Missing - My Glorious Shadow

[The following is a transcription from my personal diary, written at 5:30am. I'm not going to try to footnote it, since I think the gist makes sense even if most of the readers here won't know the stories/characters referenced. The one term I want to define is daimon. I use it in the sense that Caitlin Matthews does in In Search of Woman's Passionate Soul, in which it is the "masculine muse" or the inner spiritual beloved who inspires, challenges and teaches. The concept meshes beautifully with many male figures in my personal mythic creative writing.]

Edit: According to toesontheground I do need footnotes to make this entry intelligible. Here they are, behind cuts to keep this entry from totally taking over everyone's Friends pages.

( The Journeyer )

( Seonaid Montgomery )

( The Daimons )

These figures didn't stay on paper. They became parts of my mind, parts of my identity. Their presence enriched and provided a backdrop to my everyday life.
Back to the original post.



I have been distressed for some time about the lack of creative vitality and passion in my life. This morning, it suddenly struck me that I need a new alter-ego.
The first epoch of my conscious life was that of the Journeyer. The second was that of Seonaid Montgomery. Both were accidental, not deliberate, births. Both were born of a fantasy of confrontation, testing, captivity, and alliance with key daimonic figures. Seonaid's story is ultimately the same as Adria's: forced to a new self-awareness that reveals her true power (abilities, strength, honor, sovereignty). But where Adria left home and traveled widely, Seonaid stayed home and redefined herself in the midst of both the ordinary and the extrordinary.
Both Seonaid and Adria embodied my yearnings for my authentic self. Seonaid, despite being located in a different world, was closer to my actual situation, even more mythic than Adria.

And now?
Now, I have found my vocation, but my creative life is flat. As I step into ministry, a place where my heart and intuition are needed and necessary, I find myself drawn to Swords aspects as I once again embrace the academy. After a lifetime of passionate involvement with men - even on the fantasy, daimonic level - I find myself hollowed-out and dry. Instead of vibrant lovers, challengers, and initiators, my daimons move like cardboard, forced to play out scenarios unworthy of them or me.

I look inside for Seonaid and Adria, and they are ghosts. Their times have passed. But no one is there to take their place.
I look for the place within me from which they emerged, and find emptiness.
I feel like a character in a myth whose soul has been put in a box and hidden away.
A Peter Pan without my shadow.

My daimons have followed their ladies into the West.

There is something in that "missing shadow" image. Adria and Seonaid embodied all the glorious parts of myself I did not dare - or know how - to manifest in my life. They were the ordinary girl, the daughter, striving to be queen. Even if they didn't realize it at first.
Now here I am, finally feeling like I am closer than ever to my authentic path.
The easy, obvious answer is that it is finally time to express the "glorious shadow" in my daily life. To become, in this world, the heroine-queen of my otherworlds.
But why does it feel that that lack of an alter-ego is part of what I am most conscious of lacking right now: passion, creativity, intuition?


Where is my glorious shadow? The brilliant, secret, vibrant part of me that hides from the everyday world? How can I express it in this world if I can't touch it within myself?
How can I continue to cherish it in the secret darkness and be nourished by it?

And where is the Wendy who will help me bind it to me again?



This evening, I had a long chat with Sandy, my best girlfriend, who asserted her strong belief that what I'm experiencing is indeed the transition into the time when I will begin manifesting those shadow qualities in my real life. "You just don't have all the tools yet, so it feels empty. But it's not really empty. You're just at a crossroads. You're integrating all this stuff. Lighten up on yourself!"

Thank God/dess for best girlfriends with keen insight and a sense of humor!