On Seeing Our Shadow

Saturday was Groundhog Day, otherwise known as Imbolc, the day that marks the midpoint between winter and spring. Now the days are growing noticeably longer. The sun, when it shines, is bearing down more intensely on the roofs and pavements still laden with snow. At moments, you can feel the sap of fresh hope and vision rising through your veins and in the trees. And so the feeling that the darkness will never end, bit by bit, subsides. But, there's a tenuousness, a fragility in these rays of hope that are expanding on the horizon. Clouds and night skies can render frigid what a moment before was warm.

I look at the papers daily, almost as John Nash does in the movie "A Beautiful Mind." Only instead of cutting up headlines and articles and rearranging them into patterns supporting a world view of hideous proportion, I cut them up in my mind's eye as confirmation of a world view that finds light in the darkest moment, the darkest season, the darkest times.

But this, too, is a fragile business. I have to be careful not to divide the world up into good and bad--or good and evil, as we hear spoken of so much of these days--if I am to seek evidence of the ascendancy of the light.

Neither dark nor light has greater valence in the seasons and cycles of the years. Light has final ascendancy only in the illumination of the farthest reaches of my being. There I know that all creation is but a projection of the One and its separation into opposing forces, but an illusion cast by the limitations of the human mind's ability to encompass its totality.

In those farthest reaches I know that the dark times of my life offer themselves as fertile ground for the aspiration of my being towards the ever greater light of true Self-reflection--just as a tree takes in more light after every wintering. I also know, as with all increments of light, that a greater shadow is thrown upon that which is left in the dark.

There my attention calls me, sometimes seeming to strip me of my new growth--as the winter strips the leaves from the trees--until the essence of that which I have left in the frozen depths of forgetting is revealed. Then the icy chill of fear, contraction and attachment--all that I do when I cannot trust the return of spring to my being--thaws. I stand prepared once more to reach towards a greater light, enriched by the substance of that which I had once abandoned. But, oh, how much longer the wintering of my soul can seem when I get caught in my focus on the dark and lose faith in the return of the light.

Punxsutawney Phil came out from his lair on Saturday and, with the sun in full glory above him, saw his shadow. Thus he proclaims the extension of winter for yet another six weeks. In his recent State of the Union address, our president calls upon the American people to prepare themselves for a prolonged and possibly apocalyptic clash between the forces of good and evil. Now, in his budget, he calls us to contract still further and to hold back our growth in other areas so as to intensify our defenses against this dark night. Surely, the wintering of humanity's soul is not yet over.

But if I remember to look beyond the glare of headlines cast in fear, I can see other signs worthy of hope pulsing beneath the surface. Around the world, the voice of alarm has been sounded at such grave presidential pronouncements. Europeans at least, if not Americans, know how painfully destructive can be the paranoid call to battle the forces of evil. They are speaking up, objections are making their rounds on the Internet, and even the American press is taking note of the resistance to our readiness to charge onward against our demons.

Economic gatherings of both the rich and the powerful in New York and the more disenfranchised in Brazil voice concern that the imbalances of power and wealth across the planet be redressed. Capitalism and even democracy are being brought to question. Americans are being asked to consider still why so much of the world does hate us.

It can be very painful to witness that the shadow one combats is but a projection of oneself, emboldened and empowered by one's own disdain. How much damage to the self and others is done when one focuses only on the dark and has not the faith to reach out to that which lies discarded and bring it, too, to greater light.

Let we who find ourselves heralds of the light now find the courage to leave the safety of our lairs where we remain ignorant of the hardships and despair that others face. Let us as a nation have the courage to expose ourselves to our own shadow. But as we do so, let us not frighten ourselves into an even more deadly slumber, no matter how great is the chill before us.

Instead, let us pronounce to the world that we hear the voices of the dark and will stand vigil till they are warmed by the thaw of once cold hearts. And let us give thanks for the clamor cast by the cold light of truth and find faith that this be the harbinger of a new spring as yet to come upon the Earth.