Angela, that’s a good question. I choose images, landscapes, phrases, cartoons, and paragraphs from magazines because they catch my eye. Sometimes their connection to my current life issues is obvious, sometimes not. Some images are personal metaphors or dream symbols of long standing — for instance, there is always some form of boat or water vessel on my journal covers.

So in this way I am conscious of the collage being a reading of where I am in the moment, and what I want to have happen in the next little while. I haven’t tried looking at them in retrospect, but maybe I’ll try that sometime.

This month I went even farther, and Goddess help me if this is a new trend: I bought a 2007 datebook, then decided it needed a collage cover too! The funny thing about the whole practice is that over time it has become a necessary part of my writing process. If I am starting a new journal but haven’t made a cover for it yet, and also have a bunch of other writing projects to do, I find that the other projects are very difficult to move forward unless I first attend to the making of the journal cover. Somehow that releases some kind of energy that helps grease the wheels of my primary form of expression. I don’t understand it but it feels good and I think I’m for it.

I also do collage art for my journals and find it a good way to see outside of myself the patterns of energy that are flowing through my life at the time that I start the journal.

Do you find that the themes in the collage on your covers bear any relation to or influence the spiritual issues you encounter while filling up that journal?