The AwakenArts Path
Poetry, Image, and Seeing Your Life
A story or image draws you in. A poem gives it words. Reflection helps you see what you already sensed but hadn’t quite named — without anyone telling you what it has to mean.
What Symbol Awareness Can Teach Us
You already live with symbols. Along this path, you’ll learn to notice them, understand what they carry, and use them to see your own story more clearly.
1
Notice the symbols you already live with
- The objects you keep. A wedding ring, a family photograph, a keepsake, a flag: the things you keep and wear already speak.
- The pictures in your own words. “I’m at a crossroads.” “I’ve hit a wall.” “I’m carrying a heavy burden.”
- What a thing is, and what it means. A key opens a lock. It can also stand for freedom, responsibility, or a new beginning.
- One image, many meanings. A dove may mean peace to one person and remembrance to another.
Symbolic language is already part of how you speak, remember, and understand.
2
See yourself more clearly
- What you value. What you preserve, display, and commemorate can reveal something about what matters to you.
- Who you are. Notice the images that express where you’ve come from and who you hope to become.
- Images that return. Certain images may return in memory or experience, inviting you to explore feelings and associations that are difficult to put into words.
- Change. Paths, thresholds, bridges, and seasons give you ways to reflect on the changes in your life.
- A new angle. Find another way of seeing an experience you thought you understood.
Greater self-awareness through your own observation, never a fixed interpretation.
3
Understand others, culture, and faith
- Meaning beyond words. Gifts, gestures, and rituals carry meaning that words alone can’t.
- Belonging. Family traditions, community emblems, and religious imagery show where people belong.
- Different readings. The same image can mean different things across generations and traditions.
- Scripture’s images. Read Scripture with fresh attention to its lamps, vines, seeds, bread, water, and shepherds.
- Literature. Poems, parables, fairy tales, and stories speak through figure and image.
- Belief. Symbols express what we believe, commit to, and hope for.
A richer appreciation of language, culture, Scripture, literature, and one another.
4
Carry it into your life
- Choices. Name the directions pulling at you when you stand at a crossroads.
- Hard experiences. Find words for experiences that resist plain description.
- Journaling. Begin journaling from a single image or metaphor.
- Your own forms. Shape your own words into image, poem, and form.
- Other points of view. Look at a familiar story from another side.
- Attention. Notice which images are asking for your attention.
- A daily habit. Make noticing part of ordinary life.
Symbolic awareness becomes a practice of noticing, reflecting, and understanding everyday experience.
People tell their stories with facts. They reveal their lives through images.
How AwakenArts Works
A Practice of Attention
AwakenArts is not primarily about interpreting symbols. It is about learning to notice them. Recognition arises through sustained attention, not immediate explanation.
The practice itself is simple to name, if not always simple to do:
- 1Notice.
- 2Become curious.
- 3Remain with the image.
- 4Allow recognition to emerge.
- 5Do not force interpretation.
This practice is not new. It is understood within the historic Christian tradition of figurative language and parable, where image and story have always carried what direct explanation cannot.
My Foundation
Every life tells its story in ways that are often quieter than words.
Over time I came to understand that recognition is only the beginning. Awareness invites acceptance. Acceptance makes honest action possible.
