Dark Shadow Dancing
Welcome to the season of witches, of pleasure dark like the mouths of sirens. Of twisting labyrinths and long midnight tales. Scorpio season licks love across the skin with a panthers tongue, ripping flesh from bone. Now is the time for whispered secrets, forbidden passions and the nightshade walls of bound vulnerability. The moon is bright tonight, the deep soil rich with networks of mycelium that pass the resplendent dreams of the trees above from one body to the next. Tomorrow there will be a Blood Moon Eclipse in Taurus and I will dance beneath the cascade of the cosmos, naked and breathless between the shadows of the trees. Let the serpent in my ribcage uncoil, give her the gift of my body and slip the dainty poise of my civility. Here the savage grace of my darkness can rise, press herself against my ribcage and whisper sweet the sound of my own divinity.
A fog has descended over the city as daylight retreats. As we move towards the winter solstice each night twilight edges over the horizon with more stealth, her massive paws a powdery gray that absorbs the last of the sun's rays. The lavender bruise of the moonrise against skeleton trees begins to taste of melancholy and I feel the dull tug in my chest that promises the depression of Canadian darkness is heavy on its way. I begin to dream about winter's bony fingers reaching out from the North to tuck themselves into the shoulder blades that cut through my back. I become sharper in winter, the soft roll of summer fruits withered away. Hunger carves away the feathered wings that carried me through breathless joy in the golden yolk of summer. Leaves them hanging limp from the coat rack beside furs and denim. Fall. Breaths of cold wind caress a cheekbone, release leaves to their death dance.
All of us walk this earth stalked by our shadow selves. Humans, like every living being in the cosmos, are fundamentally relational beings. This means our entire nervous systems are coded toward connection and love. Bodies wired toward co regulation belong in community with one another. Many of the cultures we grew up in have been mutated by capitalism, patriarchal and dogmatic values and follow the secret rules of ancestral trauma that have been passed down through generations. We are each a fractal universe of the human relationships that brought us into existence. Our cognition is based on the stories we learned from our families, from books and media as well as our larger chosens families and different cohorts.
This means as young children we had to learn how to fit ourselves into these stories in order to receive the connection we were dependent on. Our primary caregivers taught us what behaviors would grant us this closeness and which ones would result in punishment or rejection. Teachers, friend groups and our cultures built upon these original lessons. Children who were too loud, too active, too messy or too wild learned how to make themselves smaller in order to remain in relationship. This is when the shadow begins to take shape. The pieces of our personality that we carve off our edges and bury in the body coagulate.
As children our brains seek autonomy, and in these early stages of development we believe our actions have an effect on the world around us. We cry and are picked up, fed or cleaned. As we continue to grow and begin to understand we are separate from our parents we still believe their actions are entirely based on our own. When our needs are not met our baby brains accept full responsibility for this - because they are incapable of understanding our primary caregivers' failure to respond effectively. This is why our shadow self is intrinsically connected to shame. Children believe it is their fault, that if they were better, adults would have been able to love them way they needed to be loved.
I want to base this contextualization of early childhood development deeply in the beauty of hope. This is our brain's way of writing hope into the desperation of neglect. The parts of us that are unloved or undesirable to our communities become secrets to us as well as we push them down in the body. There is study after study coming out right now about how early childhood trauma, abandonment or neglect result in chronic illness in adults. See Article Here The shadow is malignant. Much like the villains in many of our fairytales and modern children's films they are mutated versions of our own soft and broken hearts. They are authentic parts of us that have been forced to hide and have become misshapen and angry after being caged within the psyche for so long. These are the parts of us that leap forward when we are triggered, that push us to sabotage our relationships, that call wolf and drag us down in the darkest part of the year. Anxiety, Depression, ADHD, Borderline Personality Disorder and countless other diagnoses in the DSM-5 are titles that lie like a mask over Adverse Childhood Events (ACE). All of them wrapped around inner children that felt unloved, unwanted or unmet in some way.
The days are growing shorter and our shadows long. This is the time of the year when for many of us they have the power to dance most wildly. Fifteen percent of Canadians experience Seasonal Affective Disorder, that number doubles when you factor in immigration and the adjustment to our winter darkness. As a community of artists and weirdos who didn't fit, who feel more deeply, who let their hearts become broken by this reality, I'm sure you know there is a concentration of us in these spaces. The archetypal tortured artist doesnt exist just for the #aesthetic. I am not one to romanticize this image. I want to invite you this winter to instead move into your shadow body. Learn their name and their face and invite them back up into your jaw and wrist to create with you. Call on your chaos and sacrifice old stories to the wind.
Liminal space is terrifying and transcendental in equal parts. It is alive in the flow state of the universe, in the eternal presence of meditation, in the naive step of the fool from the cliff. Unending and consecrated on the angel wings of butterflies after metamorphosis. It is always worth it. Be dangerous, be wild, be soft and nameless. But move always, towards a space where you are shameless.
Celinas Blade - 7/11/22
