Shadowlands
"I said to Scott, over coffee, “fuck God.” And he smiled kindly and said, “Yes. Fuck God. And that’s when God shows up.”
It was a perfect Sunday here in Nashville. Hot like summer but not too hot. Blue sky. We went to church all three of us together. It was our priest Scott’s last sermon. Scott is the priest that, many years ago, when I was having a crisis of faith (like, the thousandth) and was somewhere in the divorce process but clearly far away from the acceptance process, I asked him one day if there was a group at our church for people who were divorced. He thought that was a great idea but said no there wasn’t. I told him I kind of needed a spiritual advisor and he invited me to coffee. I was dipping my toe back into church, back to this one where Jamey first brought me, where we went for years, where Huck was baptized, and now, single and broken-hearted, I went back to find something I wasn’t finding from 12 Steps or therapy. After telling him my story, I said to Scott, over coffee, “fuck God.” And he smiled kindly and said, “Yes. Fuck God. And that’s when God shows up.”
Scott invited me and made it possible for me to go on a weekend retreat he was leading with a woman who did sound baths, over a New Moon on New Year’s Eve at Rivendell Retreat Center. It was better than sitting in my house alone counting down a holiday alone for the first time. We meditated, did sound baths, journaled. I was deep in the throes of my Long Covid battle with major fatigue, so I slept a lot. But I did write a poem about the moon and I did feel healed by community and since then, I’ve rarely missed church at St. A’s.
Scott talked about sound and light and love. He uses Tibetan bowls and gongs and invites silence. I used to think I saw the Divine in metaphor but there are people who talk about God in language I understand, like colors, like shadows, like chimes, like rivers, like wind. Like light.
Later today, Huck and I went on a long bike ride, on a path through the nature park trails that line The Cumberland River. Tall trees, and deer peeking out, cardinals everywhere. A heron or an egret circled above us, then did a nosedive into the pond and caught a fish and we watched it. There are parts of the path that are canopied by the trees. Huck, pedaling fast from behind, as we passed into one of these stretches, yells, “Mommy, we’re in the shadowlands.” I didn’t think I heard him right, so I called back, “What did you call it?” And he called, “The Shadowlands.”
I immediately thought of C.S. Lewis’s work and how grief is considered a kind of shadowland. But to Huck, it was a relief, this cooling off part of a mostly sunny, hot trail. I remembered how, when he was much younger, he would try to jump on my shadow, or put his shadow on mine, fascinated by the possibility of a ghost self he couldn’t leave behind. And I thought of my own journey, the shadowlands of uncertainty. The ones from which I have emerged. And that without that darkness, I may not be able to be as connected and joyful as I feel now. My friend Kathy told me a few years ago, deep in the middle of the breaking apart, “you will know a life beyond your wildest dreams,” and I thought she was full of 12 Step Jargon Shit. But today, I thought, oh, she was so right and it looks nothing like what I thought would make me happy.
Tonight, I sat on my porch with my friend Katie, singing songs together, while our boys, both 8, saw the season’s first firefly in the darkness, in the clovers of my un-mowed lawn. Last night was the New Moon of the month. Darkness.
The night is warm and I sit here, my friends gone now, listening to crickets and see if I can piece together something from my morning writings, tap into the sound of night for metaphor. But I am no longer a night writer, like I was when I was younger. I work better in the birdsong of morning, writing of things I remember from the shadowlands.
Amy Speace is an award-winning Americana folk singer and songwriter discovered by Judy Collins. Her songs have been recorded by Ms. Collins and many others and she has won International Song of the Year from the Americana Music Association (UK). Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Working Mother, and Salon.com. She received her MFA from Spalding University and teaches English at Cumberland University. She resides in Nashville, Tennessee, with her son, Huckleberry, and her dog, Dusty Springfield. The Cardinals, coming Sept 1st with Red Hen Press , is her debut poetry collection.
Beautiful!