More Shadows from ChosenPerspectives

Shadow

I have become obsessed this week with Shadow photos but did not think about all the different definitions of the word until this morning.

Here are some of the shots I took inside to show how cool a shadow can be sometimes, cast from the sun on different objects…

My bathroom wall at sunset

Then I went outside to look for interesting shadows. As those who live way up here in the Northwest know, we can go for days and days without shadows of any kind outside.

So I was lucky to come across these…

And then I waited for a long time for these…

It was getting to be late in the day and I remembered playing a shadow game with my grandsons when they were younger…out on the back lawn, so I headed out to see what my shadow looked like.

This is as close as I get to a “selfie”.  Don’t I look tall and thin??

But then, as it darkened outside, I began thinking of all the other connotations for the word “shadow”.

I debate with some of my Psychotherapist colleagues who believe we all have this “shadow” part of us…a permanent dark side we can do nothing about. I don’t see it that way. I prefer to think of it as having unfinished work or areas of growth. We can bring “light” onto anything…sometimes simply by changing our perspective.

As I was pondering these various definitions, I remembered a photo I had taken recently, as a follow up to one of my very early posts. This particular story was very “dark”, so much so that I even warned my readers of its disturbing content. I wrote a lot about an incident as an essential part of my own healing. James and I witnessed a horrific car accident, resulting in the very graphic death of a toddler. Here is a photo of the scene just a few days after the collision.

And then on the one year anniversary, I went back to the location and took this shot.

But for this slightly ominous shadow, it’s like nothing bad has ever happened on this corner in Bellevue…like the sweet little girl named Sraddha Pancha Karla never existed.

I do like how the shadow sort of refuses to cover the spot where she died…

Read more about the accident here, but be forewarned…

The Choice