When I walked out this morning, the sun was all around me. So were the shadows. I couldn’t deny them, they marked the very ground I walked on.
I don’t want to seem too clever or clichéd, but is this not life as well?
Had anyone (or God, to be more precise) asked me if I would like a life of sunshine without the shadows, would I have said a plain yes? Of course not. I would have shouted it with all my might, YES YES YES! No modesty here. I mean, who wants darkness?
Yet, I know this. Life on earth rests on certain principles. Where there is sun, you find shadows. To deny it, proves as hazardous as denying the law of gravity.
If I don’t track down my shadows, they will track me down. I have some experience. I know.
Yet Wendell Berry in “I Go Among Trees and Sit Still” comforts me. He walks. He sits.
Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.
When I started this blog, I wrote about anxiety. It can become a habit, like writing from left to right. To live a poem, to walk it, breath it, was and is a way of getting out of my automatic thinking, to inject some new thoughts.
When I walked out this morning, the sun was all around me. So were the shadows. I couldn’t deny them. And perhaps there is no need.
