When dragons become princesses

What if that frightful monster is really something helpless that wants our love?

Today is part three in our limited series about the role of the shadow in finding alternatives to our inherited cultural stories. Madness, darkness, the untamed and unpredictable—what do we do with these fearful things? If you missed the introduction, you can catch up here.

As above, so below. Watercolor by the author.

I feel resistance to delving further into this topic of the shadow. It demands honesty and strips off masks. With nothing to hide behind, I tell myself it’s too hard or it’s all been said before. What can I possibly add to the conversation? And yet this resistance itself is a perfect invitation, a dare to keep going. Shadow is not only a repository of shame and evil. It’s a treasure house of insight for those with the courage to look.

The shadow is a trickster, slippery and difficult to pin down. Avoidance is tempting but futile: daily encounters offer boundless opportunities. Whatever shows up to block my way, to challenge and frighten me—that’s my shadow. When a person or situation brings up strong emotion—especially aversion, fear, anger, or shame—that’s revealing something deeply buried, something teasing curiosity. Either I know about it and thought it was safely under lock and key, or it’s been so long ignored, denied, and/or unacknowledged, I’m taken by surprise. Being blindsided happens less often now, but it does happen.

I came into this thinking that the most destructive, ecocidal aspects of our ingrained cultural story are reflections of my own shadow, projections of a great cultural shadow. But here’s a radical idea: what if it’s just the opposite! My shadow, everyone’s shadow, contains tremendous magic and power. And this power is just what we need to fuel the shift to new stories. Rilke saw this. He advised his poet pen pal:

“We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. . . . How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment transform into princesses; perhaps the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything that frightens us is in its deepest essence something helpless that wants our love.”

Years ago, I read a series of essays in the collection, Meeting the Shadow.¹ In it, there’s a fascinating passage about our relationship to the web of life. Far from being good news of belonging, one late 19^th century lecturer framed it as being caught in a trap. He despaired of ever throwing off “the bonds that subject us to nature.”

What an odd notion! And yet, so telling: our entire modern world reflects that intense aversion to the truth that we are but one among many, not the center of it all. And that nature is a kind of prison from which we yearn to escape. Whether it’s factory farming, deep ocean oil drilling, genetic engineering, fracking or terraforming Mars², our entire world seems predicated on proving that we can break those bonds.

To create such a world requires us to bury and suppress whole swaths of reality. Sound familiar? To bury and suppress is the same process by which the shadow is formed. Anything that doesn’t belong is shoved underground. Our hyper materialistic, overly rational, achievement driven, nature fearing culture has driven into the shadows the wild, the feminine, the intuitive: all receptive, creative, nonlinear aspects of life on Earth.

It would be a mistake to say we have only to rebalance and reintegrate these aspects and everything will be a-okay. There’s a reason the shadow is the shadow: to meet it, let alone give it expression in the external world, feels dangerous, subversive, even life-threatening. Certainly, anyone who dares to embody such qualities overtly is mocked, ridiculed, or shunned by the dominant society. Or worse.

When I feel tremendous resistance to stepping out into the light with these thoughts, it’s from a deep, ancient, even primitive place of fear for my very survival. I am caught up in believing this resistance is my own, that I’m trying to spare my closest relationships the pain of seeing me withdraw from the world, the bafflement of witnessing my loss of faith in the system that raised me and made all those promises. I went along with the program to avoid rocking the boat, but I have been hearing the call to stop for so long.

The more I consider this, the more I believe this is not my own, single journey. (I almost said “battle” there, but language matters.) This is a larger calling, the stirring of a long-buried giant that can only be awakened by a quorum of us. Yes, it seems like a dragon from where we sit right now. But it’s really a princess and she’s been sleeping long enough. She wants our love. Let’s wake her up and see what happens next.

---

Each season, we donate 30% of paid subscriptions to a worthy environmental cause. This season, it’s Indigenous Climate Action. They envision a world with sovereign and thriving Indigenous Peoples and cultures leading climate justice for all. Track past and current recipients here.

If you enjoyed this, please share and comment. It’s always wonderful to hear from you. Stay safe and take good care.

1. Listing on Goodreads

2. Jason Anthony covers this brilliantly in his recent post, Neither Venus nor Mars, which I highly recommend.