Giving Peace a Chance

I’m in the Southern the hemisphere and it’s cold and grey right now.

Damned cold. And damned grey.

“I hate winter.” I mutter to myself repeatedly as I go about my day… mostly in my dressing gown in place of a jacket because hey... work from home has its perks.

A perk of lockdown as well. Has it even become acceptable to roam the streets in a dressing gown? I do anyway. People look at me strangely sometimes, but as @tengolotodo wisely stated recently… when you are old enough, you get to a point where you start caring less about what people think.

Because I wear a knitted poncho over everything, my hair in a top knot (that looks kinda hippie chic… or granny chic according to the 11 year old) and I generally go barefoot… in winter still… I think it gives me some street cred in fact.

So I’m keeping it.

To be clear, I mutter “I hate winter” often enough for my son to pipe up, “I think I’ve heard that somewhere before!”

He has a point.

Despite the grey skies, today I began my Shadow Hunt in earnest.

(And yes. I was in my dressing gown almost all the way.)

Thing is… with no sunshine, shadows can be hard to find.

This doesn’t bother me much either. It’s the change of perspective that is so much fun. I spend some days looking for shadows in the recesses of people’s minds, so they can (hopefully) live more peaceful lives once they’re brought into the light and stop causing so much chaos. The shadows that is. Not the people.

Searching for shadows in the sunlight hasn’t been an activity I’ve been much involved in since I was a young ‘un and still believed in magic. So being inspired to look out for them has really changed the way I’m seeing the world. And that’s always refreshing.

Still… not many shadows to be seen in a winter sky that seems a shadow of summer itself.

So I had to make a shadow when a small bit of sun appeared every now and then with a thing I own instead. I thought there was a deadline for a competition tomorrow. But now I see I can just go ahead and post it anyway. So here it is...

This object is one of the only things I bothered to keep when I sold, gifted and walked away from the remainder of a life more ordinary.

A life I ended up in without enough thought or planning. An overly responsible life. A life I always seemed to be trying to outrun, but could never get far enough ahead of to find time for the things that really mattered to me.

It’s interesting what we think of as valuable… and then what we may actually choose to keep when we decide to carry as little as possible…

So here is the shadow of one of the things I valued enough to carry with me. I can’t even remember where I got it. A market trader with a small stall on a pavement, outside a large chain store shopping mall. If I do remember correctly.

I believe he made it himself.

I’m having quite an incredible experience slowly becoming a part of this wonderful community by the way.

People have been endlessly supportive and kind with both my noobness and my occasional skittishness (remnants of the impact the mainstream system has on some of us… when we wake the fuck up and see things are they truly are). It’s pretty shocking, really. I’ve drifted around for some years on my own, because I couldn’t ever in a million years go back to it.

I even wrote a piece on this process for a competition on Medium. But I couldn’t really finish it properly. The topic for the piece was “re-entry” you see, and in all honesty… I was still drifting and unable to return from my experience. Or unwilling to return, perhaps.

I hadn’t really found a group of people that seemed to be like-minded. And I wasn’t wiling to compromise the truths I had learned. I’d lost far to much to “get” them. There was no going back.

It seems I’ve found a bunch of people with the same, or very similar, outlook as mine at last. And by engaging and beginning to relax around here, I feel as though I’m coming home to myself in many ways. An unexpected but really happy turn of events, after a long time of feeling so disintegrated that I didn’t know who I would even be if I ever was able to put myself back together at all.

And now some synchronicity even seems to be kicking in for me again as well… the great mystery.

The wonder…

Something I abandoned with the disillusion of seeing too much, probably too fast.

And I’ll share something with you.

Without wonder… life (for an artist) is pretty bleak.

But maybe it’s possible to regain some of it…

Because just shortly after I decided to use this particular object for my addition to the Shadow Hunters prompt today, I got sent some more original content by @snook .