---
title: Working with the Unseen: Symbols with Weight
description: There is a thing you have never told anyone in full. A room that read wrong and kept reading wrong. A dream that knew things it had no way to know. An object th
url: https://kelliejoart.com/working-with-the-unseen-symbols-with-weight
date_modified: 2026-08-13
author: Kellie Jo Close
language: en
---

There is a thing you have never told anyone in full. A room that read wrong and kept reading wrong. A dream that knew things it had no way to know. An object that behaved. Strangely. You checked yourself afterward, the way careful women do, and the check came back inconclusive, so you filed it away and kept living.

This category is where those files come back out of the drawer.

This site is a haunted library that fell down the stairs into a website, and you are standing in its strangest wing: art, ritual, and symbolic tools for self-reflection, spiritual practice, and the inner work that refuses to stay visible. Everything shelved here does one job. It gives form to what you sense and cannot always explain.

Four rooms open off this one. The in-between of folklore and the paranormal. Energy and intention. Symbolic art. Banishment. I will walk you through them in the order I learned them, and at each door I will tell you why the room exists and what it holds for you.

## The In-Between of Folklore and the Paranormal

### Room One

Start here if the unexplained has already found you.

It found me early.

Weeks after my grandfather died, I rounded the corner into Nana’s kitchen and he was there, making a sandwich. There for a flash, and then gone. For a while I believed I had seen his ghost. Then he came to me in a dream: younger, glowing, whole, no respirator, smelling of the drawer that held his white t-shirts. He said, “Kellie Jo, everything is going to be all right,” and my heart believed him. When I woke, I knew the difference between the two events. The kitchen was wishful thinking. The dream was a visit.

That sorting is the whole discipline of this room. Watch me do it again under pressure.

The house my first husband and I rented in Germany was haunted before we ever signed, and our dysfunction probably fed the thing until it got as big as the foyer. It kept one bedroom dark through sunny afternoons. It opened a door I closed every day. Once it lifted a can of tomato juice off my kitchen counter, held it in the air, and dropped it, and the juice poured itself into an arrow on the floor, pointed at me. My husband saw the arrow too. I thought I heard the thing laugh.

Pretty sure I imagined the laugh.

That sentence is the discipline in six words. The can: witnessed, by two of us. The laugh: probably my own fear, doing what fear does. Each goes in the file where it belongs. If somebody once trained you to [distrust your own perception](https://verbalabusejournals.com/about-abuse/examples-of-verbal-abuse/), you already know why I test mine this hard. The testing is how I got it back.

On my last night in that house, alone and seven months pregnant, I woke on the couch to television static and the sound of something sliding down the stairs. It reached the foyer and began to stand, and it kept standing, letting me know how big it was before it would rush me. That is the feeling I can still call up today. The feeling that I would not survive it.

I screamed for help, and a pair of feet came down the spiral staircase fast: a long robe, lifting with each step, nobody visible wearing it. The robe stopped between me and the thing and turned its back to me. There was a pulse. Then the foyer was just a foyer. Someone stepped in for me. Literally, stepped in for me.

Years later, in Texas, the feet came back. I was carrying a guilt I could not hand to anyone; I had an affair while my husband was deployed, and the guilt was mine, carried alone. When I saw the feet again my first thought was that I had gotten Germany wrong, that the feet were the evil and the rescue had been staged. So I tested them. I screwed up my courage and followed, and they led me to the old family bible, which fell open to Psalm 23. I began reading the book that had opened itself, and writing about it, and that is when the voice came through. A woman’s voice. I asked who she was.

*“You would most likely call me your guardian angel. You can call me Pauline.”*

She named herself. Remember that when we reach the third room.

Pauline has a fierce streak that comes from love. She also has a falling out with me on her record from the end of that marriage, and at least one failed delivery: a spirit once sat down on my couch hoping I could carry a message to his wife, and his voice faded before I caught her name. The misses stay shelved beside the hits. That is what keeps this room a library instead of a stage.

The first piece in this room is a teaching Pauline gave me about demons: nothing ancient is scheming under the floorboards; we manufacture our own tormentors, one repeated harm at a time, and call them ancient because we cannot bear to call them ours. [What Pauline Taught Me About Demons]. The fuller story of that marriage lives at [Verbal Abuse Journals](https://verbalabusejournals.com), where I wrote it down as it happened. And this room keeps one rule posted at the door: curiosity without discernment is a trap. Discernment without empathy is a weapon.

Twice in my life, help I didn’t know I summoned crossed a room for me. The next room is about the help you build on purpose.

## Energy & Intention

### Room Two

One more thing happened at that German house, in the backyard, on an ordinary afternoon. Something small struck my ankle. I looked down and found a tumbled clear quartz, arrived from nowhere I could name. I picked it up and held it. Cool but not cold. Warm but not hot. Thirty years of stone and herb knowledge started at my ankle that day, and all of it lives in this room.

Here is the claim this room makes, and I want it exact. A tool is not a cure. It is a place where your body finally gets to participate in what your spirit is trying to do. The power is yours. It is never in the object.

I worried for years that saying even that much would get me filed under charlatan, so I went looking for what holds up. It turns out the mechanism has names now. At Harvard, patients told outright that their pills were inert sugar improved anyway; the researcher’s conclusion, after decades, was that the more ritualized the treatment, the more serious and important it feels.

Grief rituals measurably steady people who say they hold no belief in ritual at all, because deliberate hands tell the mind the world can still be acted on. Philosophers have argued since 1998 that an object reliably at hand and woven into your thinking is part of your mind in every sense that matters. A doll on your shelf that you speak to daily is doing cognitive work. Science has spent the last few decades catching up to this practice.

So this room teaches intention as a decision you make with your hands: what the gemstones and herbs are actually doing in the work, how the seasons and cycles fit, and how to build a practice that survives your most skeptical morning. Already shelved here: [*Grounding Objects for Therapy Rooms That Refuse to Be Greige*](https://kelliejoart.com/grounding-objects-for-therapy-room/). A full guide to embodied spiritual tools is on the workbench, and the reference entries, one stone or herb at a time, will fill this room’s longest shelf.

An anchor will hold anyone. When the object is also art, something more particular begins. Next room.

## Metaphysical & Symbolic Art

### Room Three

I told you to remember that Pauline named herself.

Every doll I build does the same thing. Each one starts on my worktable as yarn, stones, and herbs, and somewhere in the making she tells me who she is. Some give me their names early. Some hold out until the work is nearly done. They always give them. The dolls you are about to meet have all gone home to their Keepers, so I can introduce you properly.

Susanna knew her name before I did. She also wanted far more purple than she got; she got green instead of lilac because, unlike Susanna, *I* will not dash out at midnight for the preferred color of yarn. We negotiate. Brigit told me to change her top from blue to green, and I obeyed.

Roberta likes Dolly Parton, so she received a coat of many colors while Sam Cooke sang about her in my head through the whole build. Hollie Rose loves to whistle. Of Butterfly I wrote to her Keeper: *“as I created her, she created her soul. I called her Butterfly, and I will miss her”*.

It took me years to hear the rhyme in all of this: a guardian who named herself, and a worktable of dolls that do the same. That rhyme is the reason this room exists. [Art has done ritual work](https://kelliejoart.com/language-fails-art-speaks/) for as long as there has been art, and the making is the first ritual: the hours of shaping steady the maker’s whole nervous system, and the object that comes out the other side carries that steadiness in its body.

Everything that arrives while I build a doll goes onto her creation sheet and ships with her: what her Keeper asked for, and what came through that nobody said out loud. The Keepers write back to tell me the intuitions landed. Every [SoulStitch™](https://kelliejoart.com/custom-spirit-doll/) and [You-Do-You Voodoo™](https://kelliejoart.com/custom-watcher-art-doll/) doll leaves this library carrying her own first document.

Shelved here: *[Voodoo Dolls and Modern Spirituality](https://kelliejoart.com/voodoo-dolls-in-modern-spirituality/)*, on what these dolls are and what they have never been. The dolls themselves are [in the shop](https://kelliejoart.com/buy-art/available-now/), stones and herbs included, each chosen for the specific weight she will hold.

Three rooms about what you let in. The last room is about what has to leave.

## The Art of Banishment

### Room Four

This room is for the day you are done making a home for what drains you. A person, a pattern, a fear, a memory, the residue that keeps whispering long after the danger is gone. Banishment is eviction. It does not ask you to be cruel. It asks you to be clear.

You have already watched one banishment on this page. The robe turned its back to me, there was a pulse, and the foyer was just a foyer. I did not perform that one. It was performed for me. In the years since, I have taught myself to banish negativity and evils, and I have done it several times, though never on a force like the one in that foyer. I hope never to meet an energy that strong again. If I do, I will try to put it out myself. And if I have to, yelling “Help!” is still in my back pocket.

Some things need understanding. Some things need grieving. Some things need to be named, removed, and barred from reentry. The articles coming to this shelf sort out which is which: what eviction actually looks like when I have done it, how to know what deserves to stay, and cord-cutting without any damn glitter.

This is the youngest room in the wing, and it is the one my whole story argues for. I lived under a thing that wanted me gone, in a house and then in a marriage, and I am still here. Clarity got me out both times. This room teaches the clarity.

## Leaving the Library

If one of these rooms held your file, start there. The shelves are filling in that order, and the Shadow Seekers’ Dispatch is where I write about this wing while the work is still on the table, including the dolls that are still telling me who they are. [Sign up](https://kelliejoart.com/shadow-seekers-dispatch-signup-newsletter/) and you will hear it first.

The dolls that come from this practice are [in the shop](https://kelliejoart.com/buy-art/available-now/), each with her creation sheet and most of the compositional elements she asked for. If one keeps pulling your eye back, that is worth listening to. It is usually how this starts.

Ritual with a spine.   
Meaning you can put your hands on.   
The library is open.

## See the Full Working with the Unseen Collection

## Completely Custom Dolls

For what doesn’t have a shape yet.

[Shop now](https://kelliejoart.com/custom-spirit-dolls/)