Visualization exercise, 9 years ago:

I went down a staircase, and stopped at the door at the bottom, marked "Intuition". I opened the door. In the center of the damp, dim, stone-walled dungeon of a room was an urn, bronze, with a repeated fleur-de-lis pattern embossed on it.

The urn was over three feet high, and the opening on top was a foot or so wide. I saw water inside, clear and dark and unmoving, a scrying place.

I walked around the urn, trailing one hand along its side, until I came to the back. Here, the urn had a fissure down the full height of itself, where I could look at the water inside, which remained suspended in the vessel though it should have all run out. The water looked like sky, all blue and dotted with cumulus clouds.

I felt that the urn was deep and calm, at least calm on the surface. Is that me? Is it that I keep myself down, but inside me is a radiant exuberance, the sky? Does the fissure show that I try to hold everything inside, when it's obvious that everything should be spilling out all over the place? Or maybe I keep all my ducks in a row even in the face of chaos; maybe I see potential in myself but still somehow can't let it out, even when the casual observer sees that it has nowhere to go but out.