The best time for the beach is the fall. The crowds are gone, and the water is still warm. It’s also a great time for reading, prayer , contemplation, and the other spiritual things that are good for the soul and that remind us that we are small and mortal.

I have old friends who own a beach house in Bethany Beach, Delaware, and I come down in the fall every year. I’m re-reading A Wizard of Earthsea, one of my favorite books . Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic is a perfect read when faced with the awesome majesty of the Atlantic Ocean — which, as Simon Winchester observed in his book Atlantic, seems like “a living thing” and terrified would-be travelers for centuries.

A Wizard of Earthsea is a book about wizards who live in a world that is mostly ocean. Its main theme is that we only come to true wisdom, freedom, and independence in soul and mind when we accept the existence of our “shadow,” or darker side. The shadow is the part of us that is lustful, greedy, and angry (and also, some psychologists point out, creative and powerful).

Accepting it is not an acceptance of sin but an acknowledgment that we are not angels. If we don’t fully integrate this wisdom, we wind up “shadow projecting” — that is, accusing others of the exact things of which we are guilty. We become like the politicians in Washington, D.C. , which is just a few hours but spiritually worlds away from Bethany Beach.

D.C. is a town that runs on shadow projection; the same politicians who accuse an opponent of promiscuity or drug use wind up getting caught drunk with a prostitute. It’s very rare that you hear from them a quote as powerful as this, spoken by John F. Kennedy: “For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.” It’s no wonder Kennedy loved sailing and the Atlantic, which is like a dark, roiling symbol of the subconscious - and its shadow.

A Wizard of Earthsea teaches that when we humbly own our own shadow and don’t project it on others or quest for power we shouldn’t have, we can reach real wisdom and spiritual peace.

While hearing the churning of the mighty Atlantic at night off the porch of the beach house, I lose myself in the story of Ged, a wizard in the realm of Earthsea. Ged is young and focused on learning how “to gain power” with his magic. He’s like a young politician. Ged casts a spell, and it unleashes a shadow. Ged “saw that something was crouching beside the closed door, a shapeless blot of shadow darker than the darkness.” The master wizard Ogion then enters, dispelling what he later calls only “the shadow of a shadow.” Orion then questions young Ged: “Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?”

Ged travels to an island called Roke on a ship named Shadow, but his refusal to confront his foolish act is building to a terrible eruption. As famous psychiatrist Carl Jung once observed, “The less [the shadow] is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.” Despite being warned by a new instructor, the Master Hand, that “The world is in balance,” Ged argues that “surely a wizard ... was powerful enough to do what he pleased, and balance the world as seemed best to him, and drive back darkness with his own light.”

Ged spends the rest of the book learning to integrate the shadow, eventually recognizing it as part of himself. Toward the end of the story, while on a boat, Ged sees his shadow in a corner of the deck but is no longer afraid. He accepts that he is encountering something that is inside himself. He becomes one of those rare people - basically non-existent in Washington - who integrate their own darker sides. They can’t be owned by a party or by the far Left or the far Right.

A Wizard of Earthsea puts it beautifully: “Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.”

Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of  The Devil ’ s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.