During my walk this morning I saw the long shadow of my self cast against the hoar frosted meadow as the sun crested the rounded shoulders of the ancient mountain to the east. The space between daybreak and sun’s rise is longer here on the western slope giving us a slower, deeper sense of the liminal. Much like this time after my child left home to forge her own path wherein the pace of my day has shifted and memory is called back for work that can’t be easily explained and is better understood when felt.
I used to move my body because that’s what people who sat all day did to maintain their figure, in answer to an external call rather than the imaginal gaze. Then I moved my body in service to my family’s needs and daily rhythms, there is always something more to be done. Then for a while I couldn’t move my body without hurting myself, so full was it of every expectation I’d placed on it but without answer to any deeper impulse—like a guest bed piled high with guests’ coats.
Having cleared enough heavy winter coats I can walk gently and carefully on this land I inhabit again. I came to the old shed just past the stretch where I normally see white tufts bobbing between the trunks of trees. In it I noticed my shadow once again. Not just a place of darkness within, or Robert Bly’s bag i drag behind full of unlived and unloved lives, but also proof that I exist. I walked away more aware of my surroundings and for a moment or a lifetime I was not separate from the male cardinal defending his territory and chasing his intended, the deer finding a quieter and safer place to browse, or the power of hawk’s vision.
And as I walked home through the woods my tall shadow merged with the standing ones in shades of brown, more deeply rooted, and inhabited by the land. I decided last September to take on a course of study to help me be better at sitting with people and helping them to navigate their stories, whether as a designer helping them tell the story of their offering to the world or as a human being using plants and planets to help them untangle stories that no longer serve. I knew what I was getting into, and then again I didn’t. How can we ever know the full extent of ourselves?
Even though the session doesn’t begin until August the work is already rippling through my awareness and life and I am looking forward to meeting the other souls drawn to do this work this year and what collective we’ll create together.
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