A few weeks ago, before Christmas, I was listening to a couple of thoughtful women discussing their UFO encounters (bear with me) and the zeitgeist, and one of them used a phrase I’ve never heard before to describe a phenomenon she sees happening in our culture right now. As our collective shadow rises, she said (I’m paraphrasing), our Golden Shadow is also rising, and it’s bright, bright, bright.
Golden Shadow?
This is an evocative and mysterious term, and I’ve since dug in a bit and learned that it’s a neo-Jungian description of, essentially, the positive potentialities we’ve failed to see in ourselves, failed to acknowledge: aspirational qualities that are latent in us because we’ve never felt able to claim them. The Golden Shadow is close kin to, or perhaps an aspect of, the more traditional Shadow: the parts of ourselves that we’re ashamed or afraid of, that we’ve hidden away and repressed. Psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who was the first (in the western canon anyway) to name and describe the Shadow, never used the term “Golden Shadow” himself—but he is said to have said that the Shadow is 90% pure gold, precisely because he clearly saw that in hiding from our darker natures we’re also hiding from our wholeness, our full potential.
Perhaps it can be said that our Golden Shadow comprises the aspects of ourselves we’re only able to notice and lean into once we’ve also done the hard work of acknowledging and integrating the parts we’ve been ashamed and afraid of.
This 19th episode of Kinward Podcast—with Montana-based writer, mother of two, daughter of a Soviet exile, and old-school well-rounded thinker Antonia Malchik—is the wrap for this first season of the show, and while in many ways this conversation is specific to Antonia’s work and interests, I also think it’s an inspiring roundup of many of the themes we’ve been exploring since our first episode with farmer Genevieve Flanagan aired early this spring. Antonia’s lens on our foundational loneliness—the hungry ghost or Shadow which I believe drives so many of our culture’s maladaptive expressions—is the rich and seemingly omnipresent lens of private property.
Antonia and I open and close this conversation circling around, reaching toward, the shadow and shadow work. Antonia and I are both in this work on a personal front—parenting, and other life transitions, and the time we’re in, make it feel urgent—but I think it’s also a fair characterization to say that Antonia’s writing probes the aspect of our culture’s collective shadow that is the urge to dominate.
“Water, women and seeds,” were, in her telling, the first and most drastic instances of life sources, our foundational relationships, being forcefully enclosed: converted into “property.” Belonging became belongings—and this fundamental rupture from our “life-givers” ushered in the estrangement that has left us hungry, lonely, and ashamed. As Antonia puts it,
“I think one of the most fundamental things that humans have lost in promoting and supporting and empowering the concept of ownership is connection and relationship with the rest of the living world.”
And, on the flip side—perhaps the Golden Shadow side—our acknowledgement of that loneliness, that rupture, is a first step toward the good work of remembering and reclaiming the commons: re-investing our bodies and our care and labor in all that we (still) share. Claiming and tending our commons is a homecoming to a vital and enchanted belonging among our fellow humans and the wider web of life.
has written essays and articles for Aeon, The Atlantic, Orion, High Country News, and a variety of other publications. Her first book, A Walking Life, is about the past and future of walking’s role in our shared humanity. She currently writes , a newsletter about ownership, private property, the loss of the commons, and being human amidst all of it, and is working on No Trespassing, a book on private property and the commons. She was born and raised in Montana, and lives in her hometown with her family.
Midway through this episode, as Antonia and I are getting ready to dive into the tangled question of how we might vest our kids with a felt sense of belonging to the earth, to land—which I believe is every human’s birthright—and how we might try do do so here in the particular beautiful stolen lands that she and I both love, the lands of the mountain West, with their particular fraught histories—Antonia jokes that we’d need a couple whole episodes for that. Yeah, I say, laughing, that’s kind of every episode of my podcast.
For real though.
As I look back on the body of work that is Kinward’s first season, I think I could say that one thing I’ve been trying to do here is to feel the contours and to learn (and remember) the latent possibilities of our collective Golden Shadow, as it relates to this moment, now, and particularly here in my home, my bioregion, among the lands and beings who raised me and still nourish me and my family.
I hope this (complicated) claiming of rootedness has been palpable throughout these nineteen episodes, many of which have featured people I’ve learned from here, close to home—not because my home is the best home (though it’s pretty great), but because I feel that recommitting to HOME is a recommitment to healthy relationships with the network that actually sustains me, sustains us.
This is not small terrain, and in many ways it’s gotten bigger and more daunting since I became a parent. But it’s the terrain I’m feeling driven to explore as I raise my little son (and very very soon, my little daughter, who’s hiccuping in my womb right now and is due in just a couple of weeks) in the midst of this great turning+unraveling.
In the more personal parts of this conversation, Antonia shares insights derived from the shadow work she’d been doing herself as a mother in the midst of significant life transitions. I’m grateful to her for opening up about her personal journey, which I feel unfolding alongside our collective work to remember who we are. I believe we’re in a time, now, where healing is happening (and must happen) on the inside and the outside at once: that we're being called to face in ourselves what is most toxic in our culture; to comfort and nourish what’s been lost and unseen in us; and to reclaim, in daily and embodied ways, those capacities for care and belonging that we need most if we wish to emerge on the other side of the “metacrisis” with our souls, and this beautiful entangled world, whole.
I hope you love this wide-ranging, curious and nourishing conversation with Antonia Malchik, a kinward spirit. If you do, please share it. And definitely check out Antonia’s Substack,
, which is a wonderful place to land any time, and maybe especially right now.
Gratitudes for this episode include: to Antonia for modeling a broad, rooted, and caring intellectual curiosity that I also aspire to maintain; to
of podcast for my first introduction to Antonia’s work (and the work of many other thinkers I follow and admire, some of whom we mention in this episode); to for many mind-expanding musings, and for the image of our collective Golden Shadow rising; to the many beings and kin who have been supporting me and my family throughout this pregnancy and will be with me, in one way or another, in the imminent birth portal and the squishy postpartum time; to my peer learning community with Deepen Your Roots, a yearlong course with Rooted Healing that has nourished me deeply and informed these nineteen episodes of Kinward in many ways; and to all of you, for listening.
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