Shadows

What happens when someone points out my shadow?

In the photographic world, both light and shadow are needed for a picture to have depth, texture and bold richness.  Too much light and a picture is either overexposed or just flat.  Too much shadow and the picture is dark and unrecognizable.  The two - shadow and light - tumble over and around each other to create a dynamic interplay.

But what about inside of me?  Are the truths of photography true of my soul as well?  There is both light and shadow inside me, and like the picture world, one is not evil and the other one good.  Though we love, in our dualistic society, to personify light and darkness as enemies, they can be allied hues that show a greater picture, if we are willing to be curious.

The light part of me is the part I fully know.  It is my strengths; it is the places I feel confident.  The shadow side of me, however, is my unexplored part.  Though I can see it in others, it is opaque and hidden from me.  It contains all the elements I disown about myself.  Elements that are true, both positive and negative, but I refuse to acknowledge.

Even without our looking for them, our shadow selves make an appearance when we react very strongly - positive and negative - to people (or ideas?) in our lives.  Those people or things that strongly repel or attract us give us clues to the hidden parts of our lives.

So what happens when someone points out my shadow?  What happens, hypothetically, in a fight heated conversation, when I find myself reacting in repulsion to that person or something that is said? Everything in me wants to only show my light-self and my instinct is to cram that shadow-self back in the box it had the audacity to venture out from.

However, as hurtful as it is to look at my shadow, perhaps that is exactly when I am granted a moment of salvation.  It is not a moment of "fix-it-and-make-the-shadow-turn-into-light", but rather a moment to invite back in the part of me I have rejected.  It is to allow the shadow to be known and so have the possibility to make beauty with my light, instead of just reeking havoc on my soul.

Gregory Mayers talks of being ruled by our shadows as a deep self-trance:

"The deep self-trance constricts our vision to preferred patterns of perception, a security matrix that blunts or masks the uncomfortable edge of our anxiety over the unknown.  In other words, we see what we want to see, what we have been taught to see, what we are told to see, what we expect to see.  We construct our world, extracting from the scene before us that which we prefer and leaving aside whatever is at odds with our preferences."  (Listen to the Desert: Secrets of Spiritual Maturity from the Desert Fathers and Mothers)

While it is easier to construct my own world and avoid the uncomfortable edges, that is not life. 

Not REAL life.

So what do I do when someone points out my shadow?  Well...first I throw an internal temper tantrum. (Just being honest!!)  I get defensive, cross the arms of my heart, and say things like "how dare they??"   Then, when I am done, the Spirit takes me by the hand and says "Fear not.  Let's explore this together."  And I learn once more that life is not meant to be flat or dark, but it is to have the depth that only light AND shadow can bring.