By Ethan Maurice | July 16, 2020
This is a follow up to The Unsung Power of Symbols, in which I promised a list of the symbols I currently, consciously use in my own life. The intent is simply to provide some concrete examples of symbols to inspire ideas and act as a jumping-off point into the search for your own.
Below are six of my symbols, with a little what and why about each:
Memento Mori Coin
Latin for “remember death,” this memento mori coin is the most powerful symbol I have encountered in my life. As I wrote about it in The Unsung Power of Symbols:
“My heart leapt! I instantly recognized that coin was something special. It was the physical manifestation of all my near death experience meant to me. I had to have one. And I have carried it in my left pocket just about every day since. I hold that coin, run it through my fingers, and notice the press of its weight against my thigh many times a day. Each encounter is a cascade of gratitude, meaning, and perspective gleaned from getting so close to the edge of life. For me, it is the most powerful symbol I have ever encountered.”
Side note: contemplating death is a counterintuitive practice with ancient roots. If you’re curious or going, “whaaat Ethan’s weird and morbid as hell,” read this.
Blue Green Buddha Statue
With this Buddha statue, I associate realizations from books like The Snow Leopard, a ten-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat, a month in Nepal, and countless other little other impressions that add up to a certain lightness of being.
A few months ago, I devised my own little daily ritual with the statue:
Each day, I write something that feels important, difficult, or frustrating at the time on a small scrap of paper. I then crumple the paper and place it on the plate the Buddha holds. Holding a lighter up to the paper, I flick it and marvel at the beatitude of the Buddha as it turns to ash. It’s become my daily reminder of the vastness of time, how small my biggest problems actually are, and gets me beyond the limitations of my first person perspective.
Circle Necklace
Circles are everywhere if you look for them. They hold many fantastic lessons, both simple and complex. I can’t even begin to list the endless things I’ve found revolve circles, so I won’t. Rather, Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote a tremendous essay on Circles if you’re curious.
There’s also this quote about circles a WONDER WANDER 2018 attendee included in his application that’s always stuck with me:
“I live in nature where everything is connected, circular. The seasons are circular. The planet is circular, and so is the planet around the sun. The course of water over the earth is circular coming down from the sky and circulating through the world to spread life and then evaporating up again. I live in a circular teepee and build my fire in a circle. The life cycles of plants and animals are circular. I live outside where I can see this. The ancient people understood that our world is a circle, but we modern people have lost sight of that. I don’t live inside buildings because buildings are dead places where nothing grows, where water doesn’t flow, and where life stops. I don’t want to live in a dead place. People say that I don’t live in a real world, but it’s modern Americans who live in a fake world, because they have stepped outside the natural circle of life.
Do people live in circles today? No. They live in boxes. They wake up every morning in a box of their bedrooms because a box next to them started making beeping noises to tell them it was time to get up. They eat their breakfast out of a box and then they throw that box away into another box. Then they leave the box where they live and get into another box with wheels and drive to work, which is just another big box broken into little cubicle boxes where a bunch of people spend their days sitting and staring at the computer boxes in front of them. When the day is over, everyone gets into the box with wheels again and goes home to the house boxes and spends the evening staring at the television boxes for entertainment. They get their music from a box, they get their food from a box, they keep their clothing in a box, they live their lives in a box.
Break out of the box! This not the way humanity lived for thousands of years.”
The Last Temptation of Christ Poster
I wasn’t born into, nor do I subscribe to any specific religion. But I read Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1955 reinterpretation of the life of Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ and was utterly moved. To pull from what I wrote about the book on my Bookshelf:
The way Kazantzakis’s Jesus profoundly struggles, doubts, and ultimately overcomes in those five hundred pages… it was a molotov cocktail defiantly hucked into the waning fires of my spirit. I closed that book for the final time and looked up and suddenly loved those rusty, white-aging-to-yellow lockers on the wall, my soggy peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and all that my journey touched.
After finishing the book, each encounter with that thorn pattern on the cover stopped me in my tracks. It gave rise to that same experience, to those same feelings of love and acceptance of the thorns of my own path.
Rarely are book covers made into posters, but luckily, Martin Scorsese liked the book so much he made it into a movie, using that same thorn pattern on the movie poster.
Lucky Koi Fish
When my brother and I set out to pedal bicycles across the United States, my mom gave me this koi fish charm, which I hung from the bottom of my bike seat. A symbol of luck and perseverance, it proved worthy of both on the 4,450 mile journey alongside a whole lot of automobile traffic and it’s stuck with me ever since. It now hangs from the rearview mirror of my Honda Element, my on-and-off-used home on wheels of the past two and a half years. And damn, it sure does feel lucky.
Ex Libris Bookplate
Rather than recognized as personally powerful when encountered like all the other symbols consciously included in my life, this one was artfully composed of multiple symbols I was asked to come up with. Designed by Siena Baldi (a great friend and fantastic artist who splays her visual splendor all over the Big Island of Hawaii), it’s this mountain, mountain goat, sunrise, and stars scene that radiates “WONDER!!!” from the top of its sunlit peaks.
It’s an ex libris (also know as a “bookplate”) stamp meant to be stamped in the front of my books, so that friends and family who borrow them will, in theory, remember to return them. While this theory doesn’t exactly pan out in practice, each encounter inspires deep gratitude, wonder, and repeatedly reminds me the reminder of reminders: that life is best celebrated.
A Few Final Notes on Finding Your Symbols
1. If you haven’t read The Unsung Power of Symbols yet, read it! This article and why to search for your symbols will make much more sense.
2. Symbols work on the unconscious level. Reason will not result in the right symbols for yourself. Better to keep an awareness for the effect of symbols on yourself and take notice when it happens. To deliberately seek your symbols, you might reason the areas of your life that have the most meaning to you, but you have to feel around the areas to discover with what really resonates. This is a process that allows the conscious mind to better understand the unconscious mind, which I find utterly fascinating and cool.
3. Keep your symbols in view. A symbol won’t do any good tucked away in a drawer. My symbols are tucked in my left pocket, hung around my neck or rearview mirror, or intentionally placed somewhere I will encounter them multiple times a day.
4. Choose wisely. We become more like anything included in our lives, but symbols are particularly powerful things. A good test of any potential symbol is to really ask “do I really want to be more like that?”
5. I’ll leave you with some words I read online that sparked my fascination and interest taking so deep a dive into symbols over the last month:
“Symbols have meaning. Meaning is a part of their nature. Road signs are symbols with simple meanings. Some symbols have deeper meaning. They are a powerful gate to the deeper and less conscious levels of human experience. Symbols evoke profound emotions and memories—at a very primal level of our being—often without our making rational or conscious connections. They fuel our imagination. Symbols enable us to access aspects of our existence that cannot be accessed in any other way.”
Finding and integrating the symbols that resonate with your unconscious is a fascinating, fruitful endeavor. Should you choose to undertake such a deliberate quest, I wish you the best of luck in your search.
