Symbols & Doodling

I’m letting the cat out of the bag. She never liked it in there anyway. My language is pictorial and symbolic. If I deeply journal, it’s with pictures and colors; It’s in trays filled with sand, it’s at the tip of a digital pen, it’s on the edge of a metal drum. That’s where my language starts - sensation to picture - to sound - to letters sprinkled on a page.

That’s why symbols are so important to me. I derive them from culture - obviously - but they come from experiential wonder, terror, and a need to express and share a story embodied in skin entangled with soil, bark, feathers, water, sunshine, and so much more. I can’t be silent anymore - my pelvic floor won’t tolerate it [my root system].

For me, symbols are unraveling into the embrace of nature where the soil shapes me as I shape it. It’s a pulse, it’s a language, it’s a rhythm. It plants as I plant, in a mutual dance of embrace - a tango of ecstatic melody in the web of life.

Most of my doodling is symbolic in some way or another even if another living been is involved. It’s symbols IN symbols. It’s also often unfinished because I haven’t found anything in life that isn’t moving somewhere deeply embedded in birth, death, rebirth cycle.