Summer Solstice and Shadow Thoughts (Ulog No. 33)

It's the summer solstice.

If you live in the northern hemisphere that means it's the longest day of the year.

I'm trying to come up with some meaningful words to associate with this day but frankly I am drawing a blank. There's just so much going on in my life at the moment that trying to come up with something profound to say seems a stretch.

The sky at 10:00pm, this evening...

Changes...

In a few days we will be closing our small local store. In fact, this Sunday will be our last day of being open to the public. After that, there will be three days of packing up and cleaning up the place and then I will hand over the keys back to the property manager on June 27th.

It is really a bittersweet experience.

On one hand I'm sad because a dream Mrs. Denmarkguy and I had of creating a little business for ourselves has come to an untimely end. We poured hundreds of hours of energy and sweat and tears into this place and in the end pretty much nothing came of it.

My wife insisted we should try to frame it all in a positive manner, since after all we did manage to do fairly well at a couple of things we set out to do: we increased the business for our personal creative outlets. In her case her life coaching practice has grown considerably and in my case my art business has grown considerably.

But is that really enough?

Truthfully no it's not. Whereas we can come up with a lot of long philosophical ramblings and "feel good justifications," the bottom line of any business is that we tend to get into them in order to make money. And we failed to make money.

Late evening sun on the neighbor's trees...

A Feeling of Relief

There's also a part of me that is happy and relieved to be done.

One of the "quirks" of our little space is that it is located in an old building's basement and so I was working underground.

I can't say that I'm going to miss not having daylight every day that I go to work. I also can't say that I'm going to miss having to go to go and "be at a place" every day. If the experience has taught me anything it was to remind me that I really don't work well with a fixed schedule.

I suppose it would be tempting to say "oh get over yourself," because we all have to work with schedules, right? That said, however, I think we all have ways that work best for us when we are trying to do our work.

But what does this really have to do with solstice and saying some meaningful words?

I can look at all this and say that perhaps one of the lessons found here is that life is a matter of perspective.

I can choose to celebrate that this is the longest day of the year and that there is lots of light, or I can choose to be sad that we are now going towards shorter days that are going to be gradually getting darker.

What do I choose?

What does any of us choose?

Our apples are becoming apples...

That Old Shadow, Again...

As I have alluded to in some of my recent posts, I am doing a lot of psychological "shadow work" at the moment.

Shadow work is hard and it's a pain in the ass. The thing about shadow work is that if we're doing it right, we end up having to look at the parts of ourselves that we don't really like.

And if the work is to be authentic and effective, then we are going to look at parts of ourselves we'd just as well turn our back on and pretend do not exist. And yet? There they are.....

As I have slowly delved into these treacherous waters, one of the things I have discovered is that I don't really have much of a relationship with myself at all. In a way, it feels like my relationship with myself has almost always been defined by other people.

The dark and sad thing about always deferring to other people's perceptions is of course that you can lose yourself in the process. And when you lose yourself you tend to end up kind of angry and disappointed with life.

But why do we do this?

Some of the answers lie in what happens to us doing our formative years (where patterns are often created), and what — if anything — we later do to gain awareness and mindfulness of those patterns and how they affect us, and the people around us. Currently exploring patterns I have been aware of but have deemed not important enough to deal with... on account of considering other people's problems to be more worthy of attention, than dealing with my own.

Thanks for reading.

Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment-- share your experiences-- be part of the conversation!

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Created at 190622 00:57 PST
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