I exist!

Why am I so preoccupied with shadows these days? I read Wendell Berry of course, about how to let what I am afraid of just come.

Also I walk the May mornings, drenched in light. It confirms what I know already: the more sun, the stronger the shadows.

I was thinking today, how shadows really give evidence to your physical being. Wherever I go, I see myself reflected. There’s no denying it. I exist!

There has been times when I thought I was lighter than feathers. That if I jumped from a high place there would be no thump. No blood. No crying. Humans are strange that way. It is possible to count your two arms, your ten toes and ten fingers, and still doubt you are alive within a body.

I imagine it has to do with owning your own will.
But that is a different story.

So I have been standing in a window, wondering. It sounds like a sad story. It is. And it isn’t. For this is the strangely obvious but sometimes forgotten fact: shadows are proofs of the sun’s existence.

So shadow talk is not just about accepting the dark. It is as much about the opposite.

But to let the shadows come, and to focus on them, are two separate things. As similar, and as opposite as the North and the South Poles.

In the next posting I’ll conduct a small mental experiment to demonstrate the difference........

Photo © Grete S. Kempton

Conversations

The thing about repeating a poem over and over, is that the lines get a life of their own. They start talking back to you, and make echoes in you mind like reflected trees and leaves by the river’s edge.

It can happen when you least expect it. Or when you need them most.

This morning I woke with an ache. The thing itself is small, but with roots deep into the underworld of my being. In this, the small is really no more than old fear repeated. A (relatively) little thing that reminds me of a bigger thing, and therefore carries meaning outside of itself. Like a mouse with the cloak of a Raptor.

“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.”

I woke with an ache. And a song. Lines from Wendell Berry’s “I Go Among Trees and Sit Still” had started talking to me.

I cannot let this poem go. I know it has the power to save me.