2007-05-28

Embracing The Shadow

Yesterday I embraced my Shadow-that majority part of my soul and spirit from which I’ve spent a lifetime walking away. I’ve always known, in some tiny concealed portion of my consciousness, that it existed, but I’ve spent my lifetime wandering helplessly in a desert of Light, searching for my true skin, thinking I was seeking an Armour of Light. So I turned up shelves, hunted inside dusty cupboards, pawed through cobwebs, and flipped dust bunnies. All the while I consistently made no sense of the obvious truth, that my eyes scorched, my exposed muscles and nerves seared, and I wasn’t finding anything nearly like what I was seeking.

In the background, though, across the Threshold of Conscious Reality, lurked the Shadowed Grove, all this time: a massive growth of deformity never discovered in nature, where no ray of sunlight would dare to show its bright and smiling face. Creatures of the Light walk there not. Now and then came the rumbling chuckle, a sound like boulders shifting preparatory to a rockfall, and I knew the Dweller in the Shadows had its century of eyes on me. I knew—but still I always failed to expect the sudden ejection of an appendage across the threshold and directly in front of me, tripping me, so that once again I fall flat on my face, spawning ripples of Chaos across the landscape like a tossed stone ripples a pond. Always while I crumbled in shame and embarrassment tinged with guilt for my very existence, the Dweller in the Shadows chortled. Got me again!! Score’s up for the Dweller and nada for me.

Yesterday I found myself devouring a lovely fantasy {P. C. Hodgell’s God Stalk} and came to this description by a secondary character of the female protagonist:
“You have an attraction for violence.” Considering how the protagonist transforms when in rage, I found that both accurate, and also stimulating. Suddenly before my mind’s eye, the sentence from the book had been transformed by the Dweller in the Shadows, into a banner of flame, reading, like an arrow straight to Frost’s heart:
“YOU have a penchant for Chaos!! And you magnetise it wherever you go!!” This new version was rather unavoidable, considering as it hung directly in front of my mental vision, blocking the view otherwise, and zinged its way into my fevered consciousness.

I surrendered-no fool, me—turned, and crossed that Threshold, marching directly into the Shadowed Grove, thrusting my way in amongst the overgrown undergrowth, and addressed the Dweller in the Shadows directly and consciously. In fact, I embraced the Dweller—and as I did so, I perceived the Shadow fitting me like a second skin-nay, like a first skin, the very one that I had lacked for so long! At last, at last, I had found my place—no, it was NOT like coming home, it was rappelling backwards off a cavern ledge into pitch-blackness, unknowing the depth of the fall, whether miles or less, and finding when I released the end of the rope, that the drop was maybe two feet. So I found myself upright, aware, alert, unbroken, and for the first time, alive—clothed in my own skin and not someone else’s hand-me-down makeshift Armour. No—at last I am me: empowered, wrapped in my own identity, and standing on solid foundation. No longer do I dread earthquakes shifting under my metaphorical feet, nor fear the crack and sizzle of opening crevices racing toward me to encompass me like a modern-day Korah, nor the buffeting of winds roaring up from an unexpected side tunnel to pluck at my emotions and strum my exposed frayed nerves.
Not now..Incubus Frost has found its foundation, in the Shadows, embracing the cool breeze of night and the rumblings of the Dweller. What wonders and adventures lie ahead for us now?
--composed by Incubus Frost—28 May 2007