Shadows and Light

Walking across the dam at Holmes Lake this morning,  I couldn't help but notice the shadows.  They were everywhere, stretched long by a sleepy sun just getting up for the morning.  I'd hoped to get to the lake a bit earlier, so that I could avoid the flood of sunlight that I knew would force my head downward halfway through my walk.  Like the Stones said, though, you can't always get what you want.

Thank goodness.

Had I gotten there any earlier, I wouldn't have seen my own shadow, pulled like warm taffy across the fields of brome, until it rested on a sunny brick wall hundreds of yards away.  And, for a few magical moments, I imagined someone inside that home, reading the newspaper by morning light, a brief shadow yawning its way across the front page.   My shadow.

I don't tell myself that this imagined moment, this brief interruption of light, forever changed that person.  But I do let this thought play out in my mind--that there are no sharp edges in this world, no places of clear delineation.  And that thought both comforts and excites me.

Try as we might--and humans try mightily--we cannot honestly create "us and them" any more than we can  grow feathers and fly.  Of course, that doesn't stop people from pulling out their Sharpies, maniacally drawing themselves into and out of a thousand different boxes each day.  "Us and them" drives much of our political lives these days, not to mention our religious and professional lives, as well.

But saying it or drawing it a thousand times does not make it so.  I know this because I have been painted by a million shadows, gentle fingers of trees and birds, people and buildings, alighting however briefly atop my shoulders as I move through this life.  And my canvas is more beautiful because of those brief meetings.

This is a world of shadows and light, our experiences shaped and changed by sun and moon, clouds and time.  We walk through each others' spaces, touched by things we cannot see or imagine, breathing in the same air, warmed by the same sun, the edges of our lives fuzzied by these thousand fingers of life reaching out for us.