Shadows Are Not Truth

Our Blink camera had captured something in the backyard. It was night, but we have a light that comes on when something moves, so I could see two or three figures moving swiftly across the ground.

I watched the video over and over again, trying to figure out what those animals were. I eliminated the fox and raccoons. The shape wasn’t right. And it definitely wasn’t Pete, the opossum, because the tail was bushy, and it was too quick for Pete. (Okay, there may be more than one, but we call every opossum Pete, just as we call every raccoon Ricky.)

Later, I asked Del if he saw the video and what were those animals, anyway?

“Deer.”

“No, not the deer!”

I was sure he was wrong, even though we have a small herd of deer that meander through our property to get to the feeder. A few years ago, we moved the feeder, and the deer let us know we shouldn’t have done that because they let the corn grow old and moldy.

But this year, they must have agreed to bless us with their presence because they keep bringing more friends, so now there might be seven or eight staring at us as they eat. It’s debatable if this was a good idea after all. But that’s another story.

So when Del said it was deer, I knew he must have meant another video.

“Look at this one,” I said. “What are those animals moving so quickly on the ground?”

“Shadows of the deer.”

Of course, he was right. I had been looking at the shadows and not at what was causing them. I tend to do that. The batman symbol looks like teeth to me, and I used to wonder why they made such a stupid logo until someone pointed out that it was bat wings. Duh.

How often do we look at a shadow and act as if it is real? How often are we exhausted by our fear of a shadow?

A few days later, Del came home with a trailer full of logs and backed it up against our back porch so he could stack them to use for the wood stove that heats our home. Usually, Del does this himself, but I offered to help so he could get inside sooner after a long day working in the woods.

Except when I looked at the trailer and what looked like an endless supply of logs that had to be stacked, I regretted my offer.

He only laughed and said he had already done four loads that day. We’d finish in no time.

Which was true.

It reminded me of editing a book’s audio after I record it. When I look at a sixty-chapter book and know that each chapter represents almost an hour of editing time, I dread it. I wonder how I’ll ever get done. But I do.

The only way the logs wouldn’t get stacked, or the audio edited, is if I never started.

We’ll never complete anything, never climb a hill, never figure out something we don’t know how to do until we get started. And sometimes the thing that looks the most daunting is actually the most creative. Fearing what might happen or not happen is a shadow.

The deer shadow and the logs reminded me that those with bad intentions use shadows to trick us into believing something is real when it’s not. We can fool ourselves too, often without meaning to, when we focus on the shadow of what we are doing rather than on the intent.

Both the shadow and logs reminded me to look at the meaning behind what I do. What is my intent? Why do we stack logs? Why do I make audiobooks?

They reminded me to not be afraid of the doing, which is only a shadow. The shadow of the deer was not the deer. The time spent stacking logs and editing the audio is not the point.

Instead of lamenting the shadows of the time and effort it took to do both, I thought of the reasons behind those actions, and I was grateful for the chance to have an audio to edit and logs to stack.

Detecting what is shadow and what is real is a skill we all must become masters of so we can separate truth from fiction. Difficult. But we can do it. One log, one moment, one shadow at a time.