Welcome to Intutitive Journaling class.
Your assignment today is to close your eyes, breathe deeply and sense into your body, asking your intuition for a symbol of healing.
Perhaps there is an area within you that feels warm or ripe. What colors does it offer? What shapes?
Open your eyes and let your hand move across your paper, simply allowing whatever arises.
Once you’ve drawn a figure or design, name it. Create a narrative, which tells the story it longs to tell you.
Here is my story...
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Amorphia was her name.
Everyone agreed on that, but not much else.
Some told of her white skin that seemed to shift like fingers of water viewed from airplanes. You could see where it was headed before it arrived.
Others seemed to connect with the amor part. Love. It’s everywhere. It’s nowhere.
Yes, there wasn’t much that could be pinned down. But that seemed to be the point, I thought.
I first saw Amorphia myself when I left Pennyslvania at 18 for school in North Carolina. Born in Virginia, I expected that the south would welcome me home. Yet meeting my first dorm mate, I hadn’t gotten past, ‘Hi, I’m Donna…” before she declared me a Yankee. That night I sat before a fire pit listening to another freshman strum his guitar to James Taylor’s "Carolina on My Mind", and I cried for the home I realized I’d never had.
Through my tears I spotted her. For me, it helped to look through the flames. She leapt and danced in the shimmering air just where crimson and yellow met the dark. I saw her as streaming, transparent white. I know some talked about her long red hair, but I think that was just confusion with the flames. Or maybe confusion with the idea of love; that to have it you should look the part.
I didn’t think much of people making Amorphia into a Clairol commercial. I preferred to think of her as pure white that had lost interest in finding a boundary, let alone love outside herself.
She was a wild woman. Wild as in untamed, at home with weather, answering only to herself. She came and left, sometimes spotted in flame, as I’ve said, but at other times Kansas housewives reported seeing her jumping waves of springtime wheat, particularly at sunrise when the light was more horizontal than vertical. It was her leaping shadow that caught their eyes, though none could reliably describe its nature.
Amorphia would woo these women, calling to the part of them who could still remember young girl pleasures before they learned to like petticoats and bows. More important, she would sing to their souls like a whale sounding her sonar language through the depths of unlearning that had intruded on their perfection.
I hear her calling in the silence of my studio when the scratch of my pen makes the noise of a mouse skittering home. Or when women gather and we wordlessly color, watching what takes form on our journal pages.
I sense the ground under my hand like an animal finding its way through a bog. Soon I have no further need for solidity.
I am knowing. I am Amorphia. I am home.