words and images by mk swanson
 
Category: <span>shadow</span>

Exploring My Swedish (In)Side

Farmers, serfs, peasants, torps, the sons and the dottirs, setting out from Korsberga, Jönköpings län, Småland, boarding boats in Gothenburg, passing through ports like New York, and then to Knox, preceded in the two previous decades by fifteen thousand cousins (starving more deeply or perhaps more Viking-like). Magnus, Eva, Christina, …

Gullibility

Doubt is a strainer through which we pour experience. What’s credible runs through the mesh; what’s not, stays to be examined and either labeled not true, or kept as an exception: incredible, but still true. Sometimes, though, an incredible experience makes the mesh bigger, allowing more to pass through the …

Cutting Away the Past

I gave myself my first major haircut after a bad breakup in college. My hair was two feet long, bright-young-thing blonde and shiny like cooking taffy. After that breakup (that man, that boy, that pain), I wanted to demonstrate that I was a a new person, a woman who had survived. As …

My Shadow, Your Shadow

Humans have a responsibility to care for each other, and for every other being on Earth. I am afraid that other people don’t believe that is true; I fear that they believe that there isn’t enough, and will prioritize themselves and their own people at others’ expense. Fear, however, hasn’t …

The Finger

“Do it like I tell you!” “And another thing…” “I told you so.” I’m trying to make sense of The Finger. This is something I have been doing since I was a kid. It’s the digit equivalent of tapping the microphone, perhaps, or a way of saying, “I am explaining …