“I have been a doodler since college. I call them “doodles” because they are born from my subconscious, not my imagination. I don’t render them into existence so much as they seem to choose to be expressed. Whenever I try to draw something on purpose the image is crude and uninspired. But, when I let the pen or pencil or crayon do its thing, what comes out is usually the beginning of something surprising and engaging, which I can then enhance.”
from “The Gathering Girl” by Amanda Irene Rush
In 2017, when I was working on my memoir, “The Gathering Girl,” I started what I came to call a “Doodle Journal.” From a young age, I had kept journals, but my entries were sporadic. I’d write in one for a few days or weeks fairly faithfully, then the fear of putting down something less than brilliant would settle upon me and the self-censoring would begin and the writing would end. Doodling helped free me from that inner critic.
The happy tree and rabbit first showed up in September of 2018:
Sometimes, only the tree would make an appearance:
Sometimes, there’d be more than one rabbit:
The tree deemed herself “a Happy Little Tree”:
By the following year, the happy tree and rabbit had become such a recurring image in my journal, I began to wonder if the rabbit were my spirit animal:
In the early days of Covid, the happy tree and rabbit helped remind me that there was still stability and hope in the world:
By June of 2020, I had adopted the happy tree and rabbit as my signature doodle:
The tree embodies the harmony of opposing tensions within all of us: our roots reaching deep, seeking knowledge of who we are and where we stand; our branches reaching out for light, seeming to embrace the vast and unpredictable world around us. And the rabbit: she symbolizes fertility, luck, creativity, compassion, intuition. Together, the happy tree and rabbit help me feel grounded and hopeful.
amandairush.com 