Shadow Work

He’d made hay while the sun shone. This he now understood as he dwelt in an endless winter and there seemed no way to return to the season of plenty. There was romance to this recollection. The child he’d once been had visited many a world via all the books he could get his hands on. This child also wrote. There was no border between reading and writing. Children know this truth as they know many others. There is a well within each and every one of us and in that well there reside infinite possibilities. When we peer into our depths, life rises up and speaks to us. And if we linger it sings our song and we find the harmony that we must dance and play to for all our days.

Now he was barren. However much he searched there was nothing of value for him to find. He was lost within himself. Surveying a devastation which had remained hidden for far too long. Termites of trauma had gone to work on him and he had watched himself crumble to dust. Too late to salvage anything of worth.

There was no rebuilding when all there was, was the dust and ashes of an end. He had died a thousand deaths and no one had found the body. There was nothing to bury. No one to commemorate the passing of who he had once been.

Memory was a casualty of the terrorist atrocities committed upon him. Clandestine attacks against his infrastructures. Foundations undermined whilst he’d aimlessly wandered the buildings above. Swaddled in a false safety that hid from him the reality of his situation.

There were a series of grand reveals. Earthquakes of a personal apocalypse. Shaking him to the core. Throwing him to the ground and destroying everything. Making of him a landscape of ruin. Just when he thought it was over, there was yet another revelation to knock him flat and bury him in the dirt of his futile exertions.

Breathing became a bothersome effort. Unwarranted exercise that he could not avoid. His body carried the pain wherever he went. There was no escaping what was done. The past embraced him and dragged him away from the present. In this fossilised state there was no fluidity. He was a rock and the river of life eroded him as it passed him by.

There were no stories now. He visited the place where the well had been and found only a hungry void. Once he peered into that void it knew him and in knowing him they became connected. This obsidian mirror caught his image and the dark image of his pain was flung out across the infinite. His lack was outed and multiplied a thousandfold and he knelt in a capitulation that was not accepted. There was nothing left now. No capacity to surrender. Only defeat. He could not choose to give up. That choice was denied him as he contemplated the nothingness that had invaded him each and every night. Painting everything black until there was no longer any light left within him. Blinded and fallen he tossed and turned in the agonies of a confusion of grief. His loss was a writhing mass of unknowable serpents. A madness of betrayal and denial.

And yet, in the carnage of his shattered memory he found burnt and torn pages. Cradling them against his chest he took them with him as he staggered away from the scene of the crime. One page reminded him that to live was to suffer. And so he resolved to survive. To devote his time in search of meaning. This was the flag that he would raise in the centre of this desolate and despoiled land. This was a fight he was equal to, even as he struggled to pull air into his bruised lungs. Each breath a sob of grief. Each breath painful defiance. Life finding a way through the desert of loss.

Rehabilitation was an exotic animal that he could not tame. He was not yet ready to stand on his own two feet. There was no strength or will to be mustered. He was starting again. The knowledge that he had done this before was a skewer that held him pinned to the canvas. A butterfly that had seen its one Summer. Flight a dream turned haunting nightmare.

Still he went on. Nibbling at quotes. Rubbing the salve of meaning upon his wounds and speaking words of comfort and reassurance. Promising better days to a patient unwilling to hear of such things, but repeating the prayers for the damned anyway. Remembering the power of words long gone.

Occasionally, he read. The words had no harmony. Raining upon him clumsily. There was no joy in them. They could not speak to the joy that lay under the calamity of what he once was. On he went. Stubbornly sipping at the meaning around him. Believing that he would one day have a taste for life again. That he would remember how to live just as long as he kept rehearsing the movements that seemed to fit.

The world around him shrank and restricted him whilst opening up and rolling away to leave him behind. Taunting him in the loneliness of his derelict castle. He a king of pain. Ruling over his own ruin. An exile in his own land.

This a circular journey. Revisiting the scenes of the treacherous crimes that had led to his downfall. Prison and punishment in one long loop. The ghost of Christmas past holding an intervention and bringing along all the ghosts of his past. A hoard that took the high ground and left him to defend the indefensible in the valley of his sorrows.

There was victory in these defeats. He came to understand that. He had nothing left other than to face his fears. Beyond them lay life and everything he’d ever dreamed of. Sometimes he dared to hope. Sometimes his breath was light and it whispered of a revival. There were times when his passage through the world required less effort and he could see beyond the storms, and believed in a time when he would no longer be drowning in cold, dark waters.

The gymnasiums of his heart and mind became more welcoming. The work a routine that he willed to be a habit. As he swept the dust and chaos away and reclaimed his castle, he brought new meaning to this place of his. And as he built himself afresh, the darkest of his fears began to take shape. However he tried to look away from this foreboding shape, he could not, for this was the void and theirs was a connection that would never be broken.

He pondered the mystery of this. The broken connections that had added to his woes. His overwhelming desire to be with others, and in being with them be himself. Something had been lost in the translation of his self and now he had this dread, shadow millstone about his neck. He felt the weight of it each and every day. The prospect of freedom and a life worth the living lay high above him. All the time he was being dragged down and away from his just reward. Deprived of his treasure.

Try as he might, he could not distance himself from the darkness of the watching void. It whispered to him, but he could never make out what was being said. There was meaning here, but he feared hearing it. He remained weak in its presence and could not find a way forward. A sullen and lacklustre wrestling match. An asynchronous dance. A painful embrace. Held in place as the trauma crushed him and deprived him of life.

Despite this macabre struggle, writing came more easily now. Not the constant flow that had once been his gift. The aperture through which the stories came was all too narrow. A constricted airway that panted and gasped. Spitting a phlegmy tangle of words forth sporadically. The accompanying cough jarred and distracted him. He stuttered along with an attention span grown short and jaundiced. The words he found were broken and he nursed them as best he could, but only when he could.

And always there was that darkness haunting his days and nights. Infecting the words. Dimming the light. He lamented a loss of innocence he did not know he had possessed. So few saw what he’d seen, and felt the rage of the claws that tear us from the inside out. The terrible rage of an elemental animal that stalks us all of our days.

This animal had lain in wait for him since childhood. He’d walked those long forgotten paths and seen the truth of it. That all of this was a long time coming. He’d avoided it adeptly only for it to leap forward and take him down in his prime. Pride and ego rent asunder, exposing his pink and bleeding underbelly. Reminding him of what he really was. Rendering him helpless so that he might at last learn the simplest of lessons. A hungry cancer of the soul. The Great Leveller’s apprentice bestowing the naked truth of life via a series of brutal losses.

As he approached this truth of it all, he found it sitting waiting for him. An intangible illusion. The void made real. At first he thought this his trauma, but then he saw that the pain it wore was merely a cloak upon which were writ many lessons. Seeing the density of the words that decorated the cloak, he began to understand what he was seeing and in seeing it he saw the way his journey was unfolding.

With a force of will beyond his imagining, he seated himself with the dark stranger and smiled. He sat there for a long while in this stranger’s company. Sat in the silence and listened. As he listened, he felt what he must feel and welcomed this over the numbness that had been too long his experience of living. When he was ready, he nodded and stood, “I will be back.”

The stranger said nothing, and he said everything in the silence that he carried with him always.

“Hello,” he said when he returned to visit the dark stranger for the second time.

The stranger’s reply was a silence that endured.

They sat together and again he listened in the silence and began to learn how it was that he should be. Found the courage to feel again. Starting with the pain that was his and his alone. A pain he’d already experienced and had not had the stomach to revisit. A pain he’d shunned in the righteous belief that it was unfair for him to endure it any further. A pain he’d tried to wish away and deny and pretend he had not been carrying for an eternity.

As time passed, he began to see clearly. The stranger was more than a shape. The void had only an echo of emptiness. After all, a shadow speaks not only of light but also the shape of what is real. In the silence was a far off harmony. A sound that he knew he would hear if only he would learn to listen.

Learning to listen was a part of it. To open himself to the sun and receive its lifegiving light. The meaning he sought had been here all along. And so he buried himself in the fertile darkness and dared to dream again. He dreamed a dream of an awakening. His awakening.

They stood and he stepped forth and embraced that which was once a stranger. Held him close and whispered his truth. “You know me.”

The dark stranger nodded an affirmation.

“You have always known me.”

The stranger nodded again.

“Now I know you.”

He was smiling and in the dark reflection of his other half he felt the smile reciprocated.

“It’s as though…”

He paused and felt a sense of wonder.

“…I have always known you.”

And this was the truth that he had denied for far too long.

In speaking this truth, he was right back at the beginning.

The second of his lives.

This was where he began the business of living.

In unbecoming he was becoming what he was always meant to be. To know himself and bring together all the parts of himself into a whole that made sense at last. This was his truth and this was his story. His crusade to be good and deny his contrasting side had left him broken and vulnerable to the broken. He had always been chasing the half of him that he ran from. This was a cycle he could not break. There was no running away from himself. That was an act of wilful madness. The cause of so much of his pain. Self-inflicted wounds to distract him from living. He’d broken his own narrative. Now he knew the story he must tell.

Now he dared to look upon his dark half. The reflection that would never allow him to hide. Two mirrors facing each other at last. One light. One dark. He found it within himself to look upon his true nature and beyond it lay the infinite. He was a part of everything. He was how the universe thought and felt. Allowing himself to be in this moment and feel it, he fancied he glimpsed the Face of God and from the deepest of his fears sprang an overwhelming joy. This was his reward. The treasure that had lain within him from the very beginning.

Later, he would rejoice in the start of this new journey. Celebrate facing the greatest of his fears. Marvel at the self-defeating nature of that fear. The enormity of a terror that was almost self-deleting. He had been terrified of himself, yet projected this upon the world around him. Cowered in the shelter of his own fearful shadow. Voiceless in the telling of his story.

Afraid of the dark. A darkness that could never be vanquished by the light. He needed the light to see in the dark. To see it for what it was. His dark half was monstrous. A dragon that stalked his days. A dragon that had breathed fires of blame upon the world. Fires that threatened to consume him in anger and hate.

Now he was that dragon. A calm force to be reckoned with. He felt the fire in his belly. An energy that grounded him. An energy that he would use as it flowed freely within him. He was ready. Ready to face the world anew. Ready to be himself at last. Never would he forget the battles he’d fought to arrive at this day. No one would take this from him. He knew there were those that would try. That there would be those who would turn on him and not because of the darkness that he had made his own, but due to the light that shone all the more brightly for it. A light that brought the truth of existence to people whether they wanted to see it or not. A light that, in the end, could not be denied, just as the dark within could never remain a stranger.

His inner child smiled and the light burnt all the more brightly. Time to find his people. He would know them as they would know him. That thought brought happiness. He looked forward to the simple days that awaited him. The playground of life where there was fun to be had. He’d attended to the serious business. Now it was time to enjoy life.

The words came freely then. He opened up. He listened. Sitting in his garden in a cocoon of peace, he basked in the soundtrack of the birds all around him and watched the bees drawn to the cherry blossom. His face was a picture of pure, unalloyed joy as he allowed the stories to flow through him on the currents of life and love. He knew his place now and he played his part well. Monstrously well. The fires within him burned and his eyes gleamed. Time to share the treasures he had mistakenly guarded so fiercely. From deep inside a gentle, compelling sound rose up and at last he heard his song and the harmony that was always his. He swayed gently as he wrote. From this day forth, he would always move this way as he wrote, as though caressed by an invisible breeze. And if you paid close attention, you’d see his shadow partner moving to the music too. Ever so slightly out of sync. His eternal partner in this dance. The soulmate he was always destined to find, in this life or the next.

And as he wrote, he pulled the thread of a cloak of trauma. Unravelling the lessons he must learn and feeling lighter for his labours of love. Sharing those words and the fire they contained. Lighting up the world and casting his shadow as he did so.