Shadows On The Wall
But who’s holding the puppet strings?
When you were a kid, did you play with your shadow? Or make shadow puppets on the wall? A time of imagination and playfulness that was fun and fascinating. Your inner puppeteer controlled the story.
Shadows are about the light, not the darkness. A straight line of light shining on a solid object is what shades your vision. When they teach perspective in art classes, the fundamentals of shading and the direction of light bring it alive. It creates the magic of what our eyes see beyond the flat piece of paper. It raises the dimensions. Focusing on the empty spaces rather than the object you are trying to draw has an extraordinary outcome also.
You can do that with your thoughts too. It is a matter of how you look at it. If you focus on the light rather than the dark, you begin to see shades of different effects from your thoughts.
Allegory of the Cave
Puppeteers manipulate an inanimate object to create the illusion that the puppet is alive. Fear can sometimes turn shadows into monsters, nightmares, and dark clouds of thought. But as accurate as they appear, they are just our minds playing, not so funny, tricks on us more often than not.
Plato’s story- Allegory of the Cave- describes a group of people who lived in a cave…
