Shadow Selves
It was a Wednesday and I was tardy in taking my dogs out for a constitutional.
Since one of my dogs is a running hound and the other is part Jack Russell, these constitutionals are not an optional activity in their opinion. Which is how I found myself pulling into the VA cemetery and park at dusk.
The sky was a lovely rusty rose color.
My dogs had their heads out the window, sniffing the evening breezes. Suddenly, just as I turned in, a big black bear came bounding across the drive! I slammed on the brakes, sending both dogs from the widows to the floorboard. It couldn’t be helped.
Jerked into hyper-alertness by the racing bear, I came to a halt. I eased up on the brake and the minute the car moved, three more bears appeared and dashed past, oblivious to my presence. They were smaller bears than the first one, but not babies. They were almost as big as my running hound. Cubs are with their moms for up to 30 months and nurse for 18. No wonder those girls always seem to be in such a bad mood.
Newborn bears are about the same size as newborn babies at first.
But they grow fat a lot faster. By the time they’re a year old, and these bears were at least a year old, they weigh 50-70 pounds. By the time our babies are four and in pre-school, a female baby bear weighs in at about 125 pounds and the boys are big fellas - up to 150 pounds. These looked to be in the 70-pound range. That’s about the same weight as my hound, but remember there were three of them, plus their muscular, but chubby, 200-pound mother.
I watched to see where they would go.
She took them down to the creek for a drink. From the looks of it, they’d been happily dumpster diving at the two nearby nursing homes. It’s quite the pastime for black bears in our area. The local police film them and air the films on movie night at the fire station for the other first responders.
Confident that we could avoid them, I parked elsewhere and we began our walk.
My dogs love a night walk. They tore out of the car and raced onto the huge manicured lawn, only to throw on their brakes, do a 180 turn, and glue themselves to a spot another creature had marked earlier. Reading pee mail is very important to dogs. If you have dogs, I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. We’d forgotten all about those four bears, they were nowhere to be seen. I figured they’d moved down the highway to the McDonalds.
As darkness descended, I followed the dogs as they ran further into the cemetery.
Suddenly the hound froze into a point and the smaller dog locked himself against my legs. As I peered into the darkness I saw that the VA had apparently installed some new boulders near the columbarium. Boulders are all the rage in outdoor decorating today you know, and the VA was apparently catching up on the trend.
I couldn’t figure out what the hound was pointing at until one of the boulders flicked its ear.
We were about 15 feet away from one another, way outside the safety zone for a mother and her cubs. Which was way, way out of my comfort zone! They were frozen in place. They were watching us watching them. It was all rather surreal.
Who would play chicken first? Just kidding, it was me. With my heart pounding pretty loudly in my throat, I quietly snapped leads on the dogs and we turned and walked the other way. The bears stayed put.
I aborted the constitutional and we returned to the car. We’d had enough excitement for one night. As we pulled out of the VA park, the dogs sniffed the air heavily, straining their heads to catch a parting glimpse of their frenemies.
When I parked the car at home, I thought the adventure was over.
But that was before I went to sleep and began dreaming. Before I knew it, I was an aging Jane perched on the limb of a tree, tousled hair, wearing a leaf garment that covered all the right places, holding a bow and arrow. It was a long bow, like the one that hangs in my son’s closet. And in the dream, I was aiming the arrow not at the black bear in the twilight, but at a hunter who was aiming a gun at the bear. I let fly the arrow and the hunter recoiled in pain, dropped his weapon, and ran off.
Dangerous people only run from you in your dreams.
In real life, they hold you up in the parking garage. They only run away in your dreams. Which is interesting, because I am often the dangerous one in my dreams
My shadow selves are not sweet and agreeable.
I don’t even think they know they were born in the South! They don’t shrink from conflict like I often do. They don’t shy away from telling someone off. Their boundaries are clearly marked with electric fences and barbed wire, while mine are often too nebulous.
After my husband died, I did a lot of work to explore my shadow selves.
There were things in there that I needed to deal with and I imagine there is more yet to do. I find accepting the anger and propensity to violence (as well as the child-like trust and sweetness) of my shadows to be empowering and enlightening. Well, always enlightening and I’m working hard on the empowering part
I’m working to free my shadows because these days, I might need them.
When I encounter people whose viewpoints are violent and verge on the murderous, it would be helpful to remember my Jane, perched in the tree with her longbow’s arrow aimed at that hunter. If I was a better shot, I’d have killed him, since that was my intention.
Some of the people coming out of the woodwork these days frighten me half to death.
Their rhetoric is ugly and violent and vengeful. They fly from dark holes of hatred and travel in swarms, not unlike the yellow jackets that stung my neighbor’s dog half to death when it stepped on their nest. But here’s the question that haunts me: If this is who they are in broad daylight, who are they in the shadows? They’re not unlike those bears in the cemetery who sat frozen in the twilight.
Shadow selves depend a lot on the cultures we live in.
For instance, it’s hard to digest the fact that in some cultures a girl’s first sexual encounter is with her Dad. But in some cultures, this is seen as a good thing while in others like ours, it’s a crime. Well, sort of. Most abusers who are convicted serve less than a year in jail and most sexual abuses of children go unreported in our country.
Psychologists say shadow selves are the parts of us we were taught to shun or fear.
Like being afraid or vulnerable for instance, like me when I saw those bears. Or being violent and deadly, like my Jane in the tree.
We all have shadow selves.
They’re those parts of you that sit in the twilight, waiting to be acknowledged. So what parts of you, that dance in and out of your consciousness to a maddening rhythm, would you like to be welcome home?
The healing of our world might just depend on helping our shadow selves.
Helping them to see that they are holy, even when they freeze at the sight of danger, or dream wild dreams at night. If we become comfortable in the shadows, maybe we can be brave about standing in the light.