Lately I've felt stuck about what to share, yet I would speak a lot in various conversations. I felt uncomfortable to keep expressing myself with lots of maybes and I can't seem to find the right word, yet I found acceptance and an anchoring in connecting to the uncertainty.
I feel tired of some things, yet most alive. The nights have been long and restful and the days rolled by slowly, yet filled with time in nature, around earth, water, plants, animals, and books.
I hear the overwhelm of my friends in Guatemala, Brazil, the US, or just over the mountains here, while I am longing for quiet, restoration, and healing. I have tea with a grounded, quiet person and I find myself to be the loud, scattered one.
There is very little right / wrong or good / bad in this world. There is, however, useful and not useful. there are also things that are sometimes destructive, as well as things which are engendering. There are actions that are properly integrated and intentioned and those that are not.
And so I wish to share with you a topic that I am engaged with - shadow.
photo by my talented husband
I am deep in the study of this wonderful book where the above quote comes from. I use the words deep and study because it seems to be an experiential reading and not so much an intellectual one.
Oh how I love the expansive, wild, all inclusive and all consuming, cyclical feminine creative energy.
For a long time, darkness and shadow made me very fearful. Images that I can't recall how they go there, dancing in my mind, attached to sharp endings, death in the most nihilistic interpretations. Dark dreams that only loud screams could get me out of.
Afraid, uninitiated, I kept the shadow in the dark, under the water, in the basement locked up where I thought it belonged.
Thankfully, the shadow grew louder. One thing I became curious about was flow and I responded to the curiosity, maybe like you, through a rational lens. By flow I mean that state that we reach when we experience joy and creativity through experiences of complete involvement with life. So I added this practice, got that tool, read this book, spoke to that person...yet somehow finding flow through consumerism didn't feel fully right to me.
And then I started awakening to the monthly experiences that are specific to having a female body - the flow of life and death and life.
You did not expect me to go there, did you?
Just like I read in the book, death is like night in between two days. When we surrender to that and find the depth of wisdom in these life and death experiences we have been blessed with, the world around us changes and shifts.
How did we get here? Generations over generations of numbing the pain, and sterilizing the life and death natural process, silencing it because we feel uncomfortable talking about it.
I wonder, grounding ourselves monthly, surrendering to death, could this be a form of befriending the shadow?
What scattered bones lie there in the dark that have been calling for our attention?
What needs to die?
What life might we be afraid to give birth to?
taken on a hike with my wild man
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These quotes, questions, openness to share are happening at a time when I am reading
Women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés
and have been listening to the wonderful voice of Sharon Blackie and Pat McCabe. What I encounter in their shared knowledge are the very experiences I am going through. You see, this time ideas follow experience and not the other way around.
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STOPOhhh, I love your shadow images - I have collected many studies of shadow, many of them self-portraits, over the years - you inspire me to write a post! - the beautiful co-collaboration nature, sun, shadow and human.... mmmmmmmmm