I lingered over Joe Talirunili’s The Migration (1976), a small sculpture of a skin boat crowded with forty-three souls. It memorializes survival and the wisdom of women and elders, capturing both peril and ingenuity.

Nearby, Rebecca Belmore’s Wave Sound sculptures (2017) invited me to do something I hadn’t done in months. I stopped and listened. Shaped from the rocky landscapes of Newfoundland, Northern Ontario, and Alberta, the works prompt you to hear wind, water, and the unseen histories of the Ojibwe Anishinaabe land beneath the museum.

The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson’s northern landscapes added another meditative layer. Their small panels captured the wilderness directly, painted in the act of hiking, portaging, and canoeing. The light, movement, and immediacy of these works create a rhythm that draws you into the land itself.

Carl Beam’s Various Concerns of the Artist (1984) blends personal and global histories, juxtaposing images of himself, the mummified female pharaoh Hatshepsut, and an elk to explore memory, responsibility, and human connection. 

Stan Douglas, through Tales of Empire and The Enemy of All Mankind, examines colonization, race, and power, while his Klatsassin Portraits depict the people involved in Indigenous resistance and historical upheaval, creating a complex, layered dialogue across time.

Here, art doesn’t merely decorate walls. It dialogues across time, geography, and culture, asking only for presence.

To Be

By the time I walked back to my car, the late afternoon sun had softened into a warm amber glow. The woods were still, the kind of stillness that feels earned. The McMichael feels like a secret revealed only to those willing to seek it.

Hidden among winding trails and dense trees, the museum offers moments of pause, solitude, and quiet meditation. Every painting, sculpture, and photograph seemed to breathe, waiting patiently for the visitor to find their rhythm. Here, the land itself becomes part of the exhibition, and the art—from the northern landscapes of the Group of Seven to the vivid, resilient narratives of Indigenous women—unfolds slowly, intimately, and profoundly.

The connection ran deep.

The child tracing artworks, the woman carrying quiet pressures and ambitions, the observer craving stillness—all found space here. In this hidden sanctuary in the woods, I hadn’t just discovered Canadian art; I had rediscovered the parts of myself I had forgotten to see.

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Beena Vijayalakshmy is a writer and translator with roots in Kerala, now based in Toronto. An avid reader and lover of literature, she has edited two poetry anthologies -- Bards of a Feather, Volumes 1 and 2, and curates a literary page on her social-media handle that showcases the work of poets, writers, and artists from around the world for a growing global audience. By profession a management consultant, she balances her corporate career with a lifelong commitment to literature and the arts. In keeping with her philosophy of lifelong learning, she is currently pursuing a degree in management at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. By her own admission, she prefers to remain on the sidelines in the quiet spaces between prints.

Barring the photo of New York Times Square, all photos by: Beena Vijayalakshmy