“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”
If I were to leave you with my last words, would I want to be remembered for the inadequacy of my skill in recording those symbols of speech and thought? Indeed, my desire is not to be remembered because remembrance is a foolish thought of those about to die. Still, throughout history, humanity has recorded those who left an indelible mark on the collective souls of countless generations.
I am reminded that a person does not die until the last mind in which that person is a memory perishes. So it seems logical that the visionary that created the Sphinx or the master architect of the Pyramids and all their mystery wanted more than a perishable memory to give them immortality. They left us spectacular artifacts to capture the power of our imagination. I will do none of that. Instead, I’ll plant seeds; if they grow, a forest will be my hallowed ground where all my visions of the future will reside.
In the forest, there is the varied darkness of shadows and the brilliance of life under the sun. In between are a million shades of gray that exist under a full moon on a cloudless night. In the dark forest, our imagination rules, and in the light of day, our senses take control. Neither is terrible, it simply is, and this is the secret of humanity that we struggle to learn and hold onto.
John Pierrakos, a psychologist, first documented the five wounds of the soul that are endemic in human history. The five wounds are rejection, abandonment, humiliation, betrayal, and injustice. Most people will have some, if not all, of these wounds. Holding onto these wounds in our subconscious results in compensation using a masked persona to hide our pain. The duality of wounds and masks becomes our persona and the basis of our imagined reality.
Anne Yang had all five of the soul wounds. In her young life, before we met, she had experienced a lifetime of wounding. I would never have known had she not intimately shared her life with me. What we experienced in our isolation together was the path to healing we both needed, especially Anne. Was there a grand design in our brief life together?
Anne told me that the first step to enlightenment was to sit with our shadows as if each were a person and to commune with these wounds without judgment of how they arrived in our life. Over time the injuries and their personalites unfolded in our conversations in the hut while we waited for the day’s heat to pass. We explored the shadows as we took turns washing the dirt and sweat from each other.
The bathing ritual was more than the sensation of another’s touch, of cold water drawing the heat from skin and flesh. Washing transcended the addiction to sensual pleasures in an unforgiving nature. The ritual cleansing opened the portal to our inner sanctum and illuminated the creche of our soul. The outpouring of emotions and memories brought peace and tranquility within the forum of our senses, made aware by the songs of birds keeping watch on our animal menagerie, the wind rustling in the high branches, and the music of the stream rushing down the mountain over the tumbled rocks shed by the cliffs above.
Anne allowed rejection to silence her desire for love and intimacy because her culture told her she was too old at 26 to become a helpful bride. Her mother and adoptive father abandoned her because she was mixed race, which was a source of deep humiliation to know that the sins of her mother condemned her life. This betrayal by her mother left her in the care of monks who gave her all the tools to survive. When she became a woman, and the monks saw how wicked men preyed upon her, they turned her out to seek her own life. This seemed the final wound, injustice. She was forced out of the only life she knew and felt she was in control of because of the misdeeds of others toward her.
In intimate moments, we unburdened the darkness together. The stoic masks of ego fell away, and instead of vulnerability, we found strength, courage, compassion, and love. Our shadows may be dragons, but they are us, and we are them, and to kill them with our indifference and neglect is how we kill ourselves, but most often, it’s how we kill others. It is not our wounds but our masks, our acting out through our wounds, that we become the most dangerous predator. We seek to hurt because we hurt.
Here was where Anne’s lessons in life proved too formidable a weapon. She tamed her shadow dragons by bringing them to the light of day, and she gave love to them, which was the same as showing love to herself. From her life grounded in harnessing nature for good, sustenance, and providing for her beloved plants and animals, she was finally made whole when we kissed for the first time. All the masks we possessed slowly melted away.
Hyperion Sky 
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