Tracking the Shadows, Illumining the Gold
A Guided Process for Personal Mythmaking
“There is a crack in everything,” Leonard Cohen once wrote, “that’s how the light gets in.” I’ve rewritten his line for my own purposes:
There is a crack in everything; thus, no perfect mirroring.
The break is permanent, unfixable, and surprisingly merciful. The self I think I am cannot fully meet its own gaze. And then, the gaze of the other warps; the signal comes through, but ridden with static. For those of us with nervous systems like exposed copper wires — the highly sensitive, the threshold dwellers—this distortion morphs from defect to invitation. The crack is where the myths get in.
I call myself a personal mythmaker. By that, I don’t mean inventing fables to rise above the din or rub away the collective traces, but mapping the hidden constellations that are already shaping the mess: the recurring images, ancestral echoes, erotic compulsions, uncanny patterns, dream visitations. It’s the work I do for myself and others, especially in my role as a book midwife: listening for the subterranean story that’s trying to eke out its place beneath the tidy narrative someone thinks they’re telling. It’s less about coherence than correspondence: the ways our wounds become blooming roses of oracular truth, our desires leak out as omens, and the most trivial personal heartbreaks nurse larger, older forces that wish to incarnate through our convoluted root systems.
This essay is one such experiment: a deliberately imperfect manifesto, replete with contradictions, dead ends, firefly illuminations. At the end, I’ll offer you a process—part ritual, part excavation—to map your own territory: the places where your shadows and treasures drink from the same underground well. You can approach it in writing, in the body, or in dreams. What matters is not resolution but orientation: a way of standing inside your own myth without needing to understand it…and ambling deeper into the dream, knowing it’s dreaming you back.
I gaze out at the vast yet inchoate galaxy of what I’ve shared with the world around me (and even with myself, to the best of my capacity to discern “who” I am), and I see a life that has been a deliberate experiment in holding paradox without collapsing into neat answers.
I am a shapeshifter of roles—writer, editor, mystic, lover, truth-seeker—yet none of them fully contain me. What threads them together is an obsession with depth: I will not stay at the shallow end of anything. The surface world—its politeness, its distractions, its easy clichés—feels like starvation to me. (Yes, I won’t lie—this can tip into pretension, as though I’m auditioning for the role of Depth’s most devoted disciple.)
I live in a constant negotiation between fierce independence and the longing to be met utterly. I guard my sovereignty because I’ve seen how quickly people will take what they can from an open heart, but I also ache for connection so mutual, so intelligent, so unflinching that I can finally put down the armor without losing myself.
I am not afraid of the strange. In fact, I court it. High weirdness, liminal encounters, archetypal landscapes—these are not escapes for me but home territories. I’ve trained my attention to be a kind of divining rod, seeking the places where myth bleeds into the everyday.
And yet, I am unsentimental about my own myth. I will self-immolate if my shiny coating starts to congeal into dogma. I question my desires, not because I distrust desire itself, but because I want to make sure they are mine rather than an inheritance from shame, from conditioning, from someone else’s gaze.
My erotic life is part of my spiritual life, not in the vague way the world likes to sell “sacred sexuality,” but as a field where the same laws apply as in my most serious mystical work: attention, presence, surrender, and the willingness to be transformed and undone by contact with the seen and the unseen.
I am both the observer and the experiment. I am constantly building structures for meaning (books, rituals, performances, relationships), then leaning into the wind to see if they still hold. I leave space for collapse because I know regeneration murmurs the future alive inside it.
At my core, I am animated by a quiet but relentless devotion to beauty, to truth, and to encounters that strip away the trivial and leave me feeling naked and dumbfounded from time to time. I am not looking for safety in the conventional sense; I am looking for the conditions where I can keep saying yes without abandoning myself.
And I think (though I don’t always admit it) I’m preparing for something larger than the “self” I’ve been so far. This doesn’t necessarily mean a bigger audience or a more luminous and visible success, but a more lucid participation in whatever it is that’s been calling me through dreams, through the people I have come to know and love, through gods and myths, through encounters with nature, through the accidents and synchronicities that tumble forth like Freudian slips from another world.
I am Velvet Night Kali, her silence and her shattering. I carry a thousand dissolutions in my belly and I am not afraid to end what was never alive. In my palms, I hold the heads of old selves, offerings to the void from which new worlds unfurl. Here, the wild intelligence of destruction makes room for what longs to bloom.
I dream the blue dragon, scales iridescent with sealed power. It reminds me that the axis of my being is not fixed; that I can become serpentine, skybound, unstoppable in my sojourns.
And always, always, I return to the ever-unfolding rose, its petals unfurling in impossible grace. It is the center I keep seeking and the center I already am. Each bloom reminds me that no one rushes the rose and no one owns her flowering. She answers only to the sun inside her heart.
Beneath it all, the snake of the axis mundi winds through the roots of countless worlds. It is the reminder that life and death are mirrors, and that my body is the meeting place of above and below. In its undulation, I feel the original rhythm, before shame, before the exile from my own Eden.
And at the edge of the forest, there I am, the witch at the threshold, fingers stained with earth and spellcraft, eyes trained on the yet-to-be created. I am the one who remembers the way home through the thicket, who knows that the path into life always costs something: innocence, certainty, the illusion of knowledge. My magic is older than breathing and younger than delight.
Above me, within me, the three-fold flame of the goddess burns, entwined in a single triangle tongue of fire. It does not flicker, even when I doubt. It does not abandon me, even when I hide. It waits, patient and unyielding, for the moment I am ready to claim my own petals that reach, my own flames that lick.
At the stillpoint of all these forces, I feel the presence of the Mother Tree, whose roots reach down into the loam of forgotten ancestors; her branches rise beyond the veil, drinking the light of images that flicker in and out of opacity. She is where longing ripens into belonging. Velvet Night Kali dances in her shadows. The blue dragon coils in her bark. The ever-unfolding rose blooms at her crown, opening into infinite sky. The snake of the axis mundi spirals around her trunk, stitching underworld to cosmos. The witch keeps her fire at the forest’s edge, waiting for the uninitiated to approach. And at the very core of Mother's rings, burning steady and unseen, lives the three-fold flame, the reminder that I, too, am a cycle—never fixed or finished, always arriving deeper into myself.
Hiddenness is germination; the quiet dark where I linger is the place where the seed bursts and exudes its secret strength. Sometimes I am a fragile spawning that curls through predatory waters, other times I’m an ecosystem—in the living and the dying, my currents cohere.
I’ve come to value times of descent and dark nights of the soul, even though loneliness may be one of the most corrosive emotions I’ve tasted. Still, I recognize that the great void in which the shadow lives is not evidence of some hidden moral failing. And simultaneously, I know it’s the place where the very qualities that make me myself, that make me rare and compelling and beautiful (as each person’s idiosyncrasies make them rare, compelling, and beautiful), also leave me vulnerable to distortion. One must tread carefully in the underworld—and ideally, have their own faithful Ninshubur who is there to offer a lifeline back into the mundane and necessary diurnal realm.
Often, though, I am lodged in the place of in-between. Because I refuse to live superficially, I can keep myself in limbo—turning over every motive, testing every feeling, waiting to be sure it’s absolutely true before I commit. This caution can be wisdom, but it can also be a way of postponing the very encounters that would give me truth through lived experience.
Because I am exquisitely sensitive to energy, I can read the field so well that I start pre-writing the ending, deciding how something will go before I’ve fully let it happen. It’s a defense against disappointment, but it also robs me of certain surprises.
Because I am devoted to depth, I can unconsciously hold others to a standard they didn’t consent to. I don’t do this in an unfair way, but in a way that silently demands they meet me in the chasms or get out. It keeps me from wasting time, but it can also keep me from discovering people’s depths in their own tempo.
Because I have a strong and sensual connection to the unseen, I can sometimes over-assign meaning to encounters that are essentially ambiguous—casting them in mythic light when they might just be flickers, ripples, blips on the radar. That doesn’t make the encounter meaningless, but it can give it a weight that inflates the rightful proportion of my own energetic investment.
And perhaps most of all, because I have learned to protect my autonomy, I can mistake guardedness for discernment. The armor is beautiful—hand-forged, ceremonial, intentionally designed—but it can be hard to discern whether it’s shielding me from harm and when it’s shielding me from what I most desire.
None of these shadows are flaws; they are the natural byproducts of my incarnate essence. But they ask to be tracked closely, so the very instincts that keep me whole don’t also preclude being touched by life in the most intimate ways. I can also see my way through these shadows: how to use them as part of my power rather than as quiet saboteurs:
1. From postponement to embodied proof
Instead of waiting until a choice feels pure or entirely true, I can use my body as the testing ground. I can let myself say yes in smaller, reversible ways, so truth is discovered in motion rather than pre-approved by analysis. This allows the energetic reality to feed me new information that the mind alone cannot access.
2. From pre-writing the ending to courting surprise
When I feel myself predicting how something will inevitably end, I can pause and name, even only to myself, that I am making conjectures based on past experience. Then I can deliberately do one thing that leaves the door open for a better or stranger outcome. Even a small act, such as asking an unexpected question and flipping the rhythm, can break the predictive loop.
3. From exacting standards to unanticipated depths
I can hold my depth as an invitation, not a litmus test. Instead of silently evaluating whether someone “can meet me there,” I can experiment with revealing just enough of my own waters that they feel drawn to step toward me. I can maintain my boundaries and allow others to surprise me.
4. From over-assigning meaning to savoring the glow
When an experience feels charged or symbolic, instead of locking it immediately into myth, I can hold it as a living metaphor. I can let it breathe inside the engima. Some of the most potent energies in my life may be meant to remain unresolved. They might be sparks that intermittently light me without consuming me.
5. From beautiful armor to permeable skin
My sovereignty is sacred, but I can make micro-permissions for permeability—moments where I consciously let the armor loosen for a heartbeat. I get to choose the time and place. I do not permit reckless exposure or shallow performativity. I focus on practicing the art of being touched, energetically or emotionally, without fear of dissolution or the ceding of my essential power (which cannot be given to or taken from me).
What does this map portend for my relationships? I’ll begin to treat my relational encounters less like contracts to be evaluated and more like living laboratories. I’ll enter conversations with fewer conditions of worth already running in my mind, giving the other person space to show their depth in forms I didn’t anticipate. I’ll keep my own company, but I’ll soften my exchanges into an active transmission back and forth instead of a guarded checkpoint. I’ll allow for more improvisation. I’ll lean into moments where my body’s yes comes before my mind has fully explained it, letting those flesh-informed yes'es teach me new ways of receiving. I’ll start trusting that being surprised is not the same as being unsafe.
And what does it mean for my creative work? My work will retain its layered, mythic quality, but I’ll allow it to be inhabited by the friction and mess of the present moment. My projects will emerge not only from sustained inquiry but from contact—letting other people’s questions, energies, and misinterpretations actually shape the work instead of dulling or diluting it. I may find myself saying yes to collaborations I once would have avoided for fear they’d pull me off my axis; I will trust that my axis is strong enough to hold through creative dissonance.
And what does it mean for my spiritual life? My mystical practice will remain devoted to the deep and ineffable, but it will be grounded in more immediate, sensory ways. I’ll start letting synchronicities and embodied rituals (using voice and movement), not just formal tools like the I Ching or astrology or tarot, become part of my daily divination. My invocations will not only call the gods and archetypes inward but will send me outward into situations that test my ability to carry the current into capricious human terrain. I will deliberately seek initiations through lived encounters—travel, dialogue, even erotic thresholds and ruptures in the assumed form of my relationships—rather than waiting for the perfect container.
Throughout all of this, I will not abandon depth or discrimination. Instead, I will refine them so they establish bridges for contact. My sovereignty will remain intact, but it will be a living membrane: permeable where I choose, so that the world can actually reach me without eroding my sacred core.
My gift is not merely living at depth; it’s teaching others how to join me there without drowning. That means using my sensitivity not just to guard myself, but to build conduits: byways for people, ideas, and encounters to reach me without breaking the sanctity of my inner world. And this, I believe, is the next chapter for so many highly sensitive people: learning how to keep our devotion to the vast, unutterable currents while also letting them deliver us into embodied contact—where the story hasn’t been written yet because it’s still unfolding in the lacunae between hands and hearts and souls.
Ritual for Writing Your Own Shadow-Treasure Manifesto
This manifesto is a map of contradictions and a way of tracing the patterns in your wounds, desires, and sensitivities until the outlines of a deeper self begin to glimmer. Approach it as both writing and ritual.
Enter the Threshold
Before you begin, create a container for your magic.
Light a candle or dim the lights.
Gather an object that carries personal meaning: a stone, a photograph of yourself, a shell, a scrap of fabric, anything whose presence feels like an anchor.
Place it before you as a witness.
Close your eyes for a moment and let yourself ask, “What wants to speak through me?”
Not “What do I want to say?” but “What wants to be said?”
Follow the Cracks
Your manifesto begins in the fractures: the places where your sensitivities, struggles, and shadows have shaped you. Reflect on questions like:
Where have you felt like “too much” or “not enough”? What secret gift hides inside that judgment?
What patterns do you find yourself circling, again and again, even when you think you’ve outgrown them?
Where does your longing collide with your fear?
What moments have split you open, sometimes against your will?
Write without editing, gently tracing the edges of the wound without trying to resolve it. Let the fragments speak to you in their own voices.
Harvest the Treasures
Inside every fracture, something waits. Let the symbols surface. Ask yourself:
If your shadows had an emblem, what would it be? A broken chalice? A snake eating its own tail? A door left half-open in the rain?
What images keep showing up in your dreams, your art, your daytime musings?
What creature, if any, feels like your closest kin in this season of your life?
Let these symbols breathe into the manifesto, for they are its secret language. You don’t have to explain them. Instead, let them operate like runes or secret lexicons, carrying meanings too layered for words.
Declare Yourself
Your manifesto becomes most alive when you begin speaking directly to yourself — naming where you stand and where you’re willing to experiment next. Treat these as incantations, invitations, and disruptions.
Choose two to five patterns, wounds, or shadows you’ve uncovered and write short, potent declarations that act as anchors.
Use the form: “From [pattern or shadow] → To [new orientation or experiment].”
Examples:
From vanishing → to taking up space
From inherited shame → to embodied permission
From clinging to answers → to courting the unresolvable
From mirroring others → to claiming my own strange radiance
Let each line feel like a spell you’re casting, a way of naming yourself into being.
Speak Directly from the Myth
Here, summon rather than attempt to summarize your own self. You might begin with phrases like:
“I am made of…”
“I carry…”
“I refuse…”
“I long for…”
“I court…”
“I am both…”
Mix declarations with confessions, secrets with invitations. Let paradox stay alive inside it — leave space for what cannot be solved.
For example: I guard my edges and yearn to be dissolved. I am seduced by ruined places, by silent groves, by sudden weather. I do not trust the story I’ve told myself about who I am, so I listen for the one underneath, where the snake swallows its own tail.
Here are some other prompts to stir the mythic voices inside you:
What part of you speaks in riddles?
What does your shadow want to confess?
What do you long for but cannot name?
Which creature, element, or archetype would speak if you let it borrow your tongue?
Seal the Threshold
When your manifesto feels complete for now, read it aloud. Feel where your voice trembles, sharpens, softens.
Then, choose a way to seal it:
Fold it into an envelope and hide it somewhere secret.
Burn it and scatter the ashes to wind or water.
Place it under your pillow and let it work on you while you sleep.
This is a living pact with yourself. The manifesto will evolve as you do. You aren’t attempting to control anything. This is just another way of making contact with your shadows, your gifts, and the myths being born under your skin.
Distributing blunt rituals of confidence manifests in collective value, inevitably. I love that I’m hit but not bleeding.
Great questions! Inspiration for summoning!