What is shadow ... what is self?

Reflecting on moments from other times

For 14 years and 1286 posts, I blogged.

Through too many deaths, too many losses, I blogged.

Through 3 states, 2 countries, 10 houses, 3 RVs, I blogged.

For the rest of 2023, I’m going to reflect on some of those memories.

September 17, 2009 - Lafayette, Colorado

This picture calls to me this morning because of what's there and what actually isn't there. The shadow is a passing play of light, an indication that something real exists but in another space. The colorful wall is actually there but largely obscured by the shadow which will soon be gone. What in our lives is real and what is shadow?

Right now a friend is in the hospital dealing with a health condition he has faced his entire adult life. He is strong and vital yet this shadow of disease regularly passes across his life. The shadow isn't him and yet it changes the picture of his life and sometimes obscures the colorful self behind the shadow. What I'm grappling with this morning is how does he ... how do we ... stay connected to our colorful true self when the very solar system we live in casts shadows that distort our lives? How do we determine what is shadow and what is self?

At any one moment, the picture of our lives is part shadow and part solid wall. It seems all too easy to be distracted by the passing shadow, the drama of the ever-shifting reflection of people, things and conditions around us and, thereby, lose touch with the foundation of who we actually are. It reminds me of a time-lapse video of fast-moving traffic in a large city. The shadows of our lives pass so rapidly about us that they become all we see ... the furious motion, the dark, moving shapes, the speeding intangibility. Until we just want to cry, "Stop!" and quietly acknowledge each colorful, solid brick in the reality of our lives.

Today I intend to focus on that wall of colorful bricks of self rather than on the myriad of shadows that have projected themselves across my life in the recent past. I am also reminded that there are many unpainted bricks on that wall and that I can choose new colors and continue to paint those bricks.

Reflection: The friend who was sick was my first husband, a Vietnam Marine who brought back an illness that haunted the rest of his days. The war hastened the demise of our marriage and left a shadow where our love had been. We spent long hours by phone and email remembering that love when the death of my second husband opened a space for that conversation. Both are now gone and the shadows still flicker.

What shadows from the past still flicker for you?

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Y en esta día … 11/27/2023

This morning, I stopped at a librería and immediately felt the weight of politics and poetry. I shouldn’t have been surprised, I’m in the state of Chiapas, home of the Zapatistas. Engrained in this territory of colorful artisans … textiles, clay sculptures, and pottery, is the spirit of resistance.

I pick up a tiny volume of poetry, chosen primarily because of its woman author and language which I can (almost) read, and settling in with a generous pot of chai con leche, comenzo studying the language which has frustrated me for the past decade.

Leo: “In Mexico to be woman is a risk, you can be exploited, violated, disappeared, and assassinated. 8,495 women have been disappeared in Mexico in nine years, principally in the states of Mexico and Tamaulipas. Of them 625 were found dead and the rest are just missing.”Source: Paola Morales, Huffpost.

We might call this poetry book a horse of a different color. … un caballo de un otro color.

Translating the first stanza of the first poem, I read it as …

The beasts, Rosa,

travel through the darkness

stalking misfortune.

I want to go behind them

putting your name in their pupils

until they see how the light of their existence

is extinguished.

On that cheerful note, I’m off to see more of this beautiful city.