Light and Shadow

sunset at the pond, copyright 2011 by Caris Cerdwyn, all rights reserved

There is a tendency in our dualistic culture to somehow connect light with all goodness, and shadows or darkness with the bad.  And yet if we look around us at the play between light and shadow, we see a different truth played out.  The most beautiful photos often happen in the early morning hours, or near/after sunset.  There is a special quality to the light that makes for some of those amazing and breathtaking shots.  The best photographers know that.  The play between light and shadow is an amazing dance.

Our lives are filled with the same kind of a dance.  The difficult, darker things make for beauty when combined with the lighter, happy stuff.

There is a strange kind of spirituality floating around out there that tells people to surround themselves with happy, positive people.  Don't get close to people with problems or illness.  They wound up there because they somehow thought themselves into it.  If you want to be successful and together and on top of your game, just hang out with the successful, top of the game people.

This is weirdness to me.  I don't get it.  I guess that must be why Mother Theresa struggled with her faith...she hung out with the wrong kinds of people!  You hang out with people who are dying, and so poor, you wind up dying and poor yourself.  Oh yeah...that was the point with her, wasn't it?  She chose poverty.  She acknowledged the brevity of life.  And her faith centered on the One who knows how to mend the broken hearted.

Or maybe that's why Martin Luther King Jr. was killed....or Ghandi...or Bishop Romero...well, they hung out with the poor, the oppressed, the outcasts.  So they wound up unsuccessful and eventually murdered.

Oh dear....this is me, Caris, being sarcastic!  Someone told me today that I had a very devious mind!  I had a friend like that...he was always in your face on this kind of stuff.  If you were too happy, he was going to balance things out, and if you were really down, well he was going to figure out how to bring you back up.  He was one of my favorite people.

I gotta tell you...the people above have the kind of success I want in my life.  Those are the heroic people.  Not the Fortune 500 executives who make money on the backs of the poor.

By the way, that little white thing in the photograph that looks like a piece of trash is in fact the beginning bloom of a water lily.  Funny isn't it...the photo is somehow disturbing with it there at the bottom.  I thought I should crop it out, but it somehow plays into this conversation about light and shadow.  Sometimes when you look in the shadows and see something that doesn't seem to belong, there is an assumption that it is garbage or a piece of trash.  Never assume...beauty needs the darkness as well as the light in order to grow.

That doesn't excuse the choices people deliberately make for evil...causing other people grief and pain.  But it is only when we are aware of the shadows as well as the light within us, that we can make wise and loving choices.  Focusing only on the happiness and the light in ourselves, we can do immeasurable harm without even knowing that we are doing it.