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. 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 eventually deemed herself “The Happy 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 is also a symbol of contradictions: timidity, skittishness, anxiety, fertility, luck, creativity, compassion, intuition. Together, the happy tree and rabbit remind me to embrace the paradoxes, to stay grounded, and to remain hopeful.
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