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Silhouette of the Shadow Man

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I continue to see the shadow man more clearly now. I was expecting time to bring forgetfulness that penetrates the child’s memories as adulthood infects the body. It eats slowly until the brightness of the innocence of spirit is reduced to a dim glow and until the mysteries imbedded in the details of existence are explained and rationalized by chirping minds finding silence once again only in death.

Something went wrong for me in the turning. Instead of growing up I grew inward. All questions and fears, hopes, dreams and wishes I had as a child were spared, and time continued to eat around them and into the lives of children around me. I watched in horror as the years past while classmates and neighborhood friends slowly emaciated into the images and programs of figureheads and famous Americans. I was left alone and trapped in a growing body as child left to face the fading images of children’s spirits. I was a stranger to their words and movements and to them I was the ghost child trapped in an inescapable world full of politeness and social niceties, drained of heart and magick.

In a way the shadow man who instilled tremendous amounts of curiosity and fear from my childhood years became the only true and pure element as I continued growing into the body of a woman. The shadow man never changed yet he was full of heart, summoning one mystery after another into great surprises meant to shock and shatter the little seeds of experience and knowing I collected unconsciously from the world that grew like weeds breaking apart the universe inside me.

After years of engaging in a fading world with only the souls of children to laugh and play with I couldn’t help but feel a sense of displacement as I was neither child nor adult, but both. A peculiar facet of me wanted a niche, a place allowing me the space and time to dance with twinkling soul-stars and to sing with the Four Winds. A memory from the distant past began to tickle the space between my ears until I remembered the field of wildflowers I hid in as a child, playing and dreaming for countless hours at a time. It was a place of freedom and inspiration from the ordinary, plastic world I felt trapped in. I set out one last time on a journey to uncover what I had been missing all these years.

As I trudged through the trails dragging the heavy metal shovel behind me I saw glimpses of the shadow man dodging between trees and bushes all along the way. I followed his movements until it led me to an unmarked burial ground with shallow graves covering an entire hilltop. I scanned the terrain around us noticing this was the very place I journeyed to as a child on countless occasions, yet the space had become baron land where not one single wildflower grew. This place was once full of color and shape, revealing the different dances of the flowers as they were moved by the currents of the same wind. The magick was dead here now.

My heart began to sink and I felt the hopelessness that I would never find my niche again, and so I began to dig a grave for my soul because it was too painful to live in the midst of two conflicting worlds as a child trapped inside the body of a woman. I laid my body to rest in its grave until I was drowned by a lifetime’s worth of tears. And it was just then that the shadow man jumped into my body! I became a being of light trapped in the silhouette of the shadow man, and the world appeared more stranger to me than it had before but not without the mysteries and surprises I had remembered as a child . . .

The Tequihua Foundation www.tequihuafoundation.org

 Chuparrosa is a Dreaming Woman who inherited the sacred art of the ensueño (Dreaming) from the Yaqui Queen of Dreams, Heather Valencia. She has also been training and closely working with Koyote, a Toltec Man of Knowledge, integrating the art of invocation with her academic training in psychology. Chuparrosa works her dream weaving by unifying worlds and mystical visions, using her body and words to sensually integrate, rearrange, and transform.