Shadow Tweets

“Lighten up, Anne.”

Over the course of a half century of life, I’ve heard that plenty.

My reply?  No...

In Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche, Jungian psychologist and analyst Robert A. Johnson defines “the shadow” as “that part of us we fail to see or know,” and asserts, “To honor and accept one’s own shadow is a profound spiritual discipline.  It is whole-making and thus holy and the most important experience of a lifetime.”

I tried most of my childhood and early adult years to have only a light side.  I discovered myself struggling to contain an unseen, unknown part of myself, living a half-sided, half-lived life.

Paradoxically, I find myself now feeling available to lightening up when I’ve balanced it with darkening down.

While the light side of me recoiled from one of the more amusing suggestions of Johnson to “do shadow work” by looking into the garbage, I consciously offer up taking care of the innards and outards of my cats to the dark side.

I find my light and dark sides titillated when @TweetsFromHell show up in my Twitter stream.  Poet Robert Olen Butler is tweeting one-line "value addeds" to accompany his new novel entitled, of course, Hell.

The tweeting poet has been covered in the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere, according to a Google search.  I think I first read of the poet on Twitter in the Wall Street Journal.

The light side:  In another life, I was a student of poet Peter Meinke.  He taught me to write a fine line of poetry, and probably more successfully, to appreciate one, so I find Butler's up-to-140-character-one-liners exquisitely beautiful.

The dark side:  Hoo, boy, some of those tweets...  Well, my shadow, my dark psyche, my inner celebrant of the cat box all revel in the blackness!

Take a look for yourself at this one:

Telemarketers & phone-sex workers are one here, calling endlessly, selling their own body parts. Handling & shipping is the tough part

Dark, dark, deliciously dark.

I'm honored to say that I have a Direct Message - a DM - from the devil poet himself.