Shadow: A reflection

Can we find beauty, even here?

Spoken rendition of “Shadow”.

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Photo by Joshua Earle

Process

For most of my life I have been a solid sleeper. I do not remember struggling with sleep, except for offering myself too little. I often burn the candle at both ends. Six am basketball practice when 15 years old was rough paired with afternoon music rehearsal followed by evening homework and social life. As a young parent, my wife and I went through the years where nights were full of constant interruption, and I learned with three kids who at the time were three and under that getting up well before the sun came up was about the only way to get some quiet time to read, reflect, or exercise.

Over the last four years as I have entered mid-life, I have begun to shift towards a longer allotment of time to sleep. While I am still an early riser, the alarm is set for later than it used to be with the hope of having a healthy sleep routine and permitting myself to do the activities that I enjoy later in the day. Interestingly, as I have made this shift, I have begun to struggle with sleep for the first time.

I would not say I have any sort of severe insomnia. There are just phases where thoughts or waves of physical anxious energy make the act of falling asleep difficult, or a middle of the night wake up means that sleep is over for the night. I am working to learn different habits to help my body and mind calm well before bedtime, and how to work through the inability to return to sleep when it eludes me.

While my struggles are not every night, they seem to come in waves, which makes for some tired thinking and a struggle to regulate anxiety and unkind thoughts. This poem was started during one of those waves. After tossing and turning for a few hours in the middle of the night I decided to give up hope for more sleep and begin my day. I walked downstairs with my pen, paper, and a candle, and after taking a couple of quiet hours to read and reflect, I sat down to write what would become Shadow.

This poem took about a week to pen. While the nights of terrible sleep subsided in the middle of the drafting, I worked on this one consistently in my early morning 30 minute block of writing time, lighting a candle to recreate the mood of the room that first early morning held. I finished writing and editing after six days, and when I returned to it two months later, I published with no further edits, a rare way of finishing for me.

Writing Notebook, Pages 1-2, draft of Shadow.

Writing Notebook, page 3, final draft of Shadow.

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Themes

This quiet candle
must sustain me
through hours
of sleep’s abandonment.

Everyone goes through times where we have been abandoned by something that is core to who we are. These are times of profound confusion and pain. So often, our societal culture pushes us to do something…get busy, take your mind off of it, go back to work, use it to help someone else, even turn your pain into profit. When we walk through the threshold of abandonment, our first reaction need not be to learn from it, grow from it, or transform it into something that is a lesson or a gift to others. Survival, hiding, and sustaining are all that one needs in the immediate aftermath.

The sun will return	
in its brilliance
but dawn is distant
and I need light now,
light to whisper
into shadowed corners,
The sun still burns 
and has not abandoned 
hope for you.

A sense of knowing and acceptance exists in the first two lines of the second stanza. There is a belief that they will walk through this time and come to a more beautiful place, but they know that time may be far off and there are needs that must be met in the immediate. To be sustained through this time, they need a glimpse of the light that the day brings. Just that glimpse into a memory of another time or through a ritual that brings a piece of the other time into the present will be what they need to process, grieve, think and be with the moment.

I find in my own moments of pain, I struggle with resting in words of hope whether from another person or from my own mind. There is a desire to control which means not resting until I have fixed or finalized whatever the situation is. It is a messy recipe for emotional disaster.

Instead, words of hope, beauty and encouragement may be just what we need to sustain ourselves in challenging times. There are certainly no outcomes that we control, and it is questionable if our own decisions and actions really exist within the realm of our control or if they are just a product of our past. Instead of grasping for an outcome that is uncertain and overthinking what brought us to this place, perhaps just sitting in the moment, noticing the lies in our mind, and seeing the truth in front of us are where peace and contentment lie.

A match whispers
its magic glow
and bows illumined
to gift the wick
with fire that burns,
fire that dances
shadow into 
each dark suggestion,
shadow dancing 
joyously
in every corner
and into
my waiting arms.

The final stanza is a stanza of beauty. The first five lines are poetic words creating an image of what it looks like to light a candle. A whisper as the wood and box move through their friction, the first glow of ignition, the bow of the match to the wick and the gift of flame that is transferred from the match to the candle. Then, with the candle lit and in front of one’s gaze, the room becomes a mix of light and dark. This is what we grapple with during times of struggle, isn’t it? There are circumstances of pain, but in this moment, is there not something just in front of us, in this room we are in, where beauty intermingles with circumstance, and even the dark can transform into something we can embrace in our waiting arms?

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As always, thank you for reading! I hope you’ll take everything I wrote about the themes in Shadow and entirely throw it out to replace it with what you feel when you read it. This is the intent of the Poetry & Process newsletter, designed to allow you to have space to let the poem do its work in you by publishing the poem first with the reflection published days (or in this case, weeks) later. Poetry is alive and inspires in different ways and I honor that.

May you find beauty in every circumstance you encounter.

Brian

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If you missed the “A Poem” post of Shadow, I hope you will read and enjoy! You can find it here.

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