Shadows

Shadows are meant to be played with. They’re designed to throw your angles off and force your feet to move around. They cover and expose the light in ways you’d never countenance, and when pushed, they hide texture and touch just as quickly. Shadows are sprites and playful demons, alternatively.

Shadows are to our lived experiences as air is to our breathing: necessary and vital. They protect us from the heat of the sun and its fiery gaze. They cloak us in a gentle wreath of darkness as the light fades. They provide contrast and depth to the colours we perceive as well as hiding the things we perhaps don’t want to see. They’re a curtain and a frame at the same time.

Shadows don’t hide from our view. They’re as ever-present as the sun, moon, and stars. They emerge from their slumber with the timidity of a field mouse and roar, in midday, like a wounded lion. They go gentle into the night, tendrils lashed to the walls of our human spaces like an octopus being pulled from their sheltered reef. They’re woven into existence like our senses, pulled from the ether and an ever-present reminder of the cycles of of life.

The rocks that the shadows above are superimposed on are meaningless outside of being a shore upon which the waters of St. Margaret’s Bay crash. They’re tumbled in and out of the waves, the inevitable friction smoothing over rough edges, catching the shells and seaweed inevitably churned and tossed onto their waiting faces. They’re more ordinary than extraordinary and yet, within the frame cast by shadows, they become a window to a story.

Here’s the thing: we hardly give shadows a second look but perhaps, for all our rushing around, we should stop, look, and listen to the stories they tell us. The potential they offer in the quiet alleyways, the languid evenings on the sea coast, and the brutal midday blazes of summer sun is in the moments of careful consideration, of pausing to understand the moment where we exist. And perhaps, in this gentle inflection, we will learn to walk a little slower, look a little closer, and consider the delicate interplay between the light and dark.

May it ever be so.