The Draw of Shadows

I love shadows.  They draw my attention, and I find them calming.  I especially enjoy shadows from the trees outside the piano room, cast on the window blinds.  Sometimes the shadows make interesting shapes.  Other times, powered by the breeze, the shadows are animated.  A special treat is seeing the shadow of a flicker moving up a tree trunk, or that of a squirrel scampering across the screen.

Yesterday, at our graduation from yoga teacher training, one of my fellow students, Jeannette Haislip, presented us each with a set of three pictures she had taken of shadow patterns in her house.  Lovely.

While I've long recognized my attraction to shadows, I haven't understood why.  I accepted that, and was happy just to enjoy them.  I had a thought this evening though, and it may be a step on the way to understanding the draw of shadows.  I think they convey to me a deep truth, that what I see is just an implication of much deeper and richer reality.

With shadows, the implication is explicit.  I know there is another thing being abstracted into the shape that I observe.  But everything that I see is, in some way, like a shadow.  What I see is not the full reality of the thing, it is just one layer, one surface, one perspective of something that I can never fully see.