The Brilliance of Shadows
One of the most illuminating things I know is the light within shadows. So often, what is vibrantly highlighted is best framed by the darker places in which it’s nestled.
Sometimes that’s simple and literal, as with the shadows of trees drawing unique patterns on the forest floor, or the shadow of our aging cat in the kitchen’s morning sunlight. At times, the most accurate self-portraits I’ve taken of me and my beloved are the pictures of her shadow and mine, falling on whatever beautiful landscape we’re hiking through. Only then does the smallness of our place within the greater beauty shine through. Only then does the focus of the photo reflect our mindful reverence for all that’s naturally beautiful beyond us.
Other times, the darkness is more metaphorical and internal. A few decades ago, when I was a young cancer patient, it was the darkness of illness that best illuminated my personal definition of health. Also, when seeking insight on life directions, it’s frequently been under moonless midnight stars in which my internal compass is most clearly reset. When my consciousness too has gone dark for the night, many dreams have provided guidance for navigating waking hours. Several times, I’ve awoken spontaneously singing lines from a Paul Simon song: “If the answer is infinite light/Why do we sleep in the dark?”
I resist the depiction of darkness as “bad,” just as I don’t refer to rainstorms as “bad” weather. Weather without rain becomes drought, which becomes disastrous thirst and fire. Polar seasons where the sun never sets (or never rises) are inhospitable to human rhythms of sleep and waking. Sun without shadow is relentless.
Our inner shadows can be a humbling teacher, when the light they shine upon our faults is unflattering. Yet they can be our greatest teacher too, if we’re willing to look with curiosity at their soft brilliance. As in photography: once you begin to focus on the shadows, your eyes adjust, and new beautiful details become apparent. Once you begin to seek the patterns within what at first seems ugly, enlightening visions emerge. Compassionate focus on our shadows reveals their essential value.
Similarly, I’ve learned through mindfulness meditation to embrace what at first seems like a distraction. So, a loud motorcycle roars by the meditation room? Listen intently to its sound, rather than try to shut it out, and it becomes a bell of mindfulness, a call to attention. Have an itch that tempts you to scratch, while sitting in stillness? Try to ignore it, and its strength only grows. But focus all your attention on it, and soon it fades. The shadows around and within us can be a call to attention too.
Our shadows are a fine reminder of the cyclical, curvaceous nature of all existence. Breath rises and falls. Day begets darkness, which begets dawn again. Wars begin, but wars end. Illness embraced can lead to greater health beyond it, as cancer did for me. Massive climate shifts end eras, lives, even entire species; but then leave room for new living forms. You and I likely wouldn’t exist if an asteroid hadn’t wiped out the dinosaurs. Who and what will emerge from time’s long shadows, in ages far beyond our own? There’s no way to know, but the earth breathes in geological ages, and the universe beyond it breathes in longer ages still. There will be light and life in distant times and places, and it will cast brilliant shadows too. Wisdom and beauty will be within those shadows, for anyone alive then and aware enough to look.
Comforted once more, I walk off into the gorgeous gathering dusk, my shadow lengthening until disappearance. Another brilliant moonrise is coming, and it too will cast artful shadows set in silver light.