Synchronicity’s GPS: The Shadow Trickster

A Dali tapestry

I was working on a chapter about shadow tricksters and creativity and Rob remarked that he didn’t understand how this archetype was related to creativity. I started thinking about that.

If we look at our lives as a piece of art, then what are we creating from moment to moment, day to day, month to month? The way we live our lives can be haphazard and chaotic when we’re disconnected from who we are in the deepest pockets of our beings. But when we live mindfully, aware of each breath, touch, encounter, each spoken word, thought, and emotion, then aren’t we creating a lovely tapestry that is uniquely ours?

If the true meaning of creativity is, in its broadest sense, about how we live rather than the books we write, the paintings we paint, the sculptures we mold, the photos we take, then the shadow trickster certainly has a place in creativity. It’s the archetype that sneaks up on us whenever we experience selective amnesia about who we are, what we want, how we’ve treated someone else. It’s the manifestation of where we place our attention, particularly when that placement is negative. The shadow trickster reminds us of what our journey is really about  or where we should actually be and often does this with a wry, sometimes twisted humor or irony.

When I was pregnant, we lived in a condo complex in Fort Lauderdale. The complex itself was nice – tennis courts, swimming pool, and the property backed up to a canal. But the community was gated, with a guard 24/7 because the complex was located in the worst cocaine neighborhood in Lauderdale. On weekend nights, it was business as usual  to hear the shriek of tires and a resounding crash as some fleeing drug dealer burst through the guard rail with the cops in hot pursuit. What the fleeing drug dealer never realized was that there was no way out of the complex – except the way you came in – unless you drove into the canal. Some of them did.

I was about five months pregnant when we realized we probably should move and soon. But just the idea of this daunting task made us huge procrastinators.  I had nightmares about robberies and home invasions, one of them was so vivid that we had the locks changed in the condo. Still, we procrastinated. So one evening, the shadow trickster sneaked up on us.

We were at the gas station up the street, at the vacuum pump. While Rob went to work vacuuming the front seat, I got out to remove the floor mats in the back and left my purse on the floor in front of the passenger seat, with that door open.

In my peripheral vision, I glimpsed a car pull up behind us and started feeling uneasy. I ignored the feeling. Suddenly, this large man pushed me out of the way, grabbed my purse off the floor, and ran toward a waiting Camaro. It happened so fast, that Rob didn’t even see it happen. I was literally mute with shock and it wasn’t until we got back in the car that I said, “That guy just stole my purse.”

“What guy?” he asked.

When we got home, I called the cops. An hour later, a woman in an adjacent neighborhood called, said someone had hurled a purse into her yard, and she found my driver’s license in the wallet. We drove over to the woman’s house, which was right in the middle of the cocaine neighborhood. The elderly woman who had called handed me my purse. “No money there, but they didn’t take the plastic.” Then she patted my arm. “Honey, you need to move out of this neighborhood before your baby is born.”

We thanked her profusely, Rob withdrew the cash in his wallet and pressed it into her hand, and the next morning, we started looking for a new neighborhood. I had been robbed – but not injured – my purse had been returned with everything inside except the cash. The nightmares I had ignored had manifested themselves, but in a much milder form than in my dreams. The shadow trickster had made his point. Six weeks after Megan was born, we moved into a house where we lived for the next eleven years.

I wonder now if the shadow trickster is like the GPS we had in our rental car in Costa Rica. It alerted us whenever we were approaching a dangerous bridge or a particularly winding and dangerous road. If you ignore the alert, you end up in the rushing river below or smashed to smithereens on the far side of a precipice. As an archetype, perhaps the shadow trickster is a course corrector, the synchro that coaxes us – or, if we’ve really strayed, shoves us – back to where we need to be in order to live joyfully, creatively.

During the 2005 hurricane season, someone stole a generator from our garage  and we bought a new generator when we filed an insurance claim. Then, a few years later,  my bicycle was stolen from the garage. But neither of these thefts felt personal, neither of them smacked of the shadow trickster. It felt as if   the thieves needed these items more than we did.

So if the role of the shadow trickster is to correct our course, then this archetype may be more prevalent now, as we work our way through these strange, tumultuous times. Globally, there seem to be more incidents of shadow trickster – Obama being locked out of the White House, that’s just one example. But on a personal level, its appearance in our lives may depend on what we are creating for ourselves moment to moment,  breath to breath. Is your life’s tapestry beautiful to you? In the end, that answer seems to be the only one that matters to the shadow trickster.