A light in the darkness

I’ve started seeing a therapist again, trying to be more conscious and skillful with persistent feelings of inadequacy. I mentioned this to a very dear friend. He wrote in an email I received this morning, “I am convinced that some aspects of ourselves we’re discontented about are permanent parts of us, and we might do better to appreciate and harness them than to try to change.”

Appreciate and harness them.

I have been thinking all day about that wisdom and how it can be applied to the shadow we all carry with us, the part of us we hide. If we could stop resisting the shadow and examine what it has taught us, what its gifts have been, how it has contributed to our path...we might laugh more. Lighten up on ourselves. Maybe, in the constant effort to make ourselves better, we miss the gifts of failure.

This public mural by Rone that nhc blipped not long ago is near my therapist’s office. I thought I’d get a picture of people passing by below the mural, but instead the moody sky and adjacent buildings offered me a composition I couldn’t resist.

This lullaby by Cris Williamson, with its line, “like a light in the darkness” seems just right for this picture.