Everything Seen is a Shadow

Image of author by Tahiti Kulia

Dear Readers,

For four years, I have written to you on a schedule. It’s been good for me, and hopefully for you, too. However, as I said a couple of posts back, I knew I needed some incubation time, so I dropped the schedule in order to go dark.

My intent was to dive head first into one of three books that are calling me. But now that I’m in the incubator, I can see that declaration was putting too much pressure on whatever wants to come through me.

I’m not working on a book. I’m not working toward any goal. I’m just writing here and there when I feel like it, without pressuring myself. This does not mean I am not committed.

I am writing by a hand, in a large hard-cover journal that has some heft to it, and reminds me of the weight of the word, and the weight of the world. Life can be heavy and light, and these days, I’m here for all of it.

I’m writing now, because I genuinely felt moved to share from the cave. What you’ll find here, is play, an experiment in collaging words from that big, heavy journal from the narrative my hand is creating that may, or may not, become a book.

What I did, was go through the pages and pick, at random, sentences that I typed out here on Substack, I let my eye guide me where it needed to go, and strung the sentences together into this tapestry.

I’m rather astonished at how they came together in this piece, but I’m also not. I know, as an oracle, things pass through me from so many streams, but that ultimately, all bodies of water end in the ocean.

Wishing you all well as we head into the chaos together as a collective here on Earth. The cave is calling, and the eye at the back of the cave sees it all.

Will we find out what’s on the other side of that spiraling eye?

I can’t tell you, but I do have these words to off you now. May they inspire your own oracular visions.

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Everything Seen is a Shadow

This is the story of a day I walked toward the ocean because I had to.

A day that began without a plan, in a time when I still had space in my days for wandering.

Time was curved by the island’s hollows, and anyone who lived there long enough knew the island’s small square footage was an illusion—there was always a new place to discover, a new view down every dirt road.

There was talk of where the terrorists would strike next.

I had just slept on the ground for three months on top of a snake who left its skin for me under my tent before it slipped between cracks in a stonewall to go dormant for the winter.

How long did we stand there looking at each other? Probably ten minutes in clock time? But in the world that I was trying to get to—the one I could hear calling me from the other side of stonewalls stacked by enslaved people when the island was stripped and settled by my people, it was far more.

They say you can summon the devil from the bottom of Rodman’s Hollow.

They say, they say.

Did I even believe in the devil?

I walked down anyway, slaloming rocks sticking up through the uneven trail. My knees were still good.

It wasn’t like I reached a lowest point, but eventually the trail headed back up, so I knew I was ascending.

I climbed toward the rumble of stones eroding en masse by ocean waves with nothing to stop them from here to Portugal.

Down another bluff, and I am on the beach left with two choices if I didn’t want to turn back. Should I walk east toward the rising sun, or west?

Of course, I could have just walked into the water.

On the beach, heart-shaped tracks of deer—heading west. I turned toward the setting sun.

Keep going—this way—into the wind.

In summer, we kids walked out backdoors and just found each other between a border of skunk cabbages in the woods where we weren’t supposed to wander and the shooting range of an eccentric lawyer.

None of us had been to school yet and learned to measure time or inches.

We lived by light and dark, unaware our days were numbered, and that time was waiting for the day we’d realize it ruled us.

I can’t remember if anyone knew yet what death was.

In a way, I was shot through when I picked up the spent shell on the ground.

Nobody found out and we didn’t get in trouble.

One day, childhood ended and I became a ghost looking down at the neighborhood that was once a whole world.

Ghosts will always haunt the borders seeking to cross over.

Which way do they really want to go? Do they even know?

If we can find it again, our innocence will lead us to the underground rivers where our copper pennies can be exchanged for the words to make patterns that praise the world, not tear it apart. Call them poems if you want.

Just make space for the light to return home to the dark, and remember, when you come back, how the clear voice of the river passing by said, everything seen

is a shadow.

Kō aloha lā ea

Concentrate on love by way of the light