"Shadow Play"

21 January, 2000

It's been raining. I like the rain. It's one of the reasons I'm so happy to live and work in Seattle. I wasn't so happy about the rain last night, because I really wanted to watch the lunar eclipse.

I love watching the shadow of the earth creep across the face of the moon. It's amazing to realize that the whole world can cast a shadow we can see. And a little disconcerting how small that shadow looks up there, on the moon.

Shadows are insubstantial, yet they hold great power. The ancient greeks sited the lunar eclispe in their proof that the earth was a sphere at least as long ago as the third century BC. Erstosthanes used shadows to calculate his estimate of the world's diameter around the same time (though he was off, he got it surprisingly close, all things considered). And we've all seen movies or read books where a shadow falling across the hero or heroine was a dramatic announcement of a new plot development (which is probably where the term "foreshadow" came from).

Shadows crop up in our language all the time. If a person seems unable to make a job or position their own, they are said to be caught in the shadow of their predecessor. If a person's accomplishments have implications for those living long after his death, he is said to cast a long shadow. We describe a sneaky person as skulking in shadows.

Shadows aren't always bad. On a very hot summer day, the cool shadows of a tree can be the best place to lay down to watch the clouds roll by. There are many beautiful plants that grow best in the shadows of other plants. And the shadows remind us that there is light, and darkness. That the two places can be very different, or they can be blended.

I've lived most of my adult life in the shadow of AIDS; sometimes fearing it, fearing the death of friends because of it, losing loved ones to it, or dealing with other people's assumptions about it. For a time I lived in the shadow of my father, finding myself compared to him by relatives, school teachers, churchmembers, and even some of my classmates. Sometimes I've placed myself in the shadows.

But a shadow is insubstantial. It is just part of the shape of something else, a transient interruption of light, a variation in the pattern of energy around us. Whether it harms us or not is entirely up to us. We can chose to thrive in it, like those plants that love the shade, or chose to take advantage of it, like kids on a hot summer day. We can let it stifle us and chill the passion out of our dreams. Because they are insubstantial, they have no real power over us.

Just as the moon is still as glorious, mystical and real after passing through the shadow of the earth as it was before, we are still ourselves, responsible for our own lives. We are still capable of having and pursuing our own dreams.

For we are real, and the shadows are not.

This page is copyright 2000 by Gene Breshears. Photograph is copyright 1998 by Julie Rampke. All Rights Reserved.