Creativity Quote by Bruce Cockburn

He’s not confessing in the spotlight; he’s admitting to a quieter, more familiar kind of survival. “I wear my shadows where they’re harder to see” lands like the lyricist’s version of rolling down your sleeves: you learn how to pass, how to keep the damage from becoming everyone’s business. But Cockburn doesn’t romanticize that concealment. The next clause punctures the illusion of control: “they follow me everywhere.” Shadows aren’t accessories you choose; they’re physics. The line makes a small, bracing point about trauma, guilt, depression, aging, or simply the accumulated residue of being awake in the world: you can manage appearances, but you can’t outrun your own outline.

Then he pivots with a little shrug of wisdom: “I guess that should tell me I’m travelling toward light.” It’s not a triumphal “I’m healed,” it’s a weary inference. The subtext is that darkness is most visible when you’re nearing something bright enough to cast it. In other words, the presence of shadow becomes evidence of progress, not failure. That’s a songwriter’s moral logic: you read your inner weather as feedback, not verdict.

Cockburn’s broader context matters here. His catalog is full of moral attention - spirituality without sanctimony, politics without posturing, tenderness without naïveté. This line fits that ethos: it’s a private theology for public times, suggesting that moving toward clarity often makes you feel worse before you feel better, because the light finally shows what’s been there all along.