Photovoltaic OP Appendix:

Reading a little book on the human shadow,

Concrete spilled everywhere on the new steps, the bags were heavy and wet.

5 Stages in Exiling Hunting & Retreiving the Shadow:

1: externalize and project outward, the psyche has sent the unwelcome power out.  The male baby projects the ‘witch’ onto the mother.  This is sometimes transferred onto a new bride later in life.  When the mother feels a relief and a lightness.  The first stage of projection then the state of mind in which shadow material, well handled by trained conspirators, comes to rest outside the owner’s psyche, and seems likely to remain out there somewhere. 

2: But sooner or later, one of the projections starts to rattle.. it is threatening when the projection starts to rattle.  This stage is distressing.  Beliefs are shattered.  The wife isn’t always a ‘witch’ and the husband isn’t always a negative patriarch and the shadow that is projected outward rattles, as if to call to the projector that it desires to come back home, like some sort of sick medicine. 

3: the 3^rd stage is the state of mind in which the distressed person calls on the moral intelligence to repair the rattle.  It is scary because we need the moral intelligence, yet here it becomes a tool for continued unconsciousness.  People with moral intelligence are often very dangerous types, because the moment the mask is about to fall off, they step forward on request to put it back.  The desperate effot in the third stage to refit the hero mask, search the memory for witch dangers, fight with all women against negative patriarchs, achieves its aim only for a short time. 

4:  The state of mind in which we feel a sense of diminishment.  We can say that the witch corresponds to a force in us that wants to block our growth, yet we must say that the witch presents a very positive force also.  Her value lies in the fact that she knows what she wants.  If we have given away thirty parts of our self, we will then eventually feel ourselves diminished in thirty different ways.  Men and women usually take back their spiritual guide from a guru when they feel sufficiently diminished.  If a woman retrieves her patriarch, or a man retrieves his witch, their respective friends may not like it.  Our friends are used to us as we are.  We don’t live wholly at any moment in the fourth stage or the fifith stage or any stage; we are in all five stages simultaneously, as we send out or receive back various rejected qualities, projected substances, abandoned powers, each absent in different degrees, or retievable with different schedules. 

5:  the stage in which we retrieve the giant, the hero, the witch, the wicked child, the brutal national character, the process of retrieval can be called, “eating the shadow.”  Eating the shadow is a slow process.  It doesn’t happen once but a hundred times.  There are many ways to eat the shadow, or retrieve the projection, or lessen the length of the bag.  The use of careful language, by which I mean language that is accurate and has a physical base.  Using language consciously seems to be the most fruitful method of retrieving shdow substance scattered out on the world.  The fifth stage involves activity, imagination, hunting, asking. 

(Roberty Bly, “A Little Book on the Human Shadow”)  

"What do you do?" is always the first question that people ask, especially in a crowded setting where each connection is understood to be very temporary as well as business-oriented.  I remember struggling with this particular question while living in Buenos Aires, as the Argentines would ask much more interesting questions, such as, "What kind of Art do you do?" when they first met someone.  Anyhow, I would respond by saying that, "I do Ecologoical Design.  Not only solar, but full systems including greywater, compost and edible drought tolerant landscaping," or something else poigniant along those lines.  At times the corporate representative's response would be that of disinterest, and the conversation would fizzle abruptly as the next solar associate came along, most likely working for something very specific, such as an inverter company, or a silicon manufacturing company.  This was ok with me, because there were other instances where amazing connections were made as soon as I dropped my elevator pitch.  One German designer had semi-transparent modules, which would serve well as the roofing material of a greenhouse.  He made me promise that I would send him more information on the Aquaponics Greenhouses of which I spoke.  Another gentleman worked for a local solar company, and when he found out that I spoke Spanish he insisted that I gave him 2 cards so that he could be in touch.