Shadow Work: Ironic, Isn't it?

A SophiaServe reader sent me some pictures the other day that are literally gut-wrenching. And they have provided me with new insights into "irony."

As proof of their manhood, young men--mostly teenagers--participate in the slaughter of dolphins on the Feroe Islands, Denmark. These nearly extinct mammals come to play in the harbor. If you were standing on the beach, as most of the locals do, cheering the men on, you'd hear these animals cry as they are hacked to death by long hooks.

If irony is the incongruity between words or actions, Denmark epitomizes irony right now as forward-thinking leaders gather at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen to seriously think about our planet's future.

We pretend to care about our home yet we gut her at every opportunity.

Ironic, isn't it, that our lust for gold, our drive to find something we can hold on to that will last and provide security, is the very thing that is now polluting the Amazon. Illegal gold mining sends huge amounts of deadly mercury into the river's Peruvian headwaters and rips open and destroys hundreds of acres of the most precious land on our planet. The result: our entire planet is less secure.

Ironic, isn't it, that our president accepts a medal of peace while he must oversee two wars that drip blood as surely as do these dolphins?

Ironic, isn't it, that both our rampant obesity and our "food-theatened" families weaken and sicken us?

Ironic, isn't it, that everything we hate in others also lives within ourselves?

The word irony comes from the Greek eiron meaning to dissemble or to hide under false appearance. Because we're all such adroit dissemblers, it sometimes takes a visual like these dead dolphins or a movie to jerk us into a different truth.

Last night my husband and I watched Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr. in The Soloist. It's the real-life story of a musician, Nathaniel Ayers, who is befriended by an LA Times journalist, Steve Lopez. One night-scene shows a segment of the 90,000 homeless people who wander the streets of Los Angeles. It was straight out of a Brueghel painting and could have been any dark, demonic, smelly medieval city. But it wasn't.

The hereness and the nowness of the dark stuff that lurks within each of us calls us to name it, to expose it, to change it.

Carl Jung first brought us the concept of shadow. He said it's whatever we refuse to acknowledge within us. And know this: they're not the cute shapes we played with at sundown as children. They're towering. They're demonic. They hurt women and violate children. They cripple. They stalk. They masquerade as "smart" or "nice" or "fun." They pose as TV truths. And here's the worst part. They hide in each of us, cowering in our own cobwebby corners daring us to expose them. The more we open up, the more we'll be aware of our shadow-side and accept that this IS a part of us. We won't heal as people or as a planet until we see these shadows and name them for what they are.

Until then our oceans and land will continue to bleed and run red. And so will we.