EMBRACING MY SHADOW
PodBean Link for those who like to listen.
This morning the air is all sweet grass and tea rose as the cockerel announces the new day.
Alt text says this week’s image is a collage of shadows of a person's face and a person's head. I say it is me trying to take photos of my shadow with flowers for eyes.
I laughed when I compared the recent ‘dandelion eyes shadow photo’ with one that I took six years ago. In the older picture I had not at first noticed the flap from my camera which gave me the look of Frankenstein’s Monster. I liked the progress of my photography, but the time gap surprised me. It didn’t feel like 6 years had passed. I have a good memory for some things and this means that I often think things have happened recently even when they haven’t. I also noticed that I hadn’t paid much attention to the proportions of the human head during my art o-level, so my ability to get the eyes in a relatively anatomically correct place was not as easy as I thought it would be.
Seeing those two photos felt like a timely reminder to crack on and take some more shadow photos. My walks this week have been sunny so this gave me the perfect opportunity to experiment a little. I wanted to see if I could find different flowers for my eyes. I found buttercups. And my neck is only a little reminiscent of having a bolt in it.
Having fun with my shadow reminded me of a coaching session I had recently enjoyed which focused on my shadow side. A playful and rich exploration of parts of me that I might typically label negative, but which I could learn from. This was built on this week at a webinar where I began to contemplate other aspects and to lean into how approaching this with honesty and self-compassion would enable me to embrace the shadow. Of course then I had a range of pictures in my head of trying to wrap my arms round my shadow and this became a whole cartoon strip of its own. One of my key values being humour this did not surprise me, and perhaps it was also a way of lightening the mood when I was thinking about shadow elements. I used the thinking time of my country road walks to contemplate my shadow sides, and to build on the thoughts which arose from a conversation which took place in a breakout room on zoom.
Facing my shadows whilst in the bright sunlight of being human feels refreshing. It’s not always easy to acknowledge these aspects, but leaving them in the darkness or keeping them buried doesn’t improve things whereas thinking about their origin and how they are currently showing up becomes interesting and allows them to be talkable to.
Today I will share a poem from my second collection ‘Welcome to the Museum of a Life’ that goes well with thinking about walking along a country road.
I HATE YOU
said the cow.
Yeah, she hates you, whispered the grass,
hates you,
hates you, it swished on and on.
So, I climbed the gate.
Get off, you’re too heavy, said the gate.
Yeah, you’re gonna break us,
said the padlock on the chain.
I stepped over a large muddy puddle,
marvelled at a greeny-brown cowpat.
Imagine creating that!
Then I remembered that the cow
hated me
and I ditched my admiration.
Stop looking at me
and notice how quiet it is, stupid,
said the cowpat.
I lifted my head to the clouds,
caught the eye of a bird I couldn’t name,
saw its beak begin to open.
I wondered if the silence would shatter
like a pint glass, all splinters and nibs,
or just quietly split down the middle
like surface ice on a pond.
There’s only one of you.
The unknown bird was staring at me.
I waited for it to cock its head.
It remained still;
a totem carved in the tree.
You want me to repeat that
don’t you?
mocked a heron
standing on the path,
You think I have ancient grey wisdom
and the key to solitude.
I did.
I wanted to keep going
but as his wings opened like a prayer
I froze.
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