Reason and Intuition

I consider myself an intuitive person, but what comes first, reason or intuition?

A few days ago I found myself choosing colours for a website design. My first instinct was mauve and green, like a globe artichoke. Still, I decided not to rush it. I let the thought sit for a few days, placing the question of colour on a slow burner while I retreated into my usual ‘cave’.

For me, colour becomes magical when it is chosen with care and charged with intention. It speaks to deeper layers of the psyche, touching something beyond words. Colour is a kind of symbolic alphabet rooted in the archetypal world. Even without lines or shapes it can evoke feeling – much like the stark power of Kazimir Malevich’s famous Black Square.

So I set the mauve and green aside and started again with a blank sheet. I wrote down a handful of words: creativity, receptivity, fluidity, stillness, peace, quiet, mystery, the invisible, the nebulous. These qualities felt lunar to me, qualities of the moon. If that was true, then the colours should also be moonlike – soft, tertiary tones. Yet the moon itself appears in countless shades depending on the sky.

Reason couldn’t take me any further, so I stepped back. I waited a day or two, letting the question simmer. It stayed quietly present while I remained passive but receptive. Then one day, as I picked up my sketchbook, a dry old leaf slipped out and landed on my lap. It held exactly the colours I had been searching for – the colours of an August moon.

For me, this is how the magic often happens. I begin with reason and follow it as far as it can go. When it reaches its limit, intuition picks up the thread. All I have to do then is listen and wait for that quiet, steady clarity to reveal itself.