On Shadows

Relics, Remnants & Curiosities: March 2021 Vol. 1 & 2

Where did February go and March, besides? I could tell you or I could let Joy Harjo do it for me:

“The sun rises, red. Morning heat on our faces even on the coldest morning. The sun creates life, energy, nourishment. Gather strength, pull it in.

Be right where you are.”

And today, a Full Moon and a calendar about to turn the page again and my heart still here, trying to make sense of it all. Right now, I am living some stories that are not mine to tell. Right now, there are moments of light that would make you bloom right open. Right now, there are the shadows that come with it.

I fell down the rabbit hole of my first blog recently—three years of a life, deeply told. It made me want to resolve again to share more. To keep a record. To trace my days. And isn’t this why we are all here online at all? The social media, the blogs, the letters, the posts? We want to live this life and tell about it. So, here is a letter from me to you, and (as always) an invitation to click reply to this message and tell me where you are.

Love,

Cat

Relics

Remnants

March 28. 2021

Today, I am thinking of tricks of light and how everything, everything is so layered. In my journal this morning, I wrote: Even on the happiest days, there is a sense of something being lost somehow. We accept it and keep going anyway, but I do wonder if we all spend our lives trailed by shadows.

This doesn’t erase the light or diminish the light. It comes with it.

This isn’t a bad thing, either. Just a true one. Right now, as anyone who knows me knows, I am working on the second draft of my fifth book. I could call the others failures. I could mention the wasted hours. I could feel the delight of a scene coming together now and think of all of the other scenes that came together and went nowhere. The old writing trails the new like shadows.

But, I see it instead as a deepening.

The same is true of life. The old me trails the new. Her mistakes, her experiences, her successes and failures touch the edges of my current self. Jung said, “The brighter the light, the darker the shadow.” So how much creativity must have I had before to cast these literary shadows now? How much love and beauty must I have known?

We just recently crossed the threshold of equinox, too, the perfect day of balanced light and darkness. As spring pushes its full-flowered light, I will keep leaning into the shadows. For mystery. For memory. For balance.

Curiosities

Astrology writing by Virginia Rosenberg is my favorite. Her Full Moon in Libra report today is no exception.

I know I speak for all of us when I say, Beverly Cleary forever.

Mostly, because of the gift she gave a shy little girl like me by writing Ramona. This is something “How Ramona Quimby Taught a Generation of Girls to Embrace Brashness” gets right to the heart of.

“I feel like that’s something that sometimes gets lost in our culture, where everything’s about building a brand before you even have an established creative process.” So says Ada Limon about writing and poetry.