Confessions of a Symbol Reader

In the cold, clear sun this morning, I thought that it might be a good thing to call up the main symbols I use in my life. Always an advocate of finding analogies for my insides in my outsides, I think it has not occurred to me before to collect them in one place and ponder how I have used them.  A little symboleering analysis: I like arches, stone walls and towers, high trees and birds, and the sky in all its weathers.

The big one, of course, is the River. A very conscious comparison, I have used it over and over in poetry, in musing, and in art to represent the flow of my life from its springing source to its eventual molecular mix into the big waters at the end.  This has been the vision driving the choices I make from day to day.

A second symbol, although rarely used consciously, is the Train. One of my favorite intersections with the Grateful Dead is their train songs: Monkey and the Engineer, Casey Jones, Tons of Steel. Trains are big and powerful and they take you from one place to another in style (or at least they once did, don’t get me started on AMTRAK). I think of them as situational, having impetus and threatening to jump the tracks. Like a lot of the projects I have worked on. Trains take stamina!

Another is Buildings. I love engineers and the miracles they construct and am fascinated with the required nuts and bolts. I remember a line from a therapy poem I wrote in my early 20s, that “My strong, straight building leans” after some embarrassingly dramatic experience. Even then I subconsciously “constructed” my life.  Now I consciously use Buildings as metaphors for my future, as I did in Bridges: Using Symbols to Build Your Life (2014).

And Bridges! How could I have forgotten about Bridges:) I didn’t actually forget, but it comes last to mind this cold sunny day. I LOVE my bridges, all up and down the Mississippi River at familiar bends and twists, places to get from one side to the other, graced with arches and fretwork to entice my imagination. Here be the crossings.

By now I have entire emotional landscapes attached to the places I walk, the city that surrounds me. I find it comforting and stimulating at the same time, and setting up storyboards for a new direction can call me up from a slump or back from an ill-conceived trainride. A mode of personal introspection that suits me to a T(r)ee.