It's that time of year here... temperatures begin cooling down quickly and often house guests of non-Human form begin making their way inside to warmer areas. In one of our bathrooms we have a small LED nightlight and the glow drew our little friend to construct a web to entrap small, unsuspecting insects navigating the rooms of our home. When I spotted this little spider, half the size of a pencil eraser, I noticed it had built a web in and around the back of the light. This little one was clever using the glow of the light to draw insects into its' web.

But what I noticed was the size of the shadow being cast by the little spider. It was at least four to five times the size of this little guy. I thought, "Would this big shadow scare off an unsuspecting catch just by the size of that shadow?" That got me thinking...

When we encounter problems in our lives we often fixate on the problem or solution. It's rare we step back to discover the real source of the problem similar to how modern medicine treats the symptoms of an illness instead of curing the source of the condition being treated. The attention we focus often fixates on the shadow and not the form causing the shadow to be cast. We mount defenses for the oversize shadow, swinging punches toward it in dramatic style only to strike more and more air with no results to the source of the problem.

Instead we can perhaps realize the shadow is a distorted projection of an issue hiding motionless in the brightness of a light, an attempt to incite any number of emotions to experience. Could what we are searching for be hidden in the blinding light just out of sight? Is the shadow a way of causing us to make discoveries of our own instead of accepting the 'truths' of others who may have it all wrong? It always seems when we are given something using no real effort, that 'something' often seems to have little value. But when we use our own mental abilities to noodle out problems we often are able to remember those solutions far longer than ones given using no effort.

Will we fall prey to the shadow... or will we understand the shadow for what it is, a distorted projection of a truth hiding in the light.