"Shape doesn't create shadow. Shadow creates shape. Without shadow, there is no depth or dimension. It's not something to be feared, but embraced." -- me
I realized the crucial role of shadow when shading one of my recent drawings. After further thought, I realized it goes for much more than drawing. Have you ever considered what it really means to be "afraid of your own shadow"?
I was for quite some time in many ways, but am no longer. It's as Herbert says in Dune with the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear:
"I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its
path."
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain."
(Source:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bene_Ges…)
***
Something further that all of you might find interesting; I decided to post it after re-reading it again today. It is a quote from an essay I wrote six years ago.
"I have grown into a person who is driven by her need to create. I have become cognizant of my drive to write more and more over the years since my entry into adolescence. Now, fifteen years after my first recognized verse, I feel that I can finally begin to believe in myself as a composer -- not just as a poet, not just as a writer, not just as an essayist, but as one who composes using the rhythm and rhyme of her words as a musical scale, one who speaks in octaves and verses and sestinas, in iambs and feet and sentences and paragraphs, in lines and volumes to communicate the full breadth of her existence as something more than what she now perceives to be human. In living apart from humanity I have finally accepted that I no longer truly feel human per se, and have come to feel that that is truly okay. It's not a product of delusion. It's not a denial of biology. I recognize my heritage and my physical self for what they are. Yet my mind, my proclivity to description, to delving the deepest and highest possibilities of language in order to make some small attempt, however inherently limited, at describing my daily life exists as something beyond the purely physical. It is not purely biological. Nor is it purely mental or emotional. Rather, it is spiritually driven in a way that I am spiritually driven to survive, to create, to give birth to things greater and more lasting than myself, to populate an entire world with words of my own design and, in so doing, allow and enable others to do the same without fear."
Current Residence: North Carolina