Duende. N. Thomas Johnson-Medland

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      This battle with the forgetfulness of who we are in the divine nature of things is exactly what the Shadow/Duende is about. I have included the hymn here because it is a great place to begin to get an understanding of the Shadow/Duende and all of the hidden things in life that tickle us into not remembering who we really are.

      There is a sensational book that highlights this text and other similar Syriac/Gnostic tales “The Wisdom of the Pearlers” (An Anthology of Syriac Christian Mysticism). It is well worth the read. It is a guide map of the interior life which is somehow a GPS of the soul and able to track interior coordinates on the exterior landscape of the lives we live. A lot of mystic literature performs the same role and function in our lives – gives us an x-ray of what God and the cosmos call us into living while we are here.

      This particular tale is a part of the ilk of literature that the church would recognize as “Prodigal Son” literature. They are stories about what we do with ourselves in trying to find out who we are. They involve shadows, reflections, impressions, conflicts, forgetting of identity and calling, battle, and then a sort of ultimate triumph through some sort of humbling remembrance and return.

      All of this is wrapped up in and around the notion of DUENDE – the theme of this volume. Duende is that place in us where the two halves of our life are conjoined. It is the place where we go down into the self and gather up that opposing force to our immediate nature. It involves the undoing of the “pretending-everything-is-ok-mechanism” in us and it is an overall waking up to the forces of conflict in life and actually mustering a strength to make abiding choices. Many throughout time have likened this awaking process to dreams and forgetfulness and because of that it seeks to reveal itself in shadows and reflections.

      These “Prodigal Son” tales tend to end up someplace familiar; reminding us that we are who we are, no matter where we are. And, in order to become that which we think we are destined to become; we must return to our center and be who we have been all along. The tales tend to forge a unified self from both the “self” that exists in the light [the known-self] and the “self” that exists in the darkness [the unknown-self]. There is a going outside of ourselves to capture and regain some piece of who we already are. Then we bring it back inside of us.

      It is a MYSTERY.

      Some liked to note and identify these Gnostic tales as the stories of saviors who needed saving. In that vein, they are really tales about wounded healers or just plain common folk who begin to recognize the commonplace nature of the divine indwelling. The redeemer-prince tales speak to us of our complex nature. We are at one time divine and human; terrestrial and celestial.

      • • •

      Robert Bly spoke of the Shadow as the bag we drag behind us. We throw pieces of ourselves into the bag that we do not want to bring to the light of day – things we do not want other people to see. It starts with pieces of ourselves that others tell us they do not want to see.

      In this light the Shadow is the personality of the son (in the gnostic tale from the beginning), but it is his forgetful-self – the portion of him who forgot he was the Prince.

      Our bag of Shadow-stuff fills up easily. We ditch everything we are told or suppose is no good. At first it will be our parents that tell us what they do not want to see. Then it will be our teachers and our mentors. Then it will become our peers that tell us what they do not want to see. Their “shame-things” go in the Shadow-bag.

      This is how we adapt—stuffing things in the bag to keep ourselves relevant and loved. We long to belong. We learn to feel shame at the things that separate us from belonging.

      The stuff we are ashamed of is tossed into the bag and we pull it in our wake; not mentioning its presence and its worth. Just dragging the bag, we feel we are set free from the pieces of ourselves that we do not understand or cannot resolve (or more rightly put – things others do not understand about us and cannot resolve). Alas, the reality that we forget is that they are not gone.

      We are bent under the weight of our attempts to hide our darkness. We limp and drag ourselves ahead because we are tethered to our bag – we are dragging a Shadow all along the way.

      Like it or not, the Shadow is carried about. You can hide it, but it is still being carried.

      • • •

      This whole Shadow process is really laid out quite nicely in the Hymn of the Pearl. The son must leave his home and go and get his treasure which is somewhere else. He must “go down into Egypt”, or dig into his bag. There he must “snatch away the pearl and return to his father’s house”, or take out the pieces of his Shadow that are in the bag and return them to his “self”.

      So, Duende is the process of going down and into the shadow bag of the self, and retrieving the “stuff” that has been hidden in the bag.

      There will be some sort of dreamlike thing that happens in the process. Either she/he will fall into a trance and forget her/his mission (like in the Pearl), or she/he will be enticed into the therapeutic process through dream-work (Jungian analysis). In either case she/he will be returned to wholeness. This is Shadow-work. It is retrieving the thing that will make us whole. It is recognizing that the thing that has wounded us is a part of the process of mending and becoming whole.

      The Shadow is Duende. And, the whole process of Shadow-work or Duende-work is tiring. It is consumptive. I think that is why we can really only expect to be able to do this work in mid-life. At that point we are worn down enough from the battle of life, that we are able to accept the pieces of our disparate self and integrate them. Not because we choose to, but because we recognize that to integrate them is somehow a wiser and a less energy-depleting activity. It is making peace by saving energy.

      There is a wisdom in that. It is the wisdom of mercy, and grace, and acceptance. It is the wisdom of understanding the processes that run underground in this landscape we call life and living.

      • • •

      Because most of the things that we are expected to hide in the bag have to do with suffering, pain, agony, darkness, sensuality, differentness, having an earthy body, and brokenness; we can expect that Duende will take us to the edge of these things and seek to get us comfortable with their existence and presence. So for the sake of this body of poems, we can use the terms interchangeably. But I want to add some differing hues to the richness we have painted in our description of the Shadow/Duende and the bag of stuff that has been stuffed.

      • • •

      Duende is a trickster. Duende is the acknowledgement of the downward pull at mid-life. Duende is the assent to sensuality and forbidden-ness. Duende is the unspoken drive that moves through life, upsetting all attempts to order and organize. Duende is that other persona that hides just behind the one we acknowledge. And, it is also the sense of becoming so familiar with the emergence of shadow-bag-stuff, that one is not only unembarrassed, but comfortable in its showing and emergence.

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