There is an old Persian story attributed to Nasreddin that a man had lost his keys and was searching for them under a street light and a policeman on his rounds approached him and asked what he was doing. The man replied looking for his keys. The policeman then asked if he lost his keys here and the man replied no, yet this is where the light is.
When I was a child in grade school I lived in a section of town where the trees were very old and on both sides of the street so their canopies grew into each other shading, all the streets except at intersections where they were trimmed so the light from the street lights would shine.
In the winter I walked home after school events alone in the dark, and I was terrified of the dark. I would walk as slow as possible while in the light of the intersections and then when I was in the dark would run as fast as I could to the next intersection to be in the light again.
All to often, this is how we live our lives, avoiding our dark, our shadow, at all cost because we’re terrified of what we might find or feel and in order to be in what we think is the light and yet the brightness of it hides the shadows that we dare not go into and so we never discover what is actually there.
Our wounds are actually where the light is. Once we begin to look at our shadow and feel what is there (no matter it’s story) it releases and counter intuitively more light reveals itself in us, as us, to fill the vacuum left by the released shadow.
The dark is not fearful, it is only our fear of the dark that is fearful. When you walk through your shadow the fear dispels and what is left is the beautiful dark, the beautiful night time sky that the stars shine so brightly upon, of which you are one.
