Jung’s shadow, where we tuck all the aspects of ourselves that are not part of who we would like to be - unresolved or negative emotions, inexplicable misgivings - can also be the source of our creativity and intuition. The shadow can be a means of finding balance if we acknowledge its presence or can haunt us if repressed or denied, if displaced through projections onto others. Balance can give us a more authentic voice; imbalance, and our shadow spreads, our life becomes the imitation of life, our character, two dimensional and fraudulent.
The in between times are when I am likeliest to hear the dark wing beat of my shadow. All the crows come home to roost at night. Rumi, the Sufi poet, said that “darkness is your candle,” that you must cultivate an awareness of both light and shadow, that “what causes you pain blesses you.” It is difficult, though, to know when to light the candle and when it is best to wait. Our shadow selves seem to gain psychic weight in the interstices, the transitions that we are constantly in the process of experiencing or resisting. Resistance can cause more suffering….force the kind of pressure that births volcanoes.
Sometimes all I know how to do is simmer. This may be one of those nights…the kind disquieted by the hidden messages of the interstitial.
A hieroglyphic chicken night.
The Hieroglyphic Chicken
Pablo Neruda
My friend was so messed up
he could not bear the last light.
He felt the closeness of shadow
like a physical wound,
that crucial question of the day….
…He tried green sleeping pills
and extravagant liquors,
he swam in beer foam,
he called on doctors, read
pharmaopoeias and almanacs:
in that hour he chose love,
but everything proved futile:
his heart would almost stop
or beat too rapidly
when it fought off
the deadly arrival
of each day’s dusk.
Behind him, my numb friend
dragged a shameful life.
C.B. and I went with him
to a restaurant in Paris
at the hour he would encounter
the approach of night.
Our friend was convinced he’d find
an unsettling hieroglyphic
in a dish they were offering him.
And immediately after, in a rage,
he threw the hieroglyphic chicken
at the head of the restaurant’s
good-hearted maitre d’.
While dusk was closing
like a celestial fan
over the towers of Paris,
the sauce was running into the eyes
of the disoriented waiter.
Night arrived and another day
and about our tormented friend,
what to do….
