© Darice Pauselius
“#Trust30 (Self-Reliance) is an online initiative and 30-day writing challenge that encourages you to look within and trust yourself.” Today’s Challenge: Intuition
The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you could picture your intuition as a person, what would he or she look like? If you sat down together for dinner, what is the first thing he or she would tell you?
Finally! Something different! This I can get excited about! Can’t you tell from my overuse of exclamation points!?
So after taking a few deep breaths and trying to organize my thoughts, I realize it’s a lot easier said than done. I figure I’ll start where it makes sense to start…and stop when my spirit feels emptied.
I have a wonderful book, The Book of Qualities by J. Ruth Gendler (see details below my rambling) that I haven’t read in a long time…but I still remember the feelings it evoked in me. The truth and honesty behind Gendler’s words and ideas felt very natural – very intuitive. The first time I read it, I had just begun listening to myself, hearing what my inner voice had to say and actually giving her some credit. It’s also when I realized that the little voice wasn’t my conscience (something I feel is impacted by outside sources) but my intuition (feelings and knowledge that are not only instinctual but entirely mine.)
If I were to sit down with her now and have a real talk – one of those talks you never want to end because you feel like you’re discovering a new part of yourself, and you want to unwrap it entirely and eat it up. I would first apologize for not giving her more attention at times, and hesitating to trust her when I did.
I think she would tell me that it’s okay…that there’s nothing to apologize for. She would encourage me to visit her more often and doubt myself less. Because the important issues in our relationship had been discussed (you needn’t use at lot of words when talking to your intuition – she knows what you mean) we would talk about other things that were on our mind…
The Book of Qualities by J. Ruth Gendler
Excitement wears orange socks.
Despair papered her bathroom walls with newspaper articles about acid rain.
Joy drinks pure water.
The Book of Qualities presents 74 qualities – including Pleasure, Anger, Terror, Beauty, and Change as everyday characters who live among us. Both personal and impersonal, the Qualities convey a variety of human emotions in a simple and entertaining manner; readers are inspired to reflect on their own qualities and communicate their feelings with new clarity.
About the Qualities
When I was a little girl, I made up a story about the store where they sell Qualities. More like a trading post or library than a department store or supermarket, we could go to the store where they sell Qualities to taste, try on, and sample various qualities. From time to time as a teenager I made notes about the factory where they manufacture facts and the image warehouse where they store belief systems.
As I committed myself more seriously to writing Qualities, I began to consider the limits of emotional language. We often assume we know the dimensions of an emotional quality and whether it is good or bad without taking the time to see where the quality can take us and what it can teach us.
During the process of writing The Book of Qualities I felt like an explorer trying to penetrate underneath the layers and stereotypes to experience the Qualities more directly. I was turning my skills in investigation and observation inward, focusing on the textures and colors of the emotional landscape, calling on my training as both a journalist and an artist.
The Qualities seem to exist in a community of their own, apart from us, and simultaneously, they are very familiar, a part of our everyday world. I imagine that the Qualities live together in a town–Courage lives on the same block as Fear. Faith and Doubt are in the same apartment building; Despair hangs out in the basement. However, I don’t want to emphasize the Town of Qualities too much because it implies that the Qualities are separate from us, and they seem to be both in and around us. Reading the Qualities aloud brings them to life; even the same Qualities change subtly in response to the moods and needs of the people listening.
The Qualities continue to open doors in several directions at once. I am interested in the difference between similar Qualities such as Joy and Ecstasy, Contentment and Pleasure and the relationships between seeming opposites like Certainty and Confusion, Beauty and Ugliness. What happens when Courage and Simplicity work on a project together, when Pleasure and Sufficiency take a walk? Somewhere around the New Year I choose a Quality for the year and then pick one out of a bowl of Qualities, walking between the one I choose and the one that chose me. Each Quality has its own challenges and gifts.
