Lord of the Shadows

A few weeks ago, I was at a meeting where someone suddenly made a statement that stirred up a lot of emotion. People reacted, and people reacted to the reactions, and in a very short time, most of the people in the room were emotionally involved in the discussion.

On the surface, everyone sounded like they were talking about real concerns, real problems that needed to be addressed. But underneath the surface, each person was responding out of fear, or threat, or annoyance, or desire to control, or not wanting to rock the boat, or trying to stay out of harm's way.

In thinking that scene over this morning, suddenly the scenes from Lord of the Rings came to mind, where Frodo put on the ring, and suddenly entered this shadow world, where everything was in motion, everything was blurry and confusing, all edges were indistinct, and where things that were previously hidden suddenly had a vivid presence. When he popped off the ring, others back in the "real" world didn't understand where he had been.

Beneath the seemingly rational discourse with which we conduct ourselves as civilized human beings, lives this shadow world, windy, moody, dangerous, indistinct, where little is certain and all is alive. As we sit and discuss in the bright light, the shadows are whipping around us, flapping in our ears, raising primitive feelings that we don't understand, causing us to react to others as if we were beasts in the primeval world with little understanding of what was around us, working on instinct alone. Yet we sit, sipping our tea, pretending that the shadows don't exist, that nobody sees them or feels them, that our words and minds are all that exist in the room.

Sometimes, the danger zooms in suddenly, and we react out of gutteral sweat, taking rash action, taken over by ancient drives of self preservation and aggression. We shout and swing our sword, there's pain and tearing, there's a moment of chaos, and we pull off the ring. Suddenly, we are back in the rational world, trying to explain the bloody sword in our hand in terms that fit our refined surroundings and inquiring minds. We come up with weak reasons for our actions, and everyone hastily agrees with us, for no one else wants to admit the existence of the shadow world either.

And so we keep the lights on to keep the shadows away, and our minds active to avoid feeling those feelings again. We believe we are Lord of the Shadows.

Until the next time.