A Hidden Northern Treasure: Riding through Dreamtime to Meet the Shadow Spirit

By B.A. Crisp

A large white horse plodded forward, slow and steady, through parched valleys and snow-covered mountains. Mirages appeared and disappeared, swallowed up by sands of quantum tunneling. In this vast emptiness, I felt it again: a familiar ache rising from somewhere deeper than the mind, from a place the mystics call ancestral memory.

It’s a strange sensation—how such strong inner kindling burrows itself in the mind’s marrow, dormant until something, perhaps love, sudden tragedy, or quiet contemplation, awakens it. These memories don’t storm or rage; they surreptitiously vacillate. They ebb and flow under entangled universal tides, teasing release through snippets of secrets. 

As I traversed the highs and lows on my majestic dreamtime horse, I thought about what it means to live well—to love and be loved, for I’ve discovered, there is no greater treasure or remedy against negative forces in the collective universes. 

I thought too about the blessings that Source has freely bestowed upon this cosmic mosaic. Then, I considered the illusory fortune I’ve carved with grit and determination between a multitude of births and deaths. Gratitude and God, I’ve learned, each have twin faces: one for joy, one for suffering. Both belong to the same singularity. Duality is the illusion—but sentient beings require the latter because it helps carve sense and order from cosmic chaos. Through eons, lessons of duality forge the ‘soul’ through lifetimes of sentient experience.

The horse whinnied and back-trotted a few steps refusing to budge, despite gentle heel kicks to its flanks. A displeased whisper startled me. I looked around but saw no one. The discontented traveler within wanted to make haste. I put her aside with neutral calm. Turning my horse away from the distant land of Dejung Yül, I rode through the roughshod terrain of my being, into the arid stretch where old wounds lie broken like cracked earth and gouged scars threatened to swallow me whole. There, I saw her: the shadow woman.

“I am Srin-Nyen,” she hissed, encircling me, scanning my primal nature as her iridescent teal-black formlessness probed for fear and weakness of spirit. 

A hunched, ancient, and primordial figure—half sorrow, half rage—she hurled dark spheres of doubt, warning, and criticism at me like relentless curses from some evil underworld, threatening great bodily and psychic harm. 

So, I thought, here floats the dark ghost of every story I no longer need to tell, every illusion I once mistook for solid identity. We’d previously been introduced. And this time, I did not fear her.

“I know you well,” I said. 

Her darkness slightly flickered and dimmed.

I dismounted, and extended my hand—holding a symbolic phurba, to cut through her illusion. “Come,” I said to the shadow entity, “let’s walk together.” 

“You should be very afraid,” she said. 

“Why?” I asked. “The worst you can do is kill me…and I’ve been there, done that…many, many times.”

“You are a strange and rare container,” she said. “Most would have awakened with galloping heart and cold sweat…or died in their sleep.”

“I’ve been there and done that too,” I said. “I’m not here to prove anything or to barter with you.”

“Then, what do you want?” She asked. 

No more battles with you, I told her. No more extraction of my energy or essence, either—just mutual understanding. 

She took my hand, and I did not flinch. The desert misted over with rain. The dust settled. Her dark spheres softened into light and returned to my Gau—the sacred vessel of the heart where divine wisdom lives—alongside Ma-mo—and a few scraps of illusion I will leave behind to be picked up and carried away by the Tradewinds.  

It was while walking with Srin-Nyen that I realized: Even shadows are part of the whole—and dark spirits have something important to share with each of us before they can rest. Just as water may be turned to ice or steam, or fuel to energy, drips and dakinis can become guardians and protectors. To know and appreciate light is to also befriend darkness, its counterpart. 

“Go,” I told her, as I settled back onto the horse. “Tell the others. Your work here is done. The Noble Warrior has awakened.”

And somewhere, beyond dreamtime and waking, I found it—the hidden Northern Treasure.