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Welcome Samhain TarotBlogHoppers from Johnnie Twobrows Metaphysical Meanderings blog!  If you’ve just hopped in right here, make sure to drop back a blog and check it out.  

Welcome to this Tarothoppin’ segment along your TarotBlogHop Samhain dance.  The theme across the TarotBlogHop during Samhain this year is: Rather than look to outside entities this Samhain, look inside of yourself. All of your Self. The dark pieces that you think you have left behind. The parts of your Shadow that you believe you have pushed deep, deep down into a dark well . . . I look forward to meeting you.”  

If you encounter a broken link alonig your TarotBlogHop, visit Amethyst Mahoney’s blog clicking here where there is a Master List.

Tarot ~ Samhain ~ Savoring Shadow

I savor my Shadow, always have as long as I can remember.  I remember watching the shadow of a butterfly, the butterfly flying near, its shadow on the ground flying near mine.  And, as it flew by over me, its shadow disappeared into mine, re-emerging on the other side . . . of my shadow . . . of my head.  I was 3.

Life as I thought I (k)new it with my big, bright eyes curious and intrepidly traveling was about to end . . . actually, one day, 3 miles down the highway to Funland it was soon to end, though didn’t.  Heck, I asked my Mom if we could go to Funland.  She expressed now wasn’t the time.  Sauntered over and asked my Dad . . . after picking up a volume of Faulkner and dropping it in the trash. “Dad. Funland?”  “Oh no, Jordy, go explore” as he motioned smilingly to the back yard which was pretty expansive. Heck, I had asked them if they wanted to go.  I really wasn’t asking them to drive me there.  I was just trying to be inclusive.  They were my parents, and that was the only polite thing to do, right?  So, I shrugged my shoulders, it was out the back door I went . . . and out the side gate, and down the street with a friend I happened to see, and was on my way stylin’ with no shirt on.  He was a year older from up the street, but I used my deep and lightly gruff voice to make sure I knew what I was doing and make sure he thought this was a pretty good idea, too.  It was ONLY 3+ miles down a highway, and there was only ONE highway . . . the highway just happened to be the majority of getting there.  Geez, there was a shoulder, and after all . . . I was this many (3). LOL

Life as I (k)new it with my big, bright eyes curious and intrepidly traveling was soon to end. Or, was my life’s shadow simply flying in to my head to seed my continual transformation? . . . that had already concretely begun?

Let’s take a step back from 3.  Yes, a step back from 3.  This is not a specific memory other than the car smashing against the driveway when I dropped it ( 😉 ) but I had had a hernia when I was 2.  My abdominal wall just flew open and my intestines POOF-bulged out.  It’s more common than you know for boys.  I don’t remember the pain as I evidently made quite the noises, though off to the hospital and Dr. Crump gently and masterfully pop-pressed my intestines back in with a masterful palm, and then sliced me open, and sewed me up good as new . . . or, so I thought.

You see, that hernia in the lower side of my abdomen. . . that’s the sacral region. A child of 2 won’t conceptualize the violation, only the no-pain-after.  Frankly, it’s very natural.  Sounds like blacking something out?  Nah, my experience was fully experiencing and moving on, not tieing myself to every little experiential knick-knack.  Didn’t really matter, though . . . Life as I thought I new it was about to end.

Age 4 1/2.  Off to Mayo Clinic for 2 weeks. Reconstructive surgery on a portion of my insides.  Evidently, I was still a bun in the oven, huh?  They gave the final, physical formation pushes a boost.  Oops, there was an overshadowing snag.  All of the surgery went brilliantly, though I started the sniffles after a 16 hour surgery began.  Came out with pneumonia — that happens if you go into a surgery with a cold — and lived 10 of the remaining 12 days in an oxygen tent.  OOPS.  oxygen tent.  PURE environment.  Can you say Initiation?  Can you say high octane air?  I’m betting those 10 days dosing me with that much oxygen activated some things a little early?  Seratonin?  HeLLO, How long till I get to be a man?  lol.  Balancing brain chemicals may have begun flowing as naturally as a child plays? . . . if they already weren’t.  Couple the surgery trauma with the purity of an oxygen environment . . . . prelude to Chthonic Numinosity?

Age 5 1/2.  Back to Mayo Clinic for Act II and doing the final touches inside after the rest of the surgery had had a year to take and get things going on their own.

Why am I going into this biography when the topic is about the Shadow?  Because somewhere between 4 1/2 and 5 1/2 my childhood ended.  Exile.  All I could feel was exile, and my big, bright-eyed smile at the same time.  Rumplestiltskin was my fave fave fave story. Heck!  What little boy wouldn’t find the Gold-spinning Queen guessing Rumplestiltskin’s name on the 3rd try “in his rage drove his right foot so far into the ground that it sank in up to his waist; then in a passion he seized the left foot with both hands and tore himself in two.”  THRILLING!  RIVETING!  Almost better than blowing things up.  Almost.  Yet, think of a boy learning his own name, opened up at 2.  Nope.  Not the name.  Opened up at 4 1/2.  Nope, Not the name again.  And, BAM at 5 1/2 BOOM.  “Close, suchre, and let all heal as he takes it easy for a while.  He’s a real trooper.“

Scroll forward where we skip the summers in Central Mexico, divorce and consequent MULTIPLE CHRISTMASES AND BIRTHDAYS WHOO HOO! (Oh, don’t go there.  I was 6 then. Safe to say that’s as processed and cooked as ground beef).  Skip the discovery of Alan Watts and Eastern Philosophy and Architecture at 14. Skip the Black Belt at 17.  Skip a whole 5 years of individual death marches of projects through architecture school.  

Scroll forward to 1991, where the last day or two of thesis in college I had discovered Rainer Maria Rilke and Carl Jung and William Blake and Pablo Neruda almost simultaneously.  Ohhh, the duality present.  Oops, so I thought.  How did I have such an immediate handle on these figures’ works?  Yes yes, I resonated with them which certainly helps, though there was something of an almost direct memory quality to their work. Wasn’t some previous lifetime or concepts like that.  Felt like as easy as remembering a fave birthday present or time from years back.  Hmmm, I just graduated, and really had just begun my own education in earnest free of school. . . .

Please DO notice the archetypal sun in this card seen up close with deep space all around.  Your bright identity can nestle in your shadow to highlight your brightness.  Let it.  May I suggest you ask it for a dance?

Scroll-dial up one year now to 1992 and I defined Self as “Chthonic Numinosity.”  I painted “The Dive” and “Ichthusa” and “Chthonic Numinosity: Self” in the short span of several weeks after continuous Big Dreams each night, and POOF “Chthonic Numinosity: Self” was accepted into a show and featured in the front window of Alpha Gallery’s Art By Architects Show in Denver at 110 Broadway.  I found Jung in earnest and devoured 22 Bollingen series volumes in 6 months.  My painting “Ichthusa” disappeared when a woman said, “SO erotic” as she slipped a check in my hand, quietly took it off the wall as I watched, and walked out the door of a brewery’s gallery several months later.  After her car disappeared out of sight, I had fun being fakely low-key with, “Has anyone seen the painting I had in this spot?  Did one of you sell it?”  Thing is . . . how did she hide in plain sight so stealthily as she carried a 20″ x 90″ painting right out the front door?  One of the people I asked had actually helped her with the door.

She set the anima free back in the wild.  I could forget about consciously mining those Melusina depths in earnest. Earnestly forget mining them, and earnestly forget and move on.  Note to all you Girruls out there: Hell, if a guy ever even MENTIONS his anima to you, that faceless female onto which anything can project, RUN LIKE HELL.  It’s important to know about it, but geez, no, nope . . . talk to the hand . . . don’t bring that up catharting in public unless you have just as big of an ‘excuse me’ ready when you cathart in public.  

Think about that whole thing.  She took the painting.  It resonated, and I simply smile out from the depthful place and had a little fun as I saw the sun through the opening door. Cave metaphor? Yep. Long ‘parting is such sweet sorrow goodbyes?” Hell no. It was time.  My Shadow then opened me up with forgetting being for getting.  Forgetting, is for getting . . . for making more room for the good stuff with something I had made.

And, I had defined self as Chthonic Numinosity. ‘Nuff said as I loved yet forgot Carl Jung’s “Mysterium Coniunctionis: A Phenomenology of Self” into my own two words in that painting.  Forgetting is for getting.  Makes more room for YOUR OWN good stuff.  What happened to that painting?  I had THAT relationship in my early 30’s, and I let the Shadow lead one day.  SO glad I did.  I cut up and destroyed that painting after taking enough Glass Hook Venom from her to kill an elephant.  Call it the Shadow Initiating me by trial and by fire from naivete so I’d keep my refreshed freshness and sense of humor with depthful, almost scuba gear for the psyche . . . yet as well my Shadow led me to step out of there pretty immediately, and get the rest of the backstocked paintings to be adopted by a friend and his storage area PRONTO before they suffered the same fate as Chthonic Numinosity’s shamanic dismemberment mirroring my own in the “Das Panzer” relationship.  And, shadows stretch out long at certain times of the day.  It was one of those ultra-mundane Tarot readings of my shadow long on the highway shoulder of ground in traffic, in a car, that pointed me . . . reading the visual . . . to GET OUT OF HERE!  YOU ARE IN DANGER my Shadow felt to say when I traced its outline on the highway offramp. My Shadow literally pointed the way on the shoulder.  Hmmm, sound familiar?

And, The Dive, my natural way, soonafter disappeared as a gift to a friend.  You see, that exile I mentioned?  I had and still have a wonderful family.  Very very supportive. But, I was Rumplestitskin ripped open at 2, 4 1/2, and 5 1/2.  Duality came early, and soonafter felt very amatuer or bush-league.  Jung.  Alchemy. Antinomy.  Chthonic Numinosity is a statement of antinomy.  Not antimony, antinomy — integrated inner opposites that in a small way each work together AS each supporting side of every Psychic Synapse Bridge in the magical twilight of a thought. Antinomy became the higher octave of duality, an interesting identity with shadow rather than Jeckyl and Hyde.

My sense of exile while being IN a supportive family environment can only be penned as a natural, self-exile, and at one and the same time it needs no impetus or direction or reasoning.  That was simply how I began, the Capricorny sickly-ish child though mine presented physically in 1 2 3 and then off to the races across the next 20-year plateau.  Exile and a comfortability with wandering were one pair of my chief influencers — now it’s more a comfortability with the not-knowing while freshly getting projects done on time like pulling fresh bread out of the oven.  If I was bored then, I needed to go entertain myself.  When you’re out there alone, ya gotta make it for yourself or you’ll bore yourself to death. When Tom Hanks named his ball Wilson . . . YES!!!!  Deep   In    Self he was, and his Shadow-friend Wilson was the ideal companion . . . for the island.

Integrated inner opposites.  Antinomy.  Chthonic Numinosity.  Your shadow plays with you every day with an even more fluid fluency than Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing together regardless of your motions.  Yes, that’s mundane shadow.  Though, is it?  Is it also the face of your depths evidently present? . . . .  Yet, remember my butterfly at 3.  It disappeared into my head, only to re-emerge, all the while before, during, and after as a shadow.  A shadow into my head, that was a shadow.  You can play some 3-level chess with that one . . . I’ll be over on the checkers board.

Have some fun in the sun and dance with your shadow.  Be like The Sophia Principle that Pallas-Athene always reminds me of: Aware enough to sense your shadow, yet smart enough to dance with it.  Notice that it is not phrased “to not fight with it.”  Notice it is not phrased with light and dark and yin and yang and this and that and vice-versa contrariwise.  It is phrased, “aware enough to sense your shadow, yet smart enough to dance with it.”  Aware, conscious. Sense, natural animal. Smart, sensate Swords thinking. Dance . . . well, dance is everything, huh. Rather than waiting for a shaman to ask when you stopped dancing.  I have been dancing with my shadow my whole life.  May I cut in and ask you to have a dance with yours in the sun.  Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s that first step to finding that little kid in The Tower . . . the little kid that is You, Only New.  But, you (k)new that, didn’t you?  Go dance with yourself in the sun.  I’m sure Billy Idol would approve.

How does YOUR Shadow enhance your sense of place cast from your body so you don’t float away, or at least you playfully know where your own ground is?  How is the spell of your shadow cast?  How do you cast the spell of your shadow?  

Are there other shadow characteristics that are effortless as well?  I suggest to just make sure you get used to leading when dancing with your Shadow.  The Shadow isn’t very helpful when leading, and as you can imagine I’ve never been terribly fascinated with Persona. Was that a non sequitur?  Well, I’ll be damned.  It wasn’t.  My Shadow made me do it, anyway, though. 🙂

TarotBlogHop in and dance!  Heck, I may have re-invented enough wheels in my life to be an honorary tire designer. Even so, I still rather my foot on the gas, steering wheel in hand. I almost want to credit that to my Shadow.  I’ll have to step up and accept the honor, though.  The lighting in here doesn’t cast her through the screen.

Life didn’t really end, huh?  In fact since age 2 it has just gotten intensely better and better.  Note the two Tarot card images.  The Sun, and The Tower.  Feel deeply the Sun’s bright identity nestled directly in its deep-space-all-around Shadow, and its dark and light characters working together below.  Note the After-Shadow of The Tower when all the smoke and rubble has cleared, and see the bright-eyed little child come up asking you all sorts of questions that you answer and answer and answer some more until you realize you are answering them ALL and POOF . . . poof . . . poof all quietens down, and that little child’s eyes beam, as you smilingly ask, “Who are you?”  The child smiles back, “I’m you, only new.”  DAYum, the Tower Kid is in the future from mentioning him before.  Quite a bright one that Tower Kid jumping forward like that . . . perfectly out of line.

Nestle in to your dance with your shadow this Samhain, even if only in play with candles and masks.  It helps keep you fresh, and is like Direct Priority Delivery from your unconscious.  What shadows do your masks cast within you?  How do you cast the spell of your own Shadow beautifully outward like The Sun card above?  How can your Shadow be like a cashmere sweater?  How do you dance with your Shadow?

May you lead your Shadow well in the dance . . . as you can’t help but wear it.

All similar, each unique.

~ THE END ~

Happy Tarot Samhain BlogHopping!

May your life be a place where masks are colorful and enlivening,

a place where masks fall away as naturally as autumnal leaves,

a place where you are always in the season.

May your life be as natural a place as the snake his skin shedded, the snake his skins not missed.

BOO!  Jordan . . . Happy Samhain!  

HEY!, Where’s my candy?!!!!  

OH funny . . . just realized my street address is 110 now in a different city 20 years later.

Go 110!

Best to your Shadow-Unmasking new life into your journey as you explore the Samhain series of TarotBlogHops!  Click here to magically shed the skin of this blog so it becomes another shadow and Carolyn Cushing’s Art Of Change Tarot is featured.

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