Only the birds are able to throw off their shadow. The shadow stays behind on earth. Our imagination flies. We are its shadow on the earth.
~ Vladimir Nabokov
(The Compleat Teacher’s Almanack: A Daily Guide to All 12 Months of the Year)
imagination’s shadow
Ohhhhh, I like the word picture that we’re the shadow of our imagination.
Me, too! 🙂
Barbara, I love the imagery of this. Of our imaginations flying….far beyond the shadows of who we believe or see ourselves to be.
For some reason a couple of lines from Neil Young’s song, “Helpless,” just popped into my head… “Big birds flying across the sky, throwing shadows on our eyes…” Wondering if he meant actual birds or airplanes. It’s always little startling when we don’t hear a bird overhead and suddenly notice its shadow moving along the ground.
Glad you enjoyed the imagery, Colleen. May we all look up to our imaginations when we find ourselves focusing too much on our shadows…
what a lovely pic!
Thank you, Laura! I found it in the National Digital Library, a great source for public domain photos!
http://www.fws.gov/digitalmedia/
Good choice. I had not read that poem before. It reminds me a little of one I love by Patricia Hooper. A hawk comes hunting in her backyard, and carries away a squirrel. The last lines go like this:
how it must feel to be lifted
out of your life, astonished
at the yard growing smaller, the earth
with its snow-covered fields tilting,
and what must be your shadow
flying across it, farther
and farther below.
Thanks for introducing me to a new-to-me poet! Such an unusual and very touching perspective… it made me stop and wonder what the squirrel’s last moments might have felt like…
Is she the Patricia Hooper who wrote “At the Corner of the Eye: Poems”? (I see it available at Amazon and am putting it on my wish list.) Thank you so much for sharing these lines, Gerry!
What a wonderful quotation. Thanks for sharing it.
From Canadian poet Dorothy Livesay:
I saw my thought a hawk
Through heaven fly:
On earth my words were shadow of
His wings, his cry.
How many clouded days
Precede the fair –
When thought must unrecorded pass
Through sunless air.
Another thank you, for introducing me to yet another new-to-me poet, Amy Lynn! Another title for my wish list, “The Self-Completing Tree.”
“On earth my words were shadow of
His wings, his cry.”
I love those lines… So many wonderful poetic connections and discoveries the comments on this post have led to today… 🙂 Beautiful!
That a thoughtful, thoughtful quotation. I agree – our imaginations are just as quick and skittish and varied as birds.
I hear the birds singing all day, and my imagination yearns after them…trapped as it is in the stuffy workplace.
Sometimes I imagine how thrilling it would be to fly on one of those mountain banshees (ikrans) in the movie, “Avatar.” 🙂