Well...

We appear to be having a little trouble with flooding, around here. People are being driven out of their homes in a town twenty miles north, and many of them are taking hotel rooms down here. The hospital there is being evacuated, and we've been hearing ambulances all evening, transporting patients from there  to ours. Roads are closed and a bridge has collapsed.

While I am concerned, my shadowy side is watching all of this gleefully. This would be the same part of me that thrills at the prospect of tornados, is intoxicated by the idea of feeding power to hurricanes, wants to wallow in the dust of Pompeii. It wants to be standing on the edge and watching, the day California falls into the sea. It always routes for the villains in slasher films, and sees no difference between those and documentaries with big cats taking down baby wildebeasts. It thinks of being struck by lightning as "shaking hands with God," and wants to try it someday.

Destruction, annihilation--any annihilation, even self-annihilation, is an object of outright lust to this part of me. It can be a little frightening,  sometimes, but I recognize that it is a part of the cycle, and embrace it as it revels. You can't have creation without this, and before and aferward and always the perfection of the void from which everything sprang. To deny one is to throw the whole thing out of balance.