Why is it that strength and beauty find their way into our lives after something has been broken beyond repair? Whether it's one's spirit, heart, or dream-- or something more mundane, like a chipped plate or a cracked cup. What is it that makes the new pieces shift and mold and reshape themselves into something even more whole and stable than the earlier version?
Think about it. Where would you be now if you'd never experienced a death, or a so-called "failed" relationship, a struggle with a job, or the loss of a friendship? Would you have pushed yourself as far as you have come? Or would you have been able to sit back, sheltered and content, believing that you were already fully you? I think the mosaic of our spirit, our nature, can only become more colorful and detailed through breakage.
Maybe it's that once the pieces of ourselves are allowed to shift and move, to fill in the little gaps that couldn't be reached before, the trueness of ourselves can finally show. We cannot go through life unchanged. If we think we are filled and whole from the beginning, what more can we learn? How much further would we be able to stretch ourselves? If we were afraid of the cracks and chips, the shattering, we'd miss out on so much.
Isn't a rainbow created by light being fractured, allowing each light wave to be seen singularly, as a brilliant and beautiful color? Every time the world seems to shift and heave beneath your feet, remember the fractured-you will be able to shine more brightly. I think of all that I have wandered through, all of what life still holds, and I know, down to my deepest innermost self, that I wouldn't be me if it weren't for you. You, at the grocery store, the kid in high school, that one teacher, the coach, the smiling lady at the gym, the angry driver next to me and the kind one who lets me into after-school traffic, the doctors and nurses who helped us through the life of our child, the man who walks by my side, the strangers I see every day, the people I know like my own. All of your stories, no matter how quick a tale told in passing, color who I am, fill my cracks, add to my twists and turns. Where would I be, if I didn't have spaces and holes that could let you in? How would I shine?
I look at our dinner plates as I put them away after cleaning. Some have spider-webbed fissures across their surface, most have chips around the edges. Time to get a new set? No. These are beautiful. They tell stories of family meals, my children, laughing, arguing, being themselves. They tell of my husband and late nights of work and reheated left-overs. They tell of sacrifice and giving, loving and growing. Of change. Of birth and rebirth. Of fractured light. I tell you, being broken can be a gorgeous thing.
