Celebrate Your Creative Self by Mary Todd Beam ISBN1-58180-102-5, Chapter 8: Creating Your Personal Symbols recommends keeping a Symbol Diary. I've gone a bit further with a notebook I use to "download my brain" in. It's an index. Under Icons & Symbols, I list the following:
Doors, mailslots, stairways, turrets, towers, paths, labyrinths and mazes
Spirals, stars, feathers, fans, fleur de lys, sailing ships, rowboats
Stones, rose petals, shells, trees, the Moon, nets
Keys, books, lexicons, wands, wings, violins, martinis, suitcases
Mermaids, Pirates, Faeries,
Mother Bear, Damselfly, Gryphon, Cat
Palm tree, Cedar, Oak and Pine
I take photos of these frequently, doodle them, collect rubberstamps that incorporate them, clip magazine photos of them, or collect information on them or even the objects themselves.
The journal page (circa 2004) above has stars, many spirals, and center of the page a stamped image called "Maiden Voyage" by Acey Deucy which I use frequently. She has a ship on her head and her face is not unlike my own, so it expresses a part of me. The spiral has been one of my life symbols since 1993. Its significance is that life, like the seasonal year, keeps going around touching on things repeatedly. When I was in my mid- twenties, I gave away or sold quite a few things because I thought I had outgrown them, but I found decades later, that my interests haven't changed so much after all. I find myself doing things I never expected, such as having lunches with a group of old girlfriends from junior high. I hadn't seen some of them since those years, but we still had something untangible in common. I am happy to make rediscoveries.
