The story goes that if the groundhog sees his shadow, he retreats back into his own den for six more weeks of cold and isolation. When human beings glimpse their own shadows in paranormal experiences or events, the same thing often happens. It isn’t so much the shadow itself that brings on the deep freeze as it is the hasty retreat, the panicky recoiling  from that shadow, as if it has substance and could do any real damage. 

I often get a response to my paranormal columns along the lines of, “This stuff is dangerous. You shouldn’t be talking about it.” Two other common responses are 1) “It’s all nonsense,” and 2) “It’s all true exactly as presented.” Dead people really are lurking around every corner. The basement is full of demons. Aliens really are creating hybrid babies with abducted human wimmin, and so forth and so on. 

I think that we lost something back around the Age of Enlightenment that made us afraid of our own shadows, and that lost ‘something’ is a sort of grounding through shared narrative and interpretation.

Many of the ancient divinatory arts, like fortune telling (palmistry, tarot cards, the I Ching, etc.), astrological systems, and even alchemy, were concerned with placing each individual human being within the created world through organic storytelling. By organic I mean the stories were grounded in physical reality and personal experience of that reality passed down for thousands of years. 

When we discount our own experience and make the interpretative arts secondary to ‘objective’ science, we come unmoored from the natural world and are soon afraid of our own shadows, like the poor groundhog. 

The truth of course is that there is no such thing as a detached observer. We know this. Science even knows it. And yet we continue to hold in highest esteem a methodology that posits its very existence on the detached observer as a baseline reality. 

Science is not bad. It’s given us cell phones, Tang, Twinkies, flat screen TVs, and this laptop I’m typing on right now. But runaway change for its own sake isn’t progress, it’s cancer. We see the disease but the cure eludes us. I think I know what it is. 

I love to look at shadows and tell stories. That’s why I’m drawn to the paranormal, divination, experiential reality, phenomenology. I think that, by embracing our shadow side, our lived experience as it actually happens, we ground ourselves and come into the light.

That’s what is missing, that’s the cure: Respect for experience and story, for grounding ourselves in the natural world. Science is not a good philosophy, it’s a good hammer. It’s only a tool. 

So, happy Ground Hog’s Day! If you see your shadow today, don’t run. Don’t call the cops. 

Sit down. Make a pot of tea. Have a chat with the fellow.

Then tell me what you saw!