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

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 …

My Internal Priscilla

I had been rolling in the meadows of lush me-ness that my last bout of shadow-eating brought me. Then, for two weeks, my dreams were filled with toilets, bathrooms, dirt, and chicken shit. I knew I needed to ask for some shadow… but I couldn’t name it. In my daylight …