Shadows and The Wisdom Weaver
A Photo Essay
Thoughts on life, death, and wisdom-weaving. Originally composed in September 2022.
It’s taken some time for me to deepen into creativity. Just like it’s taking some time for me to soil this world, this life, with my essence. Perhaps this is by design — the length of time it takes to feel one’s authenticity. But to me, the recognition feels like magic. To persist in a world using every measure available to weaken, attack, and kill the true Self is magic. I was born into this world, and for as long as I’ve known life, it has always been bloody.
I am inclined towards peace, harmony, justice, joy. All the things of the light. And that is why I crave the darkness from time to time. That is why my song of suffering is also a song of rejoicing. A song of aliveness. Because the darkness helps refine my light. The pain coursing red through my veins is also my love, the beating heart of the Earth. And because I am deepening my creativity, opening up, ever more, into my spiritual essence, I have taken my paradoxes to nature to capture some of what messages are on offer. Always on offer, as this life is a purely abundant life.
So, let this artwork be more of a soulful exploration than an intellectual inquiry. Let it be a journal where safety, solitude, and sensuality enjoy symbiosis — rather than an essay where parameters of measured success can stifle the creative air so desirous to be embraced/inhaled/breathed. Let us look into the messages of our Mother, our home, and be guided to what she would like to remind us of.
I enjoy the way life dances with my consciousness, such that my experience of art begins in my dreams. Through the portal, I learn about an awareness and a perception, a trust, needed to render dreams into life through art. And the art that exists in the everyday? The space between light and shadows? Well, this is what I consider poetry. The way light gradiates towards shadow, eager to touch. An experiment all on its own.
Plants found near the compost. The nexus of life and death. Birthplace of the warrior flora, in defense, at the ready, life dedicated to fight. Protection. And even in the call to stand guard, there is peace. At least in the way I captured it and told the story. Storytelling is in all art creation, but it is separate from poetry, according to some of my explorations.
Poetry arises naturally in the compost, the nexus of life and death. The interaction and interplay of light and shadow. It doesn’t need to be any bigger, and crisper or clearer for you to see it. Because poetry is about feeling. All of poetry happens in the place where words haven’t yet been born. Where energy moves with entitlement and power through our bodies before we can come to utter a single thing. The beauty of storytelling is in the presentation and performance of this poetry. Leaf polyps in organized disarray, on guard to protect the essence of the one who lives. There’s a valiance in this display of love, one that seems to beg the drama of shadows creeping into the light, like the night has traveled in curiosity, attracted by the light of the sun.
There is something that the shadows tell us that the light cannot. In the shadows, there is news about the soul, particular to hidden ornaments — the story of hidden gems. Do you know the origin of the hidden gem? Well, I believe it comes from another certain nexus. One of trust and truth.
Aging, decay, life drainage. A pathway to the light. That is what the banana leaves tell us.
Once again out by the compost. Once again responding to environment. And there remains hope. The soft imaginings of a brighter way. But what do the shadows say? What do the shadows hunger for when life begins to make its exit. What is left behind? Tapping into mysteries requires one essential carry-on: trust. Tapping into mysteries is joining a collective journey towards truth. The conscious mind races in search of answers and correctness to plug into these dark spaces, until it comes to stillness in the black, thick, dank, dark of the soul and realizes it has been chasing itself. When the light at the end of the tunnel closes and you are wrapped in the soft and decaying folds of death, what will you race to do? Who will you race to be? This is what the darkness offers us: a chance to interact with agony, perhaps. Or despair, or sorrow, or seemingly insurmountable grief.
In a way, then, darkness calls us within to put us to rest; calls us to die with grace, knowing we have tried our best, we really have. And when we rise again, because we always do, it is the light that welcomes us into the new day of honeybees and butterflies and fresh, young, life unaware of the beatings and wounds turned scars turned wisdom. This wisdom is light, and this light is a gem, once hidden.
I’m beginning to consider it a crime to enter spaces of intimacy without intention. You see, the pureness of the soul — if I may talk directly about the pureness of the soul — requires inherently some kind of intention before dancing with another entity. The pureness of the soul, I think, has a forcefield that is protective, like the near-invisible webs of a spider, at work all night, all spring, all summer, all year. The spider never stops weaving her webs, protecting herself, securing her networks.
It’s intention that allows us to gaze upon the spider’s web from a healthy distance with awe and love. With adoration and respect. Without intention, we walk straight into the web, caught in confusion and discomfort. But why? Why can’t the soul live in pureness without intention? Why can’t it dance with the freeness of the wind?
It's a question I’m asking myself — because I’m prone to setting rules. It’s the way I weave my own webs.
The spider’s web, affixed to two sturdy branches, miles apart, always connected, talks to me about distortions and how we create them. It is not a passive creation of fate and powerlessness. This is an active creation where intention once again arrives in this present moment with us in writing. Walking into a spider realm (that is, walking into a spider’s web) is to be pulled from your reality and into a knowing that there is more that is present than what we previously accepted. Than what we’d planned for. And that is a distortion of sorts.
I guess our intentions create certain distortions or perspectives of being in reality. It’s really quite interesting. Because even in changing the word from distortion to perspective is with intention. Intention comes down to feeling, to motivation, to encapsulation of the sunshine warming the brain and for that sparkling yellow elixir to drip down the throat and all around the heart. Just dripping wet. Intention is the pleasure we want to experience; the erotic nature of our beings hungry for fulfillment.
Words may be getting the better of me for the moment. I wonder what the spider does when she’s made a misstep in her weaving. Does she go around? Does she reroute? Does she even ever misstep? Does the spider weave from her conscious skill or her intuitive understanding? These are the questions I ask as I weave wisdom in my life to create realities based on intention. Shall I live from what I know, or shall I flow with intention?
A good friend would tell me to release the questions and dance with life however it shows up. And I would close my lips, smile at them, and send gratitude.
And that’s the whole story, what I gleaned from Mother Nature and her transformative process. Something is always happening in this ecosystem of life. May all of these happenings guide us back to our centers. Back to harmony. Back to Love.
