A Mark that Made Itself

Can you recall a special moment that wasn’t planned or announced?

We don’t need an invitation for many of the most cherished moments in life.

Rather, they seem to arrive tucked inside an ordinary afternoon. This story recalls one of those. A deck, good conversation, and the particular light that the Adirondacks offer on a summer day when one has time to take notice.

She didn’t come for a sigil. She stopped by just to say hi. We were catching up the way you do with someone you have known so long. Flowing between the big things and nothing at all. At some point, without quite planning to, I said…

“You’re here, what better time
than now!”

I had been sitting with sigil work for a while by then. Feeling my way into it the way you feel your way into something completely new but important…slowly. With some doubt and with more curiosity than confidence.

I hadn't done this with anyone yet, not like this. But something about that afternoon felt right. She had mentioned before that she wanted a sigil, and there we were.

I grabbed paper and pencil while she sat with a statement she had already been carrying. We started to discuss all the things in her life that were heavy for her, and when she told me her statement, it made sense. “I honor my strength and discipline.”

While I began the work of breaking the statement down, finding what lived inside those words, what shape intention wants to take when you stop trying to force it, she closed her eyes and sat with it. She meditated on the words while I worked. I don't know exactly what she was holding then, but I know what I was.

I was watching something make itself.

There is a moment in the sigil process that I am still learning to trust… when the mark stops being something I work on and becomes something I am witnessing. The lines of her sigil had a quality I recognized immediately, even though I had never made one quite like it. Angular. Taut. It pushed back. It had strength. It had discipline. There was the flow of a life that moves through difficulty without breaking, and underneath that, something sharper. Something that protects.

I laughed. I couldn't help it.

Because I know her. I know the particular way she has had to hold herself together this past few years. A career asking more from her than it gives, children on their way to living their own lives in college, and the daily work of remembering who you are underneath everything being asked of you.

To add to that, I know that she has been surrounding herself with objects that have history and weight. Old things. Things that have edges.

The sigil design seemed to “know” all of that.

She opened her eyes and looked at what I had made. I don't know how to describe what crossed her face exactly. It was something between recognition and relief. Like seeing your own name written in a language you didn't know you spoke.

Custom ceramic incense burner with carved sigil speaking to personal strength and discipline.

She commissioned me to carve the sigil was carved into a small ceramic incense burner. A sage green vessel with a fitted lid that had the sigil as openings for the incense to come through. Something for her to use to remember and return to. She uses it now when she meditates, the mark present at the edges of her awareness, a silent reminder of what she already knows.

That afternoon was early. Unplanned. I had no session structure, workbook, or process refined by repetition. Just a back deck, a perfect summer day, and a friend who showed up without knowing she was arriving at exactly the right moment.

I think about that now when the doubt comes in… and it does come in. The voice that wonders if this is too small a thing, too “woo” of a practice, too much to ask someone to trust. Then I think about the way that sigil made itself for someone who needed it. The way the mark knew her before I had finished drawing it. The voice then steps back and realizes, “it’s ok”.

What would it mean to have something like that… something made entirely for you, that carries what you need to remember most? To have a symbol that sits on your desk, your altar, or your wall. It doesn’t ask anything of you except that you glance at it now and then…

I am still learning what this work is. But I think it starts there. On a deck, at the end of a good afternoon, when someone says…

“You’re here, what better time than now.”

 So I’ll leave you with this:

What is something in your life that feels like an enemy…but might actually be waiting to become a partner?

What would it look like to create a reminder of that? Something you can return to, again and again?

By your side,

Beth