The Media Line: Sports, Silk and Song: One Woman’s Journey to the Holy Land 

Sports, Silk and Song: One Woman’s Journey to the Holy Land 

A former Team Canada cyclist turned artist and harpist finds purpose in Jerusalem, bringing music to wounded soldiers and weaving faith, healing, and devotion to Israel into her work 

By Felice Friedson / The Media Line 

In the head-trauma ward, Cydney Mariel Galbraith arrived carrying a harp. Around her, wounded Israeli soldiers were beginning long recoveries, often with families gathered at their bedsides. Galbraith and fellow visitors carried bags filled with small comforts—skin cream and other personal gifts—but it was the music that changed the room. When she began to play, she recalled, the soldiers “just lit up.” 

“‘Oh, play me another song, play me another song,’” they told her. 

For Galbraith—a former Team Canada cyclist turned artist, textile designer, musician, and student of food, flowers, and gardens—the moment distilled the purpose she believes brought her back to Israel: simply to be present. “To say to you, ‘I came for you.’” 

Galbraith speaks in bursts of color, faith, and determination. Asked which of her many pursuits matters most, she did not hesitate: “Definitely, I will have to say Jerusalem is my highest joy.” 

Born in Canada, Galbraith has returned to Israel repeatedly, but this visit with Curt Landry Ministries became something more than a trip. She has chosen to remain for a time, propelled by what she described as a spiritual urgency to understand the country more deeply. 

“I had a word from above, and it was ‘Just show up,’” she said. “When I got my feet back on this ground, I thought, ‘What’s the big hurry to get home?’” 

A committed Christian, Galbraith said her connection to Israel is rooted in faith and in support for the Jewish people. “I know that Hashem’s heart is here for the Jewish people,” she said, describing Israel as a place she arrived “truly to come and learn.” 

That learning, she said, includes the culture, diversity and visual richness she finds in the country—as well as what she sees as an urgent need to confront antisemitism abroad. “We see so much shaking in the world today,” she said. “We see the rising of antisemitism, especially in our nation.” 

Her goal, she added, is to move past distant impressions and encounter Israel through its people. “It has been a burden in my heart to come and learn myself—learn about the culture, learn deeper in the realms of the people here, the beautiful color, the diversity.” 

In response to a question about her visits with wounded soldiers, Galbraith said she had been welcomed into humanitarian-aid efforts intended to support Israelis during the war and its aftermath. She believes many do not grasp the scale of what Israeli society has endured. “Our Western part of the world has no understanding what Israel has been through,” she said. 

At the hospital, she encountered soldiers in rehabilitation, some of whom had suffered life-altering physical injuries. She described a striking contrast between the severity of the injuries and the atmosphere she perceived inside the wards. “There was hope in that hospital,” she said. 

For Galbraith, music became a way to offer presence rather than explanation. “That was probably one of my biggest joys,” she said of playing for the soldiers, “and recognizing I have so much to give. We have so much to give.” 

Galbraith’s sense of spiritual calling also shaped a recent visit to the Temple Mount with Rabbi Yehuda Glick. She recalled being on an early-morning tour, singing silently to herself because, as she described it, non-Jewish visitors are not permitted to sing or dance there. 

“I was singing in my spirit,” she said. 

During the visit, an NBC reporter approached her with questions about the site and the land. Galbraith said she was caught off guard but responded from the convictions that have animated her travels and artwork. 

“The Lord has promised that it will be restored,” she said. “We don’t know what Hashem is going to do, but He did promise us that it will be a house of prayer for all nations.” 

When asked about comments she had made concerning Muslims and the future of the site, Galbraith emphasized that her vision was not about expelling anyone. “It’s not about moving anyone out,” she said. “It’s about reclaiming the promise and the covenant promise that God has made to the Jewish people here.” 

For her, the repeated phrase was central: “It is a house of prayer for all nations.” 

Before she became known for silk scarves, paintings, and performances, Galbraith spent a decade on Team Canada, competing in road cycling and mountain biking across Canada and internationally. She describes her younger self as driven, disciplined, and relentlessly ambitious. 

“I was an overachiever, a striver and a go, go, go getter—very determined, very goal driven,” she said. Yet, beneath that momentum, she felt something essential was missing. “Deep down inside of my heart, I knew that wasn’t who I was. I knew there was more.” 

At 24, she reached what she calls rock bottom and decided she could no longer continue racing as she had been. “I just basically said, ‘I don’t want to be racing like this anymore,’” she recalled. 

The crisis redirected her toward music and visual art. “When you’re at the end of yourself, you’re at the beginning of God,” she said. That transition revealed a creative identity that gave her a way to express herself and pursue healing at the same time 

Her journey led to Happy Holy City, the first scarf Galbraith created for Jerusalem roughly a decade ago. The design is more than a fashion accessory; it combines color, imagery, poetry, and song into art. Every scarf, she said, carries writing she creates herself. “On every one of my scarves, I write a poem, I write a song.” 

Happy Holy City reflects her vision of joy in Jerusalem, Mount Zion, and the restoration of the Tabernacle of David. “We will dance, and we will sing,” she said, “and we will see the restoration.” 

Her work is physically layered as well as spiritually layered. She stretches silk fabric on a frame, paints it, writes on it, walks away and returns to it repeatedly—sometimes over weeks. “Every time I walk by it, I’ll paint something on it,” she said. 

Once the original is complete, she photographs it and produces small batches using textile-printing machines. The design incorporates images that connect her Canadian roots and devotion to Israel, including the Canadian and Israeli flags. “It’s full of color and promise,” she said. 

The original Happy Holy City painting hangs in Nahariya, a fact that carries special emotional weight for its creator. 

Galbraith explained that by 2018 or 2019, she had saved enough money to bring her parents to Israel for the first time. She had prepared paintings and scarves for the trip and urged them to see Jerusalem with her. 

Then, the day before their flight, a dog charged into her during a walk with her father. The collision, she said, shattered the left side of her body and left her needing immediate surgery. “I was still determined, ‘I’m going to Israel. I’ve got everything ready,’” she remembered. But she could not travel. Instead, she told her parents to go without her—and to take the painting and scarves to Jerusalem. 

At the time, she was living in Calgary, Alberta, struggling to understand why the trip had been interrupted. “I thought I would never walk again,” she said. 

Her recovery became, in her words, both physical and emotional. “It wasn’t just a physical healing that I received,” Galbraith said. “It was an emotional healing to trust that I will come back to Jerusalem.” 

She did return—four or five more times, she said—and the artwork she had once sent ahead now hangs in Israel. “I will keep coming until I get to live here,” she said. 

Galbraith is now working toward producing some of her scarf designs in Israel, while continuing to distribute them primarily online through her website, lovespurelight.com. 

But the scarves are only one measure of the message she carries. There is also the athlete who learned to stop striving, the artist who layers poems and prayers into silk, the visitor who has come to listen and learn, and the harpist who brings joy through her music. 

As the interview ended, she was invited to play her songs she had written and performed for wounded soldiers, one of them based on the biblical priestly blessing. It was a fitting return to the image that opened her story: an artist arriving not with answers, but with music, and a desire to stay. 

For Galbraith, that may be the point of it all. “Just show up,” she said. 

Photo courtesy of Cydney Galbraith.