Shadows

“You see but your shadow when you turn your back to the sun.”

Kahlil Gibran

The obvious (to me) meaning in this has to do with turning away from the source of life/understanding/love etc. and how that leaves one seeing and feeling only the painful, dark, negative things in oneself and in life. But shadows, at least our own shadows, offer us other very interesting metaphors.

Shadows are, in a way, our original way of seeing ourselves from outside ourselves. More recently, mirrors, and later film and video, enabled us to see ourselves in great, accurate detail–but in some ways, we may see ourselves better in our shadows. Mirrors etc. show us in full color and accuracy–our surface, anyway–and so generally do not draw us inward. They do not activate our imagination, only our perception. And contemplation of such images of ourselves can be very othering, because they resemble so closely our everyday perceptions of others.

Our shadows, on the other hand, give us clues to ourselves, but we have to think, to imagine, in order to make much out of these clues, and this leads us to seek inward for more clues. And our shadows are directly attached to us, in our perception, in a way that mirror images, or even more so, film or video images, are not, so they are less othering in that way also. Thus the insights we gain from contemplating our shadows may be more “owned”, more inwardly connected, than those gained from reflections or recorded images.

So we may learn about ourselves in new ways when we turn our back to the the sun–to the drenching light that overwhelms us with the perceptual stream of sense impressions of everything outside ourselves. By thus turning away, we project just enough of an image of ourselves into/onto that perceptual stream to call into play all our powerfully developed systems of understanding what’s outside us, in the service of understanding ourselves. We look inward and outward at the same time, and hence what we learn may uniquely help connect us both to our inmost self and to the world. A refreshing thing to do from time to time.

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