Duende. N. Thomas Johnson-Medland

has been hidden in the bag.

      There will be some sort of dreamlike thing that happens in the process. Either she/he will fall into a trance and forget her/his mission (like in the Pearl), or she/he will be enticed into the therapeutic process through dream-work (Jungian analysis). In either case she/he will be returned to wholeness. This is Shadow-work. It is retrieving the thing that will make us whole. It is recognizing that the thing that has wounded us is a part of the process of mending and becoming whole.

      The Shadow is Duende. And, the whole process of Shadow-work or Duende-work is tiring. It is consumptive. I think that is why we can really only expect to be able to do this work in mid-life. At that point we are worn down enough from the battle of life, that we are able to accept the pieces of our disparate self and integrate them. Not because we choose to, but because we recognize that to integrate them is somehow a wiser and a less energy-depleting activity. It is making peace by saving energy.

      There is a wisdom in that. It is the wisdom of mercy, and grace, and acceptance. It is the wisdom of understanding the processes that run underground in this landscape we call life and living.

      • • •

      Because most of the things that we are expected to hide in the bag have to do with suffering, pain, agony, darkness, sensuality, differentness, having an earthy body, and brokenness; we can expect that Duende will take us to the edge of these things and seek to get us comfortable with their existence and presence. So for the sake of this body of poems, we can use the terms interchangeably. But I want to add some differing hues to the richness we have painted in our description of the Shadow/Duende and the bag of stuff that has been stuffed.

      • • •

      Duende is a trickster. Duende is the acknowledgement of the downward pull at mid-life. Duende is the assent to sensuality and forbidden-ness. Duende is the unspoken drive that moves through life, upsetting all attempts to order and organize. Duende is that other persona that hides just behind the one we acknowledge. And, it is also the sense of becoming so familiar with the emergence of shadow-bag-stuff, that one is not only unembarrassed, but comfortable in its showing and emergence.